My close friends mother was on her way here for a month long visit when her nephew at 22 committed suicide. He scratched sorry on an envelop.
His dad found him after making the usual Saturday morning pancakes for him and his sister. He was out of work, sick with asthma and drinking the way most people do in their twenties.
My friends mom arrived here Tuesday night and they both left this morning for Chicago. I made dinner for everyone last night and he left his dog at my house until he returns. It is comforting to have a dog around again a silent companion even though when I left this morning she was howling in her crate.
I understand the idea of suicide. I can see why someone young would think it was a good solution to endless pain. You don't have enough life experience to realize that life is a cycle of ups and downs. Your mind sometimes with the help of drugs and alcohol tells you that you will feel bad forever so what's the point of living.
The mind wins again. I wish that there was a way to convince everyone to not listen to the voice in their head especially when it doesn't have anything good to say. In my early years it was a manic voice constantly narrating the situation and giving me advice filling in the blank spaces with needless commentary. I thought this was normal and that this was a voice of wisdom and reason. It was a sum of all that I had learned from life.
I turns out that it was just making up stuff filling the hours with ideas. Ideas about what someone else was thinking or the 99 different ways a given situation would turn out usually with me getting the shaft. I lived my life on the defense trying to avoid the perceived danger in my head. This was a lot of work and I was exhausted and sick most of the time.
Over the years I have made friends with the voice for the most part. I have spent a lot time, when I am fearful, analyzing what it is saying to me that is making me feel bad. Taking each blanket statement it makes like "you are a complete failure" or "nobody cares about you" and proving that these statements aren't true. The mind knows all those buried weaknesses of core beliefs you have about yourself. It knows what to say that will undermine all the progress you think you have made.
I don't imagine that this every stops for anyone I think maybe some people just take the voice more seriously than others. My friends nephew probably was one of them. The pain of living at that moment was too much for him and he chose to use the new gun that he had gotten for his birthday to take his own life.
I hope he found peace on the other side.
I am so sad to hear that someone has committed suicide. I guess at the moment that the act is done, the person is truly out of their mind with pain and hopelessness. But every day is a chance for something different to happen. I remember in years past, I would get that hopeless feeling and think that no one would miss me if I died. I thought about suicide, but decided that I wanted to stick around and work through the pain. I'm glad that I did.
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