Please note that this has also been just posted on Daily Kos. I am also putting it here. I believe it may be important.
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I would have said even yesterday that nobody close to me had ever attempted suicide, aside from one very troubled youth back when I was young myself. Sometimes I manage to forget about him for years at a time, even though he was successful and had reached out to me very clumsily beforehand. He had a major influence on my life, and as a result never quite leaves my awareness.
But that’s not the incident I got triggered about yesterday. Amend my awareness to “as an adult.” I have found over the years that my brain has an amazing capability to protect me from some of life’s worst realities, at least as they relate to me. They cease to exist, at least for some while.
Have you ever had it happen, where you’re watching something on TV and you only react to it at first in the context of the story being told with familiar characters? They are all safely fictionalized, after all. It’s rerun marathon time on lots of cable channels, what with covid stopping production at least for a while of many of our favorite dramas. This particular trigger was an episode of “Chicago Fire” from years ago, my husband’s current must-watch series, where Gabby Dawson returns from a getaway weekend to receive a call informing her that a fellow firefighter has just committed suicide. It’s not the call, nor even the fact of suicide that was my trigger. It was watching a previous scene where the woman wrote a note and set it on her table, allowing the camera a closeup of Dawson’s name.
It took a few minutes for that to sink in. I’d been “feeling” it as I thought Dawson must have been experiencing it, while anticipating plot twists and character reactions. Then it hit me: OMG! I’d gotten one of those!
Well, except for never actually having physically received the note. I just heard it had been addressed to me. The cops had it and weren’t going to turn it over. Besides, it was almost too bloody to read!
Imagine living with that for a few weeks, the time it took to find out the rest of the story. Why did she write to me? What had I done to her to make her try to end her life? My only image of a suicide note at that time was of one person telling another what they’d done to drive the first one to that point.
I hardly knew her. She was a member of a (non-12-step) support group I was to become very involved with for several years, but we’d never really connected, at least on my part. I had been in that group busy with resolving my own issues at that time, not reaching back out to the others who were supporting me like I was able to in later years. My awareness of her was more of her being part of a couple, where it was common to refer to the two of them as a single identity, ___ -&- ____. Come on, don’t scold, it was decades ago and they’d been inseparable. Except they were breaking up, something I hadn’t been aware of. He was the one who called me with the news.
She had left the house they shared, crossed a highway, gone into a lightly wooded area where she was found hours later with a knife and a few good-bye notes. Mine was only one. That didn’t diminish my reaction, being one of the several she’d written to. It was all a jumble of mystery and horror and guilt.
The previous evening, after a meeting of that support group, a bunch of us had gone as usual to socialize and lighten our moods in what we referred to an an “afterglow.” There was always music, and with most of us being single, some dancing, a little drinking, and lots of talking and laughing. ____-&-____ had attended, and he had been flirting with me. He flirted with a lot of the women. I told him flat out that I wasn’t interested, partly because he was already in a relationship, and partly because he reminded me physically of somebody I didn’t care for. I only informed him of that first part, being too polite to be harsh about it. A casual dance and conversation were OK, talking in group was OK, but that was it.
Part of my guilt after hearing the news was wondering if she’d been aware of his coming on to me the night before — how could she not? - and had she been blaming me for his actions — how could she not? It made no difference in my mind that I hadn’t encouraged his attentions. Since she was in the hospital for a couple weeks (how badly injured was she anyway?) and didn’t return to group for a couple more, I spent that time stewing about that note and what it might have said.
Eventually she reached out to me in person. Her note, to my total shock, was about how much our friendship had meant to her and she was sorry to leave me behind or something — time has greatly diminished my exact memory. Especially as I was reeling from being on an entirely different planet than she was. How could that little interaction we had in group have been that significant? What had I said and done or not done? How responsible was I for what she’d been going through by being completely oblivious? While I was obsessing over what my fault in the matter might have been and whether I deserved the imagined scolding in her note, I was damn sure I’d done nothing to earn her great regard. And what on earth had she done to herself in trying to die that had made that note unreadable from all the blood? All those emotions had been bathed in blood for me, that note unseen still visualized in red.
The two of them finished breaking up, and her presence in group diminished greatly. I trusted she was getting the help she needed elsewhere, from professionals. Live moved on in all kinds of ways. That bloody note vanished from my thoughts. Until yesterday.
I’m bringing this up now not only because it’s back in my thoughts, but because the holidays are approaching, that time of what we are all told is supposed to be great and wonderful togetherness. Rejoice and be happy! Feast with all your loved ones! Except too many people don’t have those loved ones to get together with, for all kinds of reasons besides a pandemic. The holidays just rub it in for too many by reminding them that they aren’t happy, don’t feel loved, don’t find reasons to continue on. It’s stereotypical suicide season.
I know suicide ideation doesn’t really have a season. I had lots of long chats with a friend a month ago who was in crisis, and was shocked to find out she’d not been aware of suicide prevention hotlines. The next morning she informed me she’d called them for a couple hours. She reached out to them again along with me and several of her other friends for a few days until she didn’t need to any more. Her issues aren’t gone but she now has that resource, along with others.
If you or anyone you care about, even in the slightest, need the resource of a suicide prevention hotline, there is a national one, international lists of them, specialized needs (kids, being gay, abused wives, etc.) hotlines, all at the other end of a phone call. Google can find them for you, starting with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. Use it, please! Share it.
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