I’ve been working on a project, writing the history of an old organization, which defies brevity. It’s taking a lot of time. So last week’s blog post was a shortened earlier YSB essay on mushroom hunting. I’ve been retired almost a year so I took the hook out of that story and simply ran with the mushroom part. I should have left it alone.
In the original essay I used the time span, from being a little boy finding mushrooms to being an older man hunting them in the woods, along with the full lives of my parents as the backdrop for a lives cut short by untreated mental illness. I wrote that piece following a young man’s death that affected me very much years ago. For a long time following that I wore a rubber bracelet on my wrist to help people realize the best way to prevent suicide is to treat depression. I’ve since taken it off. It’s silly though to think you can quit being actively involved in social work and lose your concerns. In many ways social work never ends, because once you know how lives can be affected, and improved, you see needs all around you. I used to think those insights and concerns were an occupational hazard. Turns out they’re a permanent condition.
As I was editing that story we lost another person to the preventable affliction we call suicide. In reality the cause of death in the aggregate is mental illness. It’s the same, and just as deadly, as dying of cancer. It’s the second time people close to me have lost their life to suicide since I retired. It happens too often. It is made worse by knowing it doesn’t have to happen at all.
While you were at work, on a Thursday morning, nineteen people attended his funeral, with a few more acquaintances paying their respects during the visitation before. Nineteen living souls huddled in the front few rows of one of our area’s oldest and biggest churches, a gaping emptiness behind us. A man with a beautiful voice sang sacred songs, a sorrowful young priest said the mass, altar boys attending them lit candles, prepared the incense, rang the mysterious bells, and carried the cross ahead of the casket. The funeral home people kept it all organized He was almost unnoticed, I thought as I watched it take place, in both life and death. Such a quiet and unassuming life and such a violent and awful death.
He was an older man, a few years younger than me, who lived in a small house on a seldom traveled blacktop road among farm fields in the country. I have an affinity for people who live in the country, even though I left the farm 44 years ago. I equate it with peace and tranquility. Quiet and beauty, or silence and isolation, were this man’s daily companion since he was four years old. Fifty five years ago his parents built that house and moved there, with their only son, from town. After the funeral I drove to the house. From his living room window last week he would have seen no houses but rather fresh black dirt just now showing long green lines of sprouted corn. From the kitchen window in the back, past a white board fence, he would have seen a line of trees angling across the field, trees that leafed out in the past two weeks. After a steady diet of windy snow covered fields and bare icy branches on the trees, the unchanging landscape of that winter that seemed to never end, didn’t he see the world changing around him? Wasn’t he warmed and encouraged by spring? Couldn’t he feel the world coming back to life? I guess not. We won’t know.
He left no note. He reached out in a fashion at the end, clumsily, turning down offers of assistance, assuring others he was fine. His world was small. In his retreat from the wider world he settled into caring for his mother, who in her old age developed dementia. I think of him and all the hours he spent in that house. He must have felt desperate for human contact, but unable to initiate it. We can’t really understand the thinking of those who lose all hope, and consider the future as a life sentence of overwhelming pain. It’s like a foreign language. If we know help is needed by someone considering suicide we can provide it. Sometimes we don’t do enough. Sometimes our help is not accepted. But regardless we are left with the emptiness of lives ended prematurely that could have been so different. It is such loss. It is such a needless loss.
I’m a selfish man. While I don’t know what my future will bring I think that unless I am boxed in by some predictable and painful death in my finals days I will not cut my life short. For starters, I would miss my next meal. I would not know how it turns out with the Cubs. I would lose precious time with my family. But I should not, we should not, be so smug as to believe we could not be similarly afflicted. We are after all together in this boat of humanity. To escape personal pain, my friend risked inflicting pain on those around him. Was he thinking of us? I don’t think so. He had to leave. He took the only way out he could find. I don’t blame him.
He could have gone to the emergency room of any hospital, his personal physician, a mental health professional, any caring person, admitted he was considering harming himself, and been afforded treatment. Psychotropic drugs, much better drugs than ever before, psychotherapy, and the attention and care of others could have saved his life, perhaps changed it forever. Perhaps not. But I wish he would have tried. He tried to live life all alone. I think very few of us are equipped to do that, maybe none of us. Suicide is not a sign of weakness. It is a sign of mental illness which more often than not can be overcome with help.
Take care of yourself. Take care of those around you. And enjoy every day of this beautiful spring. After that? Enjoy summer, fall, and winter. Repeat. Life is a gift. Unwrap it and use it till it’s gone.
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