Post by Admin on Dec 22, 2022 0:13:23 GMT
Speaking of Suicide
ritona.substack.com/p/speaking-of-suicide
When I was about 17 years old, I was with a group of friends at my best friend’s house. I can’t remember why we had all gotten together. Maybe a birthday party. There was probably eight to ten of us, all juniors in high school. It wasn’t something we did very much. We watched a movie, and we talked. Somehow, the topic of suicide came up. I don’t remember who asked the question, but I remember the response.
Someone asked, “How many of you have ever thought about suicide?”
All of us raised our hands.
Every one of us.
I don’t think we ever had a more honest moment, before or after.
Years later, my friend remembered that, as we talked about his own suicide attempt in college. I think that collective confession may be part of the reason he is still alive today: because he knew he wasn’t alone.
I was going to write about something else this month. But the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I learned that three people connected with my Unitarian Universalist congregation had died, all within a week of each other, and all by their own hand.
Three.
I heard about the first person when we gathered for our Sunday morning discussion group. One of the elders of the group was absent, and someone shared that his 20-something grandson had killed himself.
We were still discussing what we could do for our friend, when another member of the group came in and announced that a newer member of the church, a veteran and mother of three, had killed herself too. She had just gotten engaged. My wife, who had just started to form a friendship with this person, left to get confirmation. A little while later, I found her in the stairwell sobbing.
Not long after that, a former member of the church, who had moved away years ago, came in the church door. She looked bereft, and my wife went to console her, assuming she had heard about the death of one of the others. But this person was grieving her own loss: her teenage daughter had died on Thanksgiving, by suicide as well.
Three deaths in all. All by suicide. All within a week.
For the rest of the day, I felt stunned. I felt like I had been concussed, like someone had hit me in the head, hard, three times in a row. I sat staring into space. I could barely form a coherent sentence. The best I could do was hold my wife and try to sing the songs and recite the liturgy without breaking down.
I’m not a stranger to suicide myself. My first close loss to suicide was my uncle. He was a younger uncle, and young at heart, so he was more like an older brother to me, and more like an uncle, than a great-uncle, to my own children. I’ve never known another adult who was able to get down on the level of children and really play with them like he did.
He killed himself 12 years ago, when my kids were 8 and 11. When I heard about it, I was inconsolable. I felt responsible. I had spoken with him not long before, and I remembered him being withdrawn, but I hadn’t asked him why. I was too wrapped up in my own life. I didn’t know how much he was struggling. And I should have known. I would have known if I had asked more.
And then, predictably, I got angry. He had abandoned us. He had abandoned my children, who had really loved him. There’s a handful of moments in my life which will haunt me, and one of them is the sound of my 8 year-old daughter’s voice cracking as she cried, “What?!”, when I had sat her and her brother down in the living room to tell them their uncle had died.
It took me about a year to find some peace about it. I went to his grave and poured a libation on his stone on the anniversary of his death. But I still feel it sometime, both the guilt and the anger.
And then a few years ago, my brother-in-law killed himself. He was someone I liked a lot–until I found out he was a sexual predator. He had been preying on girls for decades, family and friends, and committing varying degrees of sexual assault. He got away with it because of a culture of silence, and because his victims and the few witnesses felt isolated. No one had a complete picture of what he had been doing … that is, until his victims started talking to each other. He killed himself when he was outed. Needless to say, my feelings about it were … complicated. I can only imagine how his victims felt.
I mention his case here, because not every suicide is alike, and sometimes the emotional aftermath is complex. But I also mention it because of the pernicious way silence operates in both suicide and sexual assault. Silence enables sexual assailants. And in a similar way, it also fosters suicide. In both circumstances, silence causes people to feel isolated, and isolation breeds the feelings of powerlessness and despair.
ritona.substack.com/p/speaking-of-suicide
When I was about 17 years old, I was with a group of friends at my best friend’s house. I can’t remember why we had all gotten together. Maybe a birthday party. There was probably eight to ten of us, all juniors in high school. It wasn’t something we did very much. We watched a movie, and we talked. Somehow, the topic of suicide came up. I don’t remember who asked the question, but I remember the response.
Someone asked, “How many of you have ever thought about suicide?”
All of us raised our hands.
Every one of us.
I don’t think we ever had a more honest moment, before or after.
Years later, my friend remembered that, as we talked about his own suicide attempt in college. I think that collective confession may be part of the reason he is still alive today: because he knew he wasn’t alone.
I was going to write about something else this month. But the Sunday after Thanksgiving, I learned that three people connected with my Unitarian Universalist congregation had died, all within a week of each other, and all by their own hand.
Three.
I heard about the first person when we gathered for our Sunday morning discussion group. One of the elders of the group was absent, and someone shared that his 20-something grandson had killed himself.
We were still discussing what we could do for our friend, when another member of the group came in and announced that a newer member of the church, a veteran and mother of three, had killed herself too. She had just gotten engaged. My wife, who had just started to form a friendship with this person, left to get confirmation. A little while later, I found her in the stairwell sobbing.
Not long after that, a former member of the church, who had moved away years ago, came in the church door. She looked bereft, and my wife went to console her, assuming she had heard about the death of one of the others. But this person was grieving her own loss: her teenage daughter had died on Thanksgiving, by suicide as well.
Three deaths in all. All by suicide. All within a week.
For the rest of the day, I felt stunned. I felt like I had been concussed, like someone had hit me in the head, hard, three times in a row. I sat staring into space. I could barely form a coherent sentence. The best I could do was hold my wife and try to sing the songs and recite the liturgy without breaking down.
I’m not a stranger to suicide myself. My first close loss to suicide was my uncle. He was a younger uncle, and young at heart, so he was more like an older brother to me, and more like an uncle, than a great-uncle, to my own children. I’ve never known another adult who was able to get down on the level of children and really play with them like he did.
He killed himself 12 years ago, when my kids were 8 and 11. When I heard about it, I was inconsolable. I felt responsible. I had spoken with him not long before, and I remembered him being withdrawn, but I hadn’t asked him why. I was too wrapped up in my own life. I didn’t know how much he was struggling. And I should have known. I would have known if I had asked more.
And then, predictably, I got angry. He had abandoned us. He had abandoned my children, who had really loved him. There’s a handful of moments in my life which will haunt me, and one of them is the sound of my 8 year-old daughter’s voice cracking as she cried, “What?!”, when I had sat her and her brother down in the living room to tell them their uncle had died.
It took me about a year to find some peace about it. I went to his grave and poured a libation on his stone on the anniversary of his death. But I still feel it sometime, both the guilt and the anger.
And then a few years ago, my brother-in-law killed himself. He was someone I liked a lot–until I found out he was a sexual predator. He had been preying on girls for decades, family and friends, and committing varying degrees of sexual assault. He got away with it because of a culture of silence, and because his victims and the few witnesses felt isolated. No one had a complete picture of what he had been doing … that is, until his victims started talking to each other. He killed himself when he was outed. Needless to say, my feelings about it were … complicated. I can only imagine how his victims felt.
I mention his case here, because not every suicide is alike, and sometimes the emotional aftermath is complex. But I also mention it because of the pernicious way silence operates in both suicide and sexual assault. Silence enables sexual assailants. And in a similar way, it also fosters suicide. In both circumstances, silence causes people to feel isolated, and isolation breeds the feelings of powerlessness and despair.