I had a friend whose brother, while high school aged, stuck a shotgun in his mouth to blow his brains out. He actually lived through it. I always wondered how he viewed the world after that but I never tried to find out.

I feel for that girl's parents.

Read Art Kleiner's How Not to Commit Suicide, and maybe recommend it to students. That's just incredibly sad.

Well, damn.

Those poor parents. What a hell they must be in now.

My ex-husband's nephew hanged himself, aged 26, in his bedroom a few years ago. He was discovered by his mother when she went into his room to get him up for church on the Sunday morning. His parents have never, ever recovered from the shock of it. I don't suppose they ever will. He was their only son, their golden boy.

After his death it was discovered that he had a drink problem - there were empty bottles hidden all over his room. I had no inkling of it - although I didn't see him very often, only a few times a year. To my ex-husband's family, I'd kept my anonymity about my own recovery. But to this day I still sometimes feel guilty about that and wonder if he might have reached out for help if he'd known there was another way out of his desperation.

My childhood best friend shot himself when he was nineteen. Nothing I can say can capture how horrible it was for his parents.

This is so, so awful.

I have a nephew who jumped from a six-story building. He survived with pretty minor injuries, considering. My brother was a wreck and very sensitive to scenes of death and suicide on TV for a long time. The kid got over it much faster than his dad.

FWIW, he has not tried again.

danf, I don't see how any of that tragedy could possibly fall on your shoulders.

I was in the NE doing funeral detail (military) in a civilian cemtery, one of the civilian tombstones had a note from the parents attached to it as a permanent item; not unlike how some tombstones might have pictures, or prayers. This note described how terrible their childs (19 yr. old male)suicide had made them feel (I think they even used the word "selfish" to describe his act, and had some negativity about him taking his own life and leaving them to suffer); and how much they loved their child and how much help they had tried to find for him. It stays in my mind as a very unpleasant and vivid item I have encountered upon lifes path.

NE?

Today is the 21st anniversary of the suicide of my best friend's older brother when he was a senior in high school. It's not an exaggeration to say that his death changed my entire life.

I deal with a suicide about once every two weeks or so. My job is to get people through the funeral, not to grieve with them. But it hurts every time. And when it's a kid...god. I can barely make it through those days.

*hugs ColdChef*, *hugs danf*, hugs all in this thread.

There are some irrational and impulsive suicides, but I don't think every single one is. When older people do it, after a long time reflecting on it, that's an honest choice that I can respect. HST and Spalding Gray come to mind here. It is always painful when a loved one is gone, but we have to accept that continued life can be a confining and very painful burden for some. Martyrdom is not expected of people as baseline ethical behaviour - asking someone to go through the slow death of old age and diminishing capabilities against their will, for the sake of others, should also not be expected if that person wants to choose the timing of departure while still intact.

ColdChef, I would like to know if there have been suicides such as I describe above that haven't been so painful for you, that you felt were "the right thing".

A girl I knew in high school tried to kill herself while on the phone with one of my friends. Thankfully, she lived and is doing well now, but it screwed up my friend for a long time.

I had a dear friend blow his brains out when I was 22 and he was 20. It taught me that there is something that feels worse than a broken heart.

I don't think life provides for returns or exchanges and though I once thought there was some perverse bravery involved, I've come to think the intentions or thoughts of the suicide don't matter at all once they're gone. It's only the ones who are left around and how they are affected that matter. Maybe people are only really gone when the people who loved them stop trying to justify their departure, whether with the departed's own words or with their own. I guess that can take any amount of time. I don't think it sucks to be a grownup, though I do think it often sucks to grow up. There are a lot of ways and directions to grow, and sometimes we learn as much from the lessons we are spared than we do from the ones that strike us. It's so damn individual, and maybe some paths of growing up teach you that you never stop crying, but that those tears are never an obstacle to anything else you might want to try doing. Maybe some part of growing up, for some of us, is finding beauty or value or simply truth where they are least obvious or hardest to find. We crawl out from under rocks and we will crawl back under them when we're done, but the rest of the day is ours, rain or shine.

ColdChef, I would like to know if there have been suicides such as I describe above that haven't been so painful for you, that you felt were "the right thing".

That's hard for me to say. I've had funerals where an older person was dying of a painful disease and they "accidentally" took too many pain pills. And that's hard for a family, but it's almost never ruled a suicide unless a note is left.

But I've also had ones where it was the same situation where someone is dying anyway and they choose to crash their car into a tree (absolutely the dumbest way to try to kill yourself) or they shoot themselves in their bedroom and leave a huge mess for me and their family to clean up. And that's never the right thing.

(scribbles note: pills, ok; car into tree, absolutely the dumbest)

My uncle got dressed for work, put weights in his pockets, got into his car, put an anvil in his lap, and drove as fast as he could into the St. Lawrence River. His son-in-law was the paramedic on duty when the call came in. We're not sure whether he died from hitting his head on impact or if he drowned. It doesn't really matter; he really died because of depression.

I think of him when I'm resisting treatment for my own depression. I remember how beautiful the weather was for the first few days after he died, walking around thinking, "How could you have wanted to miss this?"

I don't think the effects of that event are ever going to stop rippling through my family. My parents lost their faith, reasoning that my (very religious) uncle must have cried out to God and was met with silence. We found out about lots of family members who had kept their anti-depressants and hospitalizations secret from the rest of us. I'm just glad my grandmother died before it happened; it would have broken her heart.

My heart goes out to those who have lost friends/family to suicide. *hugs* As a mental health case manager, I see many people in the grip of severe depression and/or psychosis; our agency has lost a handful of clients to suicide in the last year, each one of them difficult to process (in a rural area, just like anywhere, even one is too many). We always feel like we could have done more. Depression really sucks (I'm not just a clinician, but I'm also a client!)
Take care of yourselves!

My uncle got dressed for work, put weights in his pockets, got into his car, put an anvil in his lap, and drove as fast as he could into the St. Lawrence River.

I sincerely apologize if my statement above came off as callous or insensitive. I didn't call it the "dumbest" way to suggest that someone is "dumb" to do it, but because 1. the survival rate is so high 2. you ruin a perfectly nice car 3. driving erratically puts the lives of others at risk. Again, I apologize if my words hurt you.

Oh, no no, it didn't at all, ColdChef. It made me laugh, actually, and I was going to make a joke about it, but then I realised this was totally the wrong thread for those jokes. I got what you were saying -- that people often survive and have injuries and are embarrassed and have totaled their car in the process. My story about my uncle was supposed to be separate, sorry that wasn't clearer. I love your stories.