I don't feel this way myself. I'm lucky. But one of my earliest memories is visiting my father at the mental hospital. I was so young, I remember fuzzy, odd little details: orange shag carpet; the moccasins my father made (though I never saw them again once he was back home); and bagel chips in the cafeteria. Over the years, he saw a lot of people and tried a lot of medications to help with his depression. He even tried shock therapy. Some treatments worked for a while, but never for long. There were many threats of suicide that he never went through with, until finally, he did.
Your first thought, upon hearing this, is most likely: Why didn't you stop him? When my mother told me that he was very depressed again and talking about wanting to die, I tried. We all did. I sat down with him and told him that I loved him and wanted him here with me, and he didn't respond. Isn't that enough for you? I begged. Can't you stay here for us? No, he admitted. He sounded empty.
He was in his 50's and had been hurting for 20 years, since I was a child. He had been like this for so long, on and off, with ups and downs, that I hoped this would pass, like all the other times.
I missed the call from my mother because I was at a night class, a new teacher working towards my master's degree. To this day I regret that I missed it because by the time I got to her house, he had already been taken away. Their longtime neighbor & friend, Gloria, was there with my mom after she found him, and she told me that she had never seen my dad look so peaceful. I would have liked to have seen him finally at peace.
So, having experienced somebody I loved end their own suffering after years of enduring it, when I hear about an older person taking their own life, I don't feel regret that somebody didn't intervene. I don't think, If only somebody had been there for them. I know that for some people, it's not a temporary depression, a rough spot, something they will get over with help. Therapy and drugs, while wonderful for many people, don't help everyone.
I do feel sympathy for the loved ones who are left behind to grieve and deal with all the emotions and issues that come in the aftermath. I feel so sad for that loss that the living have to endure. But I don't ever think, if only somebody could have stopped them. Because there is a good chance that people tried. From my dad, I learned that some people cannot be saved. After he died, I was devastated. Him taking his life was selfish. But me expecting him to stay, when he was in such pain, was also selfish. For 20 years he had tried every kind of therapy and drug available to him. In his last years he had even set up a home gym and gotten into the best physical shape in his life, and gone back to school and earned a master's degree to finally live out his dream of being an audiologist. He did everything he could to feel good, and it didn't work. So he made his choice.
I think, sometimes, we forget. We want people so badly to be here, that we forget that it's their life. We don't know what it's like for them. We don't know the pain they are in. We don't know how many years they have been suffering.
Now, when it comes to teen suicides, I feel completely different. When teens and young adults take their life, it is extra tragic because they didn't give their life a chance to get better, as it most likely would have. It's probably safe to say that we all suffered when we were teens, but it got better. With time, most pain in life gets better.
On this blog, I connect books I have read to my topics. And I realize that all of the fiction books that I have read on the topic of suicide are about teen suicide, probably because I read a lot of YA fiction. Note to self: read more "grown-up" books.
I've always thought about writing a book from the point of view of a teenager living with a suicidal parent, because I've never read that before. The closest I've come to a book like that is reading Tom Leveen's Zero. The parents have serious issues but are not suicidal. Another of his amazing books, Random, is actually about suicide. If you haven't read Tom's books, you should. And if you are a teen reading this, life DOES get better! Please ask for help.
