Suicide - Suicide - Suicide

"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.