Suicide - A Shift in Perspective -- 09/04/09

For most of my life I have been on the verge of suicide, that seemed to me as the only answer when the pain got to be too much. This past week my perspective has been forever changed...let's start at the beginning...

When I was 15 years old, I took an "accidental" overdose of aspirin. I had been crying out for help/attention and no one noticed. I had been in pain for a long time, maybe someday the details of why will be important, but for this blog they are not.

Something happened that day that "broke the camel's back" and I sobbed so hard I got a headache. I took some aspirin about 3:00 pm and then some more and then I took the rest and diluted them in water and drank some of it. I went to my room and wrote my mother a letter telling her I was sorry (my father was in Iceland at the time) and put it under my pillow to be found when I was gone.

About 8:00 pm my ears started ringing and I felt hot and my stomach was starting to cramp. At that point I didn't want to be alone and went to the living room to watch TV with my mom. I don't remember that I said anything obvious to her, but she got up and went to the bathroom and came back with the aspirin bottle. It was empty so she asked how many I had taken...I said I didn't know. She told me we were going to the hospital and I said no...and then ran to the bathroom to throw up.

At that point there was no question about where I was going. I don't remember where my brother was...but off to the emergency room on the air force base about a mile away. When I got there they made me drink some ipecac and some water and told me it would take about 10-15 minutes to work...wrong, less than two. They took blood samples and when they came back I heard the doctor tell her that if she hadn't brought me in when she did I would have died in about three hours.

Once I was "stable" they sent us to the big AF hospital in San Antonio...when we got there I was put in a bed and left there to wait by myself. There was a heavy-set woman that was brought in who had taken an overdose of barbituates. I heard them say she had five children and then I watched as they proceeded to tube her and pour the saline in...then a nurse shut the curtain and all I heard was the sounds of her fighting them. I sat there and thought "how dare she do that to her children"...it never entered my mind what I would have done to my mother, to my extended family if I had died. I was in the hospital for three days.

I had to visit with the psychiatrist, he had on his white coat, coke-bottle glasses and hair that looked like he had stuck his finger in a light socket. He was so funny looking to me that I kept staring at the floor to keep from laughing at him and he told me that I didn't seem to have any emotions...little did he know.

In my sophmore year in high school a girl that I had been friends with in junior high committed suicide...the rumour was she had a brain tumor and she shot herself while her parents were away. Again my thought was "how could she do that to her family", still not getting what I had done.

When we were in England...a woman tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison. She had a four-year old son...AGAIN, "how could she do that to her child" and why would she kill herself over a man (another long story there). Still not getting it...

Fast forward to August 26th, 2009...my coworker's son hung himself...23 years old and the father of a beautiful little boy. As I watched my coworker cry, it broke my heart and I FINALLY got it!

IF ONLY...if only he could have held on for another day and then another day. We don't see the light at the end of the tunnel, we just feel the pain and want it to go away. We don't understand that our pain may go away, but those that have loved us, their pain is just beginning and will last them a lifetime.

There are times that you have to live day by day, somestimes it might be hour to hour or minute to minute. Some people call suicide cowardly and maybe it is, but unless you have felt the unending pain and the hopelessness that goes on inside the brain you'll never understand the darkness that seeps into the soul of someone who contemplates suicide.