Sometimes things happen that no matter how hard you try, you
will never understand. A friend who you knew since your early days in Atlanta, took
her life a few weeks ago. It was Friday June 19th.
You’ve not had this experience before with someone you
knew. Your experience with suicide in
the past, always a distant friend of a friend, or someone from another
department at work that you’d never met. Or the headlines with a celebrity or a well known author or artist or musician.
It was never anyone you knew.
Never anyone that was at your home for dinner
and vice versa, never anyone you traveled with, never anyone you visited with
and stayed at their home. This time the news was different, the truth bitter and
shiny. The sting of comprehension lasting. The reality hitching a ride in your heart, the passage foreign and slow in motion.
You conceptually understand suicide, you know what it means,
you know what the result is. What you
can’t imagine is the color of darkness in someone’s heart, a darkness so thick that
it gets them to a place where they make the decision and end their life.
How does the decision happen?
Is there a tipping point or does it take millions ? What
caverns in the mind allow the mental rehearsal, the research, the planning, and
finally the course that fixes on this severe action as a way to manage.
Certainly the brain has to process and think and consider
and ration that ending life is a solution; an RSVP of sorts to a better place.
You and everyone else knows the subject of suicide as complex, emotional
and difficult. You know that every
story, every life ended, is individual and unique. The
generalizations around this topic, the statistics, are just that. Every suicide has a face, a family, a history, a life lived.
And you cannot imagine.
How do the depths of despair ravage the human mind and soul?
How does the persistence of mental discord accost the human spirit to the point
of doors closing, roads ending, paths weaving to destinations with no return ?
Suicide is tragic, sad, confusing, the finality of the
decision gaining a life of its own. The questions, the thoughts, the attempt to understand and
imagine, many times hijacking the lives of those left behind: Mothers, Fathers,
sons, daughters, uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews, wives, husbands, partners, friends and co-workers.
A life ended.
A breathing, living, person starves their body of oxygen and
the all the pain and confusion and misery and troubles and anxiety and dreams
and nightmares; it all goes away.
The acts are usually swift. There is no second chance, no practice round.
The finish line is the finish line.
Because you know, you don’t.
Because you have a past, memories, shared experiences, bike rides, walks
on the beach, visits to grocery stores, it's hard for any of this to be
settled, for any of this to quiet and find a place in the polaroids of your
mind.
Where do tragedies rest? Where do they find shelter ?
Where is that special place that remembers, that place that
honors and makes familiar room for the life of a friend lost.
You're not sure, you will keep looking.
