“I want Priya to be remembered for how she lived and not for how she died”

10 October 2022
Smitha Murthy Written by Smitha Murthy
Smitha Murthy

Smitha Murthy

Co-Founder and Editor @MyndStories Smitha Murthy has shaped...


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Some connections are serendipitous. Beautiful synchronicities orchestrated by a compassionate Universe. In September, a client sent me a DM, “Here, this might help you.” That client doesn’t send me DMs often. We speak more on WhatsApp, and mostly about work. We most definitely don’t share links to content. Yet, this time, the client did. He shared a link to a post from Geetha Balagopal, who was fundraising for her daughter, Priya. At the time of publishing, that post had more than 1,300 likes, but more than the virality, it showed me the raw, aching, pulsating nerve of grief and resilience. I reached out to Geetha right then.

This interview is the result of that synchronicity. Geetha’s story of losing her daughter Priya to suicide is devastating. But there’s so much strength in Geetha honoring her daughter’s memory, in the walks she conducts to raise awareness and funds for mental health, and in her willingness to share her story. 

In Part 1 of the interview, Geetha and I talk about Priya, the human being, not defined by an illness but by compassion, grace, dignity, and love. 

In Part 2, which will be published on Priya’s birthday on October 19, we will talk about how we can become mental health ambassadors and create a fairer world that doesn’t judge but accepts.

One of the first pages that come up when you Google Priya Balagopal is her GoFundMe page. Priya had started this fundraising campaign, stricken by guilt and wanting to alleviate some of the financial stress she felt she was burdening her family with.

The rawness here is palpable, revealing so much of the inner turmoil she went through while facing a very real illness. Tell me about Priya, the daughter, friend, sister, and student. 

We found out about the Go Fund Me page a few hours after she had died by suicide. We were already numb with shock and grief, and reading the contents of the page was excruciatingly painful. Priya was a loving, thoughtful, caring, shy, introverted, brilliant, compassionate, warm, and kind young girl and woman whose disease made her feel like such a burden that she felt the only solution to her pain was to kill herself.

She was a gifted and brilliant student, hard-working and self-motivated. She was a volunteer tutor since middle school, teaching Algebra, English, and Spanish. 

She was a loving daughter until her mental illness changed how she interacted with us. By then, she was in a boarding school for gifted kids and came home only one day a month or called or texted us when she needed groceries or something else. She had always been quiet, but she became even more silent at home or in the car with me. She always had her earphones on, which made it clear that she didn’t want to talk. So we just let her be. I didn’t realize it then, but I know now that she did it because she was in so much pain, and listening to music made her feel better. Also, it quieted the obsessive and intrusive thoughts that plagued her for much of her young life.

I know that she was a loving and supportive friend. From when she was little, she used to help her friends with homework whenever she got a call from them. I also know that she was bullied in school, starting in kindergarten. I found out years after it happened that her nickname in kindergarten was “Gorilla” because she had hair on her arms and legs, and face and they were more prominent since she was very fair-skinned. She didn’t have many friends till 11th grade. When she was home during the holidays, I heard her comforting friends who were worried about their grades, teachers, or boyfriends. She helped many of her friends write essays for college because she was a good writer.

She was a protective big sister to her younger sibling, but the relationship suffered due to her illness and because she left home when she was 15 and only came home for a few weeks every year for the next 9 years.

In a LinkedIn post, you write, “I want Priya to be remembered for how she lived and not for how she died.” How did Priya live? She was such a passionate mental health advocate too…

I wrote those words the day she turned 30. I did not want her to be defined by how she died. 

Priya was so much more than the last seconds of her life.

She was a perfectionist who was hard on herself but so supportive and helpful to others. She was quiet and shy but really got into dancing and mental health advocacy in her late teens.

Priya took pride in serving as a member of the Student Honor Court for the last two years of high school and all four years of college.

She was very open about her illness and a fearless advocate for the mentally ill, social justice, and women’s issues. In 2012, she organized an event called “Send Silence Packing,” – it’s a display of 1,100 backpacks on college campuses because 1,100 college students die in the USA every year, and each backpack included a personal story about a college student who died by suicide.

Priya also volunteered for a suicide hotline for our State since it did not get any public funding.

She was a survivor of sexual assault and turned her pain to help others by volunteering for a rape crisis center and publicly supporting other survivors of sexual assault.

During the last two years of her life, she served as an AmeriCorp volunteer. In their first year, she served in North Carolina, helping the disadvantaged population in our county with computer skills, with their resumes and outreaches in homeless shelters and churches, and public speaking about the program’s advantages. She volunteered at Dress for Success, an organization whose mission is to empower women to achieve economic independence.

During the last few months of her life, she volunteered for AmeriCorps in a city near Atlanta, Georgia, working as a classroom assistant to children six to ten years old who are too emotionally traumatized to attend a regular school.

priya balagopal
Priya

When a person dies by suicide, it leaves us with a sense of feeling incomplete – that death here, from my personal experience, seems to have no closure in the traditional sense of the term.

Guilt is often the feeling you are left with. And many would go through the same pain when their loved ones leave them. How does one cope?

Yes, it does. The sense of incompleteness is always there. I also agree about the guilt. 

I can only speak to how I coped. How I am still coping. Priya has a younger sister who was 20 when she died. I lost a child, but she lost her only sibling, someone she loved and looked up to. I didn’t want her to also lose the mother she knew. I wanted to become a better version of myself for her, my husband, and myself. 

We lost so much when Priya died; I didn’t want us to lose more.

I found local survivors of a suicide support group from another parent whose child died 3 months before Priya. I went to the weekly meeting about a month after she died and found it overwhelming, so I took a break for a few months and then started attending regularly. It helped to talk to other survivors who had been on this grief journey way longer than I have. When I saw them smiling while sharing a funny memory about their loved one, I felt hopeful that I, too, could get there one day.

The parents in the support group taught me so much. I talked to them outside of the weekly group meetings. They became my family. They gave me the strength to go on, the belief that I, too, can survive losing my precious child.  

Suicide is often difficult to talk about – especially in reticent Indian families. How do we keep communication open when there’s so much grief, disbelief, guilt, and more?

Yes, it’s very difficult to talk about. Everyone in our suicide support group has shared that as soon as they say, “my loved one died by suicide,” the conversation stops, and people look at them differently.

We not only had to deal with our own grief and guilt, but we had to mask our pain with a smile, so people around us feel more comfortable. 

I know of no other illness or cause of death that causes communications to break down or causes some families to lie about the cause of death of their loved one due to the stigma and shame.

If a friend or family member chooses to ignore our existence because our child died by suicide or they think that Priya or we are in any way less of a human being because she killed herself, then I don’t feel responsible for making them change their mind. 

My family and I don’t owe any explanations to those who chose to stay ignorant and hateful. 

It was no one’s fault that Priya suffered from a cruel disease and that the medicines and therapies did not work for her. Nothing I do or say will bring her back, but to the extent that I can, I share her story, share resources, and help others.

Part 2 of the story is available here.


Part 2 of this interview was released on October 19. However, on this World Mental Health Day 2022, let’s remember what Priya would have liked us to do in her own words:

You can tell someone you love that you care about them today. You can encourage your friends to talk about their mental health. You can offer to provide a listening ear to someone you know who is struggling, or sign up to volunteer for a crisis hotline. You can research the way that mental health services are funded where you live and how they could be stronger.

Help support mental health

Every mind matters. Every donation makes a difference. Together, we can break down stigmas and create a more compassionate world.