Another and Another and Another

April 22, 2008

Last night I found out about another local teen suicide victim… another friend of my children… another child I knew. That’s two in as many days, three in as many weeks. And that on top of a string of senseless accidental deaths that seems to stretch back as far as forever.

It’s not just heartbreaking in the abstract anymore, it’s not just "a tragedy." I’m heartbroken. I’m worried. I’m at a loss.

As a very fortunate survivor (saved by a series of unlikely events) and one who has continued to struggle with suicidal impulses, I understand so completely that it would sicken these children, so convinced that their pain is unique and unbearable. And yet I also don’t understand at all, because in the 20+ years since I tried I’ve struggled with some part of the desire to try again almost every day and I’ve never been able to really make sense of it. My understanding comes from somewhere deep inside beyond or below rationality. Except for the brief honeymoon period as I made my recovery– a brief bloom of ecstatic awareness that I imagine survivors of all kinds of near death experiences can understand– the pull towards the ultimate denial of self pulls almost unceasingly. And in the rare moments that it doesn’t, the absence is conspicuous. When you become so accustomed to fighting against something and that something goes away, you might think you just steam off in the desired direction, like a boat breaking free of a rope. But my experience is that I no longer know how to operate properly or what it means to go where I want to go under my own steam. I’ve become defined by the constant struggle.

What these children don’t get is that they are children. I’m not minimizing the suffering they feel… nothing makes me more resentful even now than someone who tries to convince me that the pain I felt– the despair– was somehow illusory or unreal. What these children can’t feel is that life comes in stages and a good part of their life hasn’t even begun. They don’t understand that they are children still and that things can and will change so much for them so soon. That is an understanding beyond logic and intellect, tragically most needed at an age when it is impossible to understand that there really are a lot of things that you can only learn through time… through existing longer.

And I worry about my children because I know how thoroughly I fooled my own parents, partially subconsciously. I talk to my children more directly and more often. I talk to my children about these issues directly. But I know that they could– as I did once– walk right past me on an ordinary day, tell me they are tired from practice and want to take a nap, and almost casually close a door that will never open again.

Last night I finally just let out a howl, some kind of primal scream of anguish for these children, for my children, for me… and for the me that is not me (or maybe it’s the real me I glimpse in mirrors out of the corner of my eyes) that nauseatingly understands. And understands nothing.

Tags: despair, Psyche, suicide