"This
guy's walking down the street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep
he can't get out.
"A
doctor passes by and the guy shouts up, 'Hey you. Can you help me out?' The
doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on.
"Then
a priest comes along and the guy shouts up, 'Father, I'm down in this hole can
you help me out?' The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole
and moves on.
"Then
a friend walks by, 'Hey, Joe, it's me, can you help me out?' And the friend
jumps in the hole. Our guy says, 'Are you stupid? Now we're both down here.'
The friend says, 'Yeah, but I've been down here before and I know the way out.”
(Aaron Sorkin,The
West Wing, episode 2)
When addiction, depression,
fear and ignorance continue to take the lives of our best and brightest talent,
it’s time to say something. Michael
Jackson, Whitney Houston, Philip Seymour Hoffman and now Robin Williams, had
bigger than life talent. Whether you like them or not, that talent is obvious. Now
imagine putting depression in the middle of that. How can I be depressed, I have
everything? Am I that selfish or
self-centered that all this does not satisfy me? I should look outside, help
someone else, and then I’ll feel better. These are often the kinds of help we
offer to our creature human beings, these and more platitudes. I think we can do better.
Today is a sad, sad day for
me. It’s right that we are sad. That’s not a useless feeling. We don’t have to go back to the lives of
Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann. We have these present day examples of people
full of talent, love, caring and
incredible pain. All of these “stars” turned to substance for relief. I don’t
know what they were specifically seeking relief from, I didn’t know them, but
the pattern is clear. Whether the substance directly caused their death or not
doesn’t matter. It matters that they didn’t see any other way out.
Today it seems as if Robin
has come into my body and mind somehow. It happened when he committed suicide.
I keep waiting to hear that it was not real. The real story will be that he was
shot, or tortured, or kidnaped and never heard from again - anything but
suicide. Is this my time to feel my
father’s suicide? I think maybe so. If so it will stay with me until I work it
through.
I was watching Robin and
Billy Crystal in a shtick and Robin said to Billy, “now you’re with me brother,
you’ve crossed into the land of bad taste.” For ½ hr they were riotously funny.
They make me want to do stand up on suicide.
You
will enjoy and get more out of this book if you have a sense of humor about
things most people don’t laugh at. So if writing out your ideal funeral plan is
not amusing to you. Then making your very own, never fail suicide plan won’t be
either.
In
the process of getting feedback about these chapters I heard from a good friend
who spoke of her worst depression. However, she said during all those weeks of
withdrawal and isolation she never thought of harming herself. With me I
definitely thought of, planned for and started carrying out suicide attempts,
but I never thought of them in terms of harming myself. I wanted the pain to
stop. The idea of harming myself did not enter into it because the harm to
myself was inflicted by staying alive.
