i never owned a kate spade handbag.
i never owned a kate spade handbag. i never even watched one of anthony bourdain's shows. but i was well aware of both of them. and suicide too has been well within my awareness.
when i was 15 years old, 40 long years ago, i wrote a suicidal note of my own. and in a rather bold-yet-desperate move, i shared it with a very unlikely candidate.
a boy at my high school who i'd had a mad crush on. his teenage-male response to my long rambling stream-of-consciousness writing was unexpected. and perhaps even helped to save my life.
two phrases still stand out in my mind. in his boyish scrawl, he'd written "i understood what you wrote, and it scared me." he also told me that he loved me.
of course, he only loved me as a friend. he already had a steady girlfriend. but he did care deeply about me, and i felt it when i read his words that day.
i carried his reply around with me until the paper it was written on became thin and weak, and the writing blurred. i thought i'd keep it forever, but it's since disappeared.
i do, however, possess a handwritten copy of the note that i wrote. "have you ever thought about suicide / the word itself is scary but moreso is the feeling"
eventually i was voted both class clown and most likely to succeed. i was drill team captain and salutatorian. yet i had so many many emotional struggles.
my mom always believed in me though. she told me again and again, "your time will come." i repeated those words to myself over and over. "my time will come. my time will come."
when my mom died years later, i suffered another very low point, essentially checking out of life for a couple of years. my nuclear family unit and my two best friends helped pull me back from the abyss.
in my work at a hospital's adolescent mental health unit, i encountered suicidal ideation on a daily basis. a few names and faces have hauntingly stayed with me, brilliant and imaginative souls who tragically completed the act.
some seem to have it all, and we wonder why they choose to give it up. others haven't yet realized their chance, and we wonder what could have been.
life is hard. life is precious. we often feel alone and sadly, sometimes we are.
darkness invades our psyche, no matter our situation. reaching out requires effort and courage, no matter our status.
there often feels like no way out, except the forever-silencing of our voices. unimaginable pain, leading to an ending so devastatingly heart-stopping-ly final.
the oft-repeated phrase has resurfaced. "we never know what someone is going through." we can, however, become aware of the emptiness. and we can always ask, then take the time to listen.
endnotes:
another post i wrote four years ago, when the well-known comedian/actor robin williams ended his own life: goodnight, mr. williams.
facial sketch above created by alexander lee