I lost him when I was hiking the Green Mountains of Vermont. I guess he just decided to give up on life. He said as much, but I didn’t believe him. When someone tells you they are going to take their own life, the immense feeling of desperation to save them makes you either paralyzed or wondering if they are serious. Either way, what I found over the years was that my friend’s life was not mine to save. It really was not anyone’s except his. And, even as I write these words, there is a feeling of guilt and worn out desperation that I am somehow at fault.
We struggle to talk about suicide, so much so that even when people write about it on social media, they spell it differently or use special characters to mask the word. How absurd we have become as a society to do such things. We cannot hide from suffering or death, and we certainly cannot hide from mental illness that often precursors one’s death. Often, when the word suicide is spoken within a conversation, it is whispered or muffled, or someone leans in to say it as quiet as possible. That kind of sensitivity to a word does not bring back the dead. It certainly doesn’t save lives or mask the pain that someone with suicidal ideation is going through. I know when I tell the story of my friend’s death, I certainly do not shy away from the reality of how he did it. That would be disrespectful to him and the struggles that he faced. Why then would I shy away from a word or an act such as suicide?
For some of us, we too have been at that jumping off point, where death seems the only solution to stop the pain or bring us out of the darkness our mind has decided to dwell in. The thought of suicide weighs on the mind of many people with depression and anxiety. Imagine the suffering someone must be going through to finally decide that suicide is the only way to find respite from the cruelty of your own mind. That is a relief I have contemplated more times that I can count. It’s the dark dance of the depressive.
I walked in the Green Mountains last summer. I revisited a place that I could not find the courage to for over twenty-two years, and when I entered Vermont tears filled my eyes. That is the impact of trauma and loss. That is the steady grasp that grief has on you. It never goes away, you simply learn to walk beside it, and sometimes it climbs on your back and makes you carry it for miles at a time. I’ve carried my friend’s memory for over two decades, and have carried the weight of others I have lost and will do so for a lifetime. It is my gift to them, to hold them sacred in my memory, and other times it is my curse, where I sit on a downed tree in the middle of the woods and let the tears fall to the dirt below.
Yes, I lost my friend years ago while hiking in the Green Mountains, but I still hold him close every day. I have learned to cope with the guilt because his life was not mine to save, no different than another friend who was shot, a father who took his life with medical assistance, a sister who died suddenly, or a mother who suffered until her last breaths. We must talk about death and we must talk about suicide. When we do, we must not whisper the word or lean in to say it quietly. Suicide is something that has, and will, impact millions of families, so lets talk about it with a clear voice so we can understand the pain without embarrassment or stigma attached to it.
Suicide’s voice is clear. It is unmistakable, and it needs to be heard.
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