In therapy Tuesday Dr. D and I again discussed the suicide of this friend. I told him I’ve come to the conclusion that she died of mental illness. She may have had wounds so profound that they resulted in her death. Its easier to take when I think of it that way.
I still don’t want to believe this. I still want someone to tell me this is a bad joke.
There is guilt. There’s stuff I wish I hadn’t said that I can never, ever apologize for. Hell, what I said was justified but damn, I don’t want them to be the last words ever heard from me ya know? I guess we don’t get to choose our last moments with a person. We don’t ever know if our last sentence to another will be cutting ones until it happens and we can’t change it.
I feel guilty for so many things. Dr. D said we will talk about that in the therapy session tomorrow. He said there’s a reality check I need. I told him that 90% of me says this act is her own and that she had troubles way before she met me. Ten percent says, damn Faith, you killed that girl. You fucking killed that girl. If this, this and this hadn’t happened she may still be alive. If, if, if, maybe…….. you should have, you could have, why didn’t you?
I told him that when the ten percent begins to badger me I still have the 90% to push it back. We’ll talk more tomorrow.
I’ve actually finished a painting. I’m calling it Crossings. It’s not just about death but about life choices and reaching the other side of our choices successfully. It’s about not alienating ourselves or putting rifts so large we can’t repair them. The painting is about turning our backs on life’s waters (making bad decisions) but also moving forward, connecting. It’s about walking in the dark but not walking alone.
This painting has been sold.
Faith
the death of someone close is always hard… heck, any death is difficult…
as for suicide… my personal opinion here… it’s a very selfish act that is completed by a person without regard for others…
that being said… if this person was going to take their own life, nothing you could have said or done would have changed that… what you did say or do did not change that…
i know that doesn’t help at all…
but after working with suicidal people, working as an emergency dispatcher, working in a psychiatric hospital, and having personal friends & relatives that have taken their own lives… well, i have figured out that it is the course of their journey and there is little if anything i or anyone could’ve done to prevent the death…
none of this will make your heart hurt less, or your mind stop trying to figure out why or what if….
i’m so sorry for your loss…. i know how devastating it can be
I think there are different stages, the stage where the person can be talked to and the stage where a person is past talking. I think a lot of people want to be talked out of it.
I understand that its selfish. I also understand the pain a person is in that would drive them to lose all reasoning ability and become selfish enough to hurt loved ones this way. I get it intellectually. I get it from experience. It hurts, all around it hurts.
Thanks for your comment
Faith
dearest faith,
I must respond to the comment that suicide is a selfish act. I have encountered this opinion many times in my 51 years and I now know that the people who say this know nothing of the pain of mental illness, just as I, at least at this date, know nothing of the pain of late stage cancer. When Ann Landers wrote that suicide is “a permanent solution to a temporary problem”, I knew that, with my faith in an afterlife, the opposite would be true. The fear of hell, and that saying reversed, “a temporary solution to a permanent problem.”
The thoughts in the mind, over and over, profound and dumbfounding. The difference in my sight as opposed to the sight of the “sane”. What one feels so deeply, how they are affected so intensely, the desire to turn it off is met with the insatiable desire to know it fully, to resurrect it to the core so as to somehow tame it while the sane world turns the pages of the newspaper so as not to see the newest horror. And I envy the sane for their ability to do this, but I can’t stop the confusion in my brain and I can’t stop the evil that tries to claim me so I fight it to keep it away for just another minute, another day. Maybe. Maybe the world needs me to see and feel what it cannot, will not.
After the suicide of my friends’ brother, she asked me how I got through the depression. I had not thought of it in such a way as to provide a simple answer, so I responded that I have a strong faith. That answer sounded so cocky, so controlled, as if I was somehow stronger than her brother. I called her the next day to apologize for that simple minded quip. My answer to her question was this: “I just haven’t gotten to that point yet.”
I know that mental illness is difficult for most people to understand. So much of it just looks like bad behavior, laziness, excuses, lack of control. Years ago, when I told an acquaintance that I suffered from depression, she responded, “Oh, so do I. When I get depressed, I go buy shoes!”
My dearest, brave faith, to you I say how sad I am for the loss of your friend. Perhaps a kind word or two would have bought her a minute, but what would happen when you needed to hang up the phone or go home for the night? Do not put that on yourself as I know that if that time should come for me, there is nothing that can be done to save me. I would not want any of the people who love me to think that they could have saved me from a mind given this degree of thought, this degree of illness.
I tell you these things not because I am in this state now, but so that you will know that I have given years of thought to this kind of pain. I think that the selfishness is in the people who would insist on a continuation of a life with such unbearable pain. My best friend died of breast cancer a decade ago. The hospice nurses gave her more and more morphine for her pain until the morphine killed her. None of her friends or family said that she was selfish.
I stumbled upon your work on etsy. I was led to this site. I have NEVER sent an e-mail. EVER. But, I could not leave this unsaid. I am sorry for your friends death and she fought a courageous battle to the end, having succumbed to terminal mental illness.
An embrace.
Sue,
I’m sorry that you know how it feels to be tortured by your mind and to want to die. I’m sorry that your family and friends will grieve over this. It hurts more than I can explain.
I didn’t touch on it much in this entry but I do know why people break and I know why they attempt or commit suicide. I do get it but, I also get how devastating it is to be left behind.
This entry touches ever so briefly on a huge, life changing shock that I .never .saw .coming.
I’m still very, very raw at the loss of this individual. The grief from it is nearly blinding.
I’m not sure what else to say.
Sincerely,
Faith