Suicide

As long as we are dredging up painful memories, I have more.

I once had tickets for MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. That part is only a little embarrassing. I also had tickets for Billy Idol and Faith No More, as well as Nelson, during that time period, so mainly I think it shows a fairly diverse musical taste. I made it to the other shows, but not to MC Hammer.

Somehow the tickets disappeared the day of the show. We did have some workmen come over to work on the furnace that day, I did share a room at the time, and also, I have lost other items before (though never concert tickets), but I never found them.

It felt worse because it affected someone else. I was going to go with Matt Davis. He was one of the guys on the basketball team I managed, and we weren't particularly close, and we definitely weren't crushing on each other, but we had decided to go, and when he came to pick me up I was still frantically searching my room. The evening was cut short.

That is not the painful part. The painful part was later, when I was away at college, and my sisters called to tell me Matt had killed himself.

I know he didn't kill himself because of the missed concert; there were other things going on. I did still wonder at times if going to the concert would have gotten us closer to each other, and maybe I would have been keeping tabs on him, and known it was getting bad.

Or maybe if he and Mary had gone out on that date, it would have changed things. There was a girl he liked, and I knew her, and she was new at the school so didn't know a lot of people. I tried to fix them up, but she didn't want to. Maybe that would have changed things.

In reality, I probably had no ability to affect it. It didn't stop me from mentally trying to find all sorts of ways to undo it. That's what happens with suicide. Our mind recoils not just at the loss of a life, but that it was intentional. Something went terribly wrong and we struggle to reconcile it.

I suppose I have been thinking about more since Robin Williams died. It wasn't just him, though that affected a lot of people. Locally a young mother had gone missing, and there was a lot of publicity until she was found, and discovered to have taken her own life.

I had written a little about how frustrated I was with the press releasing details on the methods used, and the news coverage in general. I could write a lot about how horrible people can be in their responses, especially via web comments, for those cases and others. The thing that is working on me now though is how it gets misunderstood.

I understand why people call suicide selfish, though it does feel an awful lot like name-calling, which wouldn't be a good response in general. That's not how it works though. You may think that they did it with no regard for anyone else, but for many of them there has been this voice in their head repeating over and over that they are ruining everyone's lives, and that everyone else would be better off without them.

They're wrong. Most of them are way wrong. Some of them may make life more difficult in some ways, and they feel that. The logic breaks down if you really go into whether everyone would be better off without them, but usually when I am dealing with it, it's teenagers. Not only do they have less perspective on life, not having lived very long, but their pre-frontal cortex isn't fully developed and there are things they just aren't going to grasp yet.

The adults should be better able to fight it, and they often are. That reminds me about one other thing, especially with Robin Williams though, is that then people felt like everything was a cheat -- that when he was laughing and making others laugh it was all a lie. That's not true either. They can still have good times that are real. If they have any tendency toward bipolar, they may have really intense good times. The lows still hit.

I don't know what happened with him specifically. Sometimes it is just a matter of the urge hitting harder at a time when the opportunity is there. What I can say is that anything that I do understand now is only because I have listened. It's so easy to avoid the uncomfortable conversations, and to dismiss the thoughts that seem ridiculous, but it's not ridiculous to them, and they are more uncomfortable than you. Sometimes you can disrupt that dark moment. Yes, more dark moments will come, but only because they lived longer. It gives another chance.

And that can be enough. There was one more person from school whom I didn't know well, but I knew from another friend that he seemed to know an awful lot about suicide, and things that could happen when you tried. And yes, it's a stereotype, but he did dress Goth. So, I worried about him, and it seemed like he moved, or wasn't around anymore, and I always wondered.

One day he showed up on Facebook, and he has a family and work, and a good life. That happens too. People can make it. Always remember that.