Let's Talk

It’s touchy. It’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable. It’s heavy. It’s emotional. It’s taboo. It’s avoided.

It’s suicide.

No one WANTS to talk about suicide. No one likes to THINK about suicide or even imagine the suicide of someone close to them. That’s why no one is prepared for suicide if/when it does happen. And no matter how hard you try to prepare for death - you can’t. Even if someone is terminally ill, you’re still never ready to see them pass away. With cancer or any other terminal illness you have a form of closure. You knew they were ill, you understand they’re no longer suffering, and eventually you make peace with that. But with suicide, there is none of that. There is no closure to the thought of someone being in so much pain that they were desperate enough to end their life. There are no pauses in the thoughts that haunt your every waking moment of if you could have done something, if only you had known, and thinking you could have stopped it someway or somehow. The questions that come from the loss of someone due to suicide are never-ending and ever painful.

I lost my cousin this year to suicide. Before that, I was never directly affected by it. My great-grandfather committed suicide during the Great Depression but I never knew him so I lack an emotional connection to his passing. When I was in 7th grade a classmate committed suicide. However, I was 11 years old at the time and didn’t understand what suicide meant or the seriousness of it. I would hear of different celebrities who had committed suicide but I still was never directly impacted.

Until June 2, 2017.

I came home from work and my mom was in my driveway...I instantly panicked. She hurried me inside, sat me down and told me the news. I was in such shock I didn’t know how to react or even what to say. I felt ten different emotions at once and yet all I could do was sit there in silence. As time went on and as I started to process things, I began to feel this overwhelming sense of responsibility that I must do something, anything, to stop another human being from thinking this world is better off without them in it.

No one wants to talk about suicide, hear about suicide, think about suicide, or figure out WHY suicide is committed all across the globe. Suicide doesn’t differentiate between age, social status or race. The aversion to discussing suicide needs to stop. The only reason suicide is an uncomfortable subject is because far too many are uneducated about it. You cannot fear what you know and as a society we NEED to recognize that suicide is real and that with the proper help and support, we can SAVE lives. As a writer and poet it is my only goal to use my words and my life experiences to allow people to see they are in fact one of many that feel as they do, that someone is out in this world experiencing and feeling similarly. People besides them do struggle, they do fall down, they get beat up, and some days it really does feels like there is no joy in sight. Before we are anything to anyone we are human and being human has its own set of responsibilities that we must fulfill with a range of emotions we experience at one point or another. If we lead with that fact and stop seeing people as what they are to us (mother, father, sister, brother, friend, teacher, etc) but rather WHO they are as a HUMAN, we can and will be able to help and possibly save another human being.

As National Suicide Prevention week comes to an end, I just felt the need to write on the topic and if only one person sees this and decides to spark a conversation and shine a light into the dark, then my work is done. Rome wasn’t built in a day nor was it built by one person...but it DID start somewhere, with someone. So why not us, today, right now?