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Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Reasons I didn't. Suicide: Personal History.

Reasons I didn't. Suicide: Personal History.


            This weekend my teenage children marathon watched the Netfilx series, 13 Reasons Why, which focuses on the reasons that surround a teenage girl’s decision to end her own life.  The series is really well down and I recommend parents watch it with their kids and to talk to their kids about suicide and what’s going on in their lives so they can express the reasons that we live.  The series has some graphic depictions of violence, sex, and drug use and in recommending it I wasn’t sure at what age it would be appropriate.  The series reminded me of my own life and the conversations I have had with my own kids about suicide.  I try to be an open book so they can know what life is like.  Sometimes I don’t realize the impact what I’m saying to them has until one of my stories is repeated to me.  At those moments I have an odd mix of shame and pride as I try to re-qualify what it is I said and how “it wasn’t like it sounded” when in fact it most likely was.  

At age 13, I was a mess. I wasn’t athletically skilled.  Whatever moments of glory I had on the baseball field in my youth were not translating after age 12. I had some real moments of failure and embarrassment on the ball field that made any desire to play baseball totally disappear. I found comfort in food and had bottomless hunger at times.  So I was chubby or just plain fat.

I liked to play football and spent a lot of time playing it in the neighborhood. I liked it enough that I decided I would try to play pop warner.  I signed up but back then I was over the weight limit.  It was highly embarrassing because my older brother managed to make it but I didn’t.  So that ended any desire I had to play any sports ever.  

I think it was the summer before middle school that I and a friend in the neighborhood were so dissatisfied with our home lives that we both had the idea to just run away from home. I had ideas about jumping on a freight train and just leaving it all behind.   My friend ended up moving away and we lost touch pretty quickly.  Neither of us ran away as far as I know, not geographically anyway. 

I was at that transitional stage in life between elementary school and high school where hormones and emotions are running wild, where you’re no longer a little kid but you haven’t gotten past puberty entirely.  It also was a time where the friends in the neighborhood had all but disappeared.  A few had moved away and others were lost in childhood vendettas.   We also all went to a new school where I either got separated from the few friends I had, or we grew apart.

There was a lot of stress in going to middle school. Not only did I have to adjust to new people in class, back in my time, being bullied or beaten up was a real concern.  Fights were not common place but certainly not unheard of.  I was a fat kid so I wasn’t necessarily safe from insults or teasing.  I got my fair share in the neighborhood and at home.  I remember, early on in 6th grade, a kid giving me crap while we were in the boy’s room, in front of other kids.  I was bigger so I grabbed him and put him is a wrestling hold I had seen on T.V. until he begged to be let go.  The other kids saw it and after that I was never really bothered again. 

From that and other squabbles in the neighborhood, I guess you could say I am not innocent in terms of being a bully.  After that episode in the boys room though, I never put my hands on anybody again.  I like to think that I didn’t like the way it made me feel.      
            I was lucky in that I wasn’t picked on but I didn’t really have anything going for me so I didn’t really have any close friends.  So I know what it’s like to be lonely and frankly, when the alternative is to be an object of negative attention, loneliness can be okay. 
            So that’s the picture of me between 5th and 8th grade.  Somewhere in that time frame, probably around the time I was thinking about running away, I thought about killing myself.  The turmoil of life seemed to be too much and I figured I would get my Dad’s gun that he kept in his top dresser drawer and shoot myself in the head. 

            I remember one time, I think I was 13, going into my parents room and taking the revolver out of his dresser drawer, holding it in my hands.  He had a mirror on his dresser and I saw my reflection holding a gun with an anguished look on my face.  I don’t know if it was loaded, 99.9% sure it wasn’t, I never pointed it to my head, I don’t think.  Contemplating ending my life scared the daylights out of me.  So I put the gun back and I don’t think I ever touched it again. 

            I was in a state of turmoil in those days and I remember making threats to kill myself and my parents getting angry and they were very adamant that I was not to kill myself or even talk about it.  I think they may have said something close to “We’ll kill you if you kill yourself!”  Or “We don’t want to hear any of that stupid talk!” 

            As silly as it seems, I think I needed to hear that.  No matter how they said it they conveyed the fact that suicide was something that I was not to do.  So if it was the fear of death, subsiding hormones, or my parents’ warnings, I obviously didn’t kill myself. 

            I’ve told my teenage kids these stories to show them I know how hard it can be growing up. They have shared that the kids can be just as mean as they were in my day and have both felt like they were made fun of and had times where they felt isolated without any friends. 

            A few years ago my son Brennan, was in middle school (the wonderful years for all of us I guess) when he decided that homework was just something that he wasn’t going to do and sitting at his desk in class didn’t appeal to him either.  So he bad grades, and was getting detention for disobedience, and had even walked off the school grounds a few times. 

            On one occasion he told the faculty at his school that he wanted to die.  The school did the right thing. They called the cops and sent him to the local hospital for a psychological evaluation.   Brennan had no actual plans to kill himself.  He was being an angsty teen with issues with authority. The staff was required to keep him for a certain amount of time and his mother had to pick him up.  So he had lots of time to think about what he had said and what he was doing. 


            I took the door to his bedroom off of its hinges after that because we couldn’t “trust” him to be alone.  We talked about it, a lot. The troubles with the homework and discipline didn’t go away immediately but the next school year Brennan changed his ways.  He says that he decided for himself that what he was doing was stupid and hurting himself.  Since then he’s gotten good grades and has started participating in drama and has a decent sized role in the next musical production at the end of the month. 

I realize there is a lot to respond to in reading this. Lessons to be learned:

Lock up your guns.  Kids know where they are and they might know where the keys are too. Just saying, kids are smart. 

Talk to you kids.  Share your experiences so you’re not just a “parental unit” from the planet “Boring”. 

As dumb as it may sound, Tell them suicide is punishable by death!  Just kidding, express to them you love them and that they are not to take their own lives.    

Discuss that choices and actions have consequences that may have a farther impact than they think. 

Basically, we have to be there for our kids and treat them as human beings who may be going through the toughest times of their lives, human beings that need to know there is hope and love for them at home, and human beings that need to know there is reason to live and a future where things get better. 

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