When you’re beside yourself
By: David A. Knight
Tags: Holidays, Christmas, Suicide, Seasonal Depression, Prevention

It’s that time of the year, again. Sure, it can — and does — happen every day somewhere, but during the holiday season there seems a most overwhelming prevalence. Someone’s gone through with it. Someone’s dealing with it. What is it? Say it, say the word — suicide.

You might be awoken one morning by your phone. It might be your parents or some other relative, or a friend. They call to tell you that someone you went to school with had taken their lives. Their business may have been falling apart, their husband/wife, or partner, may have left them, or they may have experienced the loss of someone close to them.

You may pause to think of how you thought they had gotten ahead in the world, beyond your achievements — how you had believed they were a success story, that you weren’t. Maybe you weren’t the best of friends. Maybe they were closer to one of your friends, and you just knew of them. Maybe you had been friends, and fallen out of touch over the years.

Do you call them deceased now — is that the right word to use? So often, when we say death, or we say deceased, we mean to refer to the end of someone’s life, stereotypically due to cancer, or emphysema, or some affliction common to our elder population, or a traffic or workplace accident. You might think about how gentle the word seems, when referring to someone who passes away in their sleep, but after a long life. You might not have used the word before, to describe someone’s self-death — a suicide. The word begins then, to seem a cold and inappropriate oddity, requiring another, and better word.

Whether deceased or suicide, neither word suits you: but should you have a comfortable word choice available to you? You may consider how uncomfortable they had been to have done what they did. What does it take for someone to extinguish themselves from existence?

Maybe they hated life. Maybe they loved life, as others had it, but just hated their own life in comparison. Perhaps, they were so lost in disillusionment that suicide appeared an easy escape, as we are often told it sometimes does for those who take their lives. Perhaps, they did it for revenge, as a last resort effort to inflict emotional damage on those they felt wronged by, a very final act of condemnation and judgment of others. What leads to that kind of anger, that level of frustration?

You might wonder if people had missed clues somewhere, that may have been communicated consciously, or subconsciously. It may be that things appear apparent now, only far too late. But, we are human beings, and as such we are fallible, so we make mistakes and we do miss things. We also think that if only we had done this, or we had done that, we could have encouraged a different outcome. Maybe that is true. But, only maybe. Looking back only helps if it allows us to look more effectively at our present, and those who are around us — if it helps us to listen, and to listen all the time, and not only when someone seems down.

We, as individual beings, are a complex matter to deal with. There can be such an emotional and psychological storm raging beneath the calm surface. The facts and the figures — the yearly statistics — don’t begin to address this. You might even pause to consider what it would take, for you to take your life.

The bottom line has to be this: whatever it is that bothers you, don’t be alone with it — share it, and survive. Don’t be alone with it.

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