Suicide

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day.

I have never attempted suicide. I idly thought about it as a teenager and came very close to attempting early last year, but I didn't go through with the attempt. I do, however, have more of an intimate history with suicide than I'd prefer to have.

David Foster Wallace, a writer who ended his own life, had this to say on the subject of suicide:

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

People who feel that "terror way beyond falling" seem to come to me to express it. Eight so far. That doesn't even count my mother, who never told me she was intending to kill herself before she left the house and attempted just that. That would have been 1987, I think, maybe '88, and my stepfather went out and found her before she actually suicided. That was the first time I ever saw him cry; the second was after she died in a fire in November of last year.
My mom and I never talked about that darkest of nights for her. Part of me remained angry at her for years because she didn't come to me beforehand. Another part felt enormously guilty. I had just taken an entire week of classes on suicide, the signs and signals and what to do and say with someone who was suicidal.

I had just taken that unit and blithely come home every day and not noticed ANYTHING unusual about my mom. In hindsight--or rather, hindsight decades removed--I should have. The thing I recall most clearly even now was that in what would have been my last time seeing her, she said she loved me three times and asked me if I understood that. It felt odd, strangely final, and yet it didn't twig any of my freshly implanted suicide sensors.

I've never shared this publicly.  Two people in my current life know about it. I've chosen to share it today because of what I'm about to say next.

Shortly after my stepdad rescued my mom...it couldn't have been more than two weeks...a girl in grade thirteen, somebody I didn't know at all, had never even seen, cornered me in a hallway at lunch and told me she was going to kill herself.
Why she chose to tell me this, a kid in grade nine she'd never seen before, is a complete mystery. Nobody in MY class was talking to me that year. But once she did it, she set something in me in motion. I had missed the signs with my mother. Here was a clear-cut sign thrust in my face: I had to engage.

And so I did. She told me her life's story in bullet point form, and it was awful. Her pain was a palpable thing and it sent daggers into my gut and got me crying. I still remember her drawing back for a second, gazing at me with something like wonder...and then all her inner dams burst and I hugged her as best I could. She soaked my shirt with her tears, eventually snuffled herself under a semblance of control, and I gathered myself together and started grilling her. Had she chosen a method? (She had.) Did she have the means available to kill herself? (Yes). When was she going to kill herself? (Tonight.) Had she written a note, did she care who found her.

This is where I panicked and did precisely the wrong thing. And I knew it was wrong and still did it. If somebody has a method and a time and a place, and they have the equipment handy, the risk is extremely high...much higher than a barely trained minor niner should have been handling on his own. I should have found a teacher. I should have called 911 -- but this was before the age of cellphones, and there were no teachers around, and this unknown girl had chosen me, for whatever reason. I felt like I couldn't run away from her.

So I asked her what she wanted me to do with what she told me. I asked her for her phone number (the first time I'd ever done that with a girl, and needless to say not under the pretences I would have preferred). She actually gave it to me, which lent even more of an air of unreality to the very real situation we were in.)
 I was going to use it to call her family and make sure she wasn't left alone. Then, as if waking from a dream, she thanked me for listening to her and started to walk away.

"Wait", I called, desperately. "I don't even know your name, but wait."

"You don't need to know my name," she said. "After tonight I won't have one anymore."

"No!", I almost shouted. "You have a name, you're important, you're loved, and the way you're feeling now will CHANGE!"

She stopped. I still don't know why, but she stopped. Turned. Smiled the most ghastly smile I've ever seen to this day. "I doubt it", she said.

"Tomorrow." I said, "I want you to come see me. Same time, tomorrow. We'll talk some more. I care, damnit. TOMORROW."

That night, I called the number she had given me several times. Nobody ever picked up. It just rang and rang. And I felt more and more dread. I barely slept that night.

But she was there the next day at lunch. I saw her and ran to her and said "you still have a name, and I want to know what it is."

"Karen," she said. Then she told me that she hadn't gone home until late the night before, and she was going to kill herself but decided not to, at least not yet. I had the little pamphlet we'd been given in the suicide prevention unit, and I  handed it to her. It had numbers to call if you were thinking about killing yourself.  The girl -- Karen --  looked at it, looked at me, and said "where did you get this?"

"I brought it from home," I told her, and mentioned the unit we'd just taken on suicide maybe a month before. "I was hoping you'd be here so I could give it to you."

"Thank you," she said. "I don't know why I picked you to come to yesterday, but I'm glad I did."

My heart sang.

_________
This is where I tell you Karen and I became fast friends and still talk today. Except that would be a lie. I never saw Karen again. I do know, however, that she graduated that year with her class. I checked. I went through all the Karens in the yearbook until I found her picture. Seeing it, something in me relaxed, a breath I'd been holding for months escaped me, and I felt better.

Until the next time.

Karen was only the first woman -- they've all been women -- to come to me and tell me she was thinking of killing/going to kill herself. There have been seven others.

Seven.

I lost one of them. I won't write that here...I can't. I just can't.  I carry that with me every day, wondering if I said something wrong that pushed her over instead of pulling her back. I'm not going to take credit for the other six, any more than I feel I should take credit for Karen. I did what I could, what I've been taught to do and what I've taught myself to do, but it's only what anyone would do if they knew. So--

TALK ABOUT IT. DIRECTLY. If somebody comes to you saying that they are thinking about suicide, THINK ABOUT SUICIDE right along with them. Get right in their head. Find out what, where, when, and most notably HOW. Don't shy away from it like it scares you.
LISTEN. DON'T JUDGE. STAY CALM. The would-be suicide feels judged enough already--by herself.  He needs an ear and he needs support. What you say is important, but not nearly as important as how you say it. Your own emotional distress at what you're hearing will simply pile onto what's already unbearable, so don't show any.
BE HOPEFUL, BUT NOT CHEERY. You're going for an ironclad conviction that things will get better. You may not feel that conviction yourself, but you know something? It's all right in the end. If it's not all right...it's not the end." The line is Paulho Coelho's", popularly and falsely attributed to John Lennon. I firmly believe it.
HELP IS CLOSE BY.  Here are numbers for the various distress centers  and hotlines in Canada. 911 will also work; so will 1-800-273-TALK.  Text START to 741-741. There are lots of total strangers out there willing to talk.

I never knew Karen for longer than an hour (even though I got to hear details of her life I don't think anybody else knew). I did, or do, know, and love, the other seven, to varying degrees. And including the one that did commit suicide, all seven of those women were/are treasures. Treasures who had convinced themselves they were worthless. It's horrifying, how often this happens.

It's World Suicide Prevention Day. The need will still be there tomorrow.