Hi Herownself. I hope you find some comfort in the next few days.
I haven’t lost any family members, but I have been to the depths of depression and tried suicide when I was ten, so I have a faint idea of what you’re going through. But hang in there. Eventually it may stop hurting.
I’m sorry to hear that you lost your sister.
I haven’t lost anyone to suicide, but I know what it is to hurt that much.
Hang in there.
Hey, Herownself. Been a major depressive for years, so I can commiserate with you there. My mom is the one who lost siblings. Had one murdered when she was young, had another life-long troubled sister commit suicide about a year after we moved to WI, had another sister commit suicide about three years ago after that sister’s ex-husband died after a prolonged illness and she cared for him though they were divorced. Pretty much knocked the wind out of my mom’s sails and put her in the hospital for a while. Luckily, I get the same genes. YAY!
Kissing aside, I was the one who had to tell my mom about her sisters - I got the calls from a priest friend of ours who called to let my mom know. He thoght it might be better for me to let her know.
So, I can feel for you here. If you don’t want higs, that’s cool - I have a spare set of dishes since I moved out here and in with my BF, and we can throw them at walls all day long. I also have spare galssware.
I have tons of pillows if you need to beat something.
I have lots of old clothes if you need to rip, rend, shred or tear things. Or if you need to get really dirty by throwing things around in the yard. I can’t promise the dog won’t look at us like we’re nuts, but - hey, we are!! Wheeee!
Sounds like you have a fair amount of ears here available for listening. I am here for the more destructive needs. Someone’s gotta do it!
Keep your head up. You know all the words of comfort; it doesn’t make it any better. You know what you need to know and platitudes wont help so I don’t offer any. Just, keep your head up.
Inky
Crap. Kidding aside. :rolleyes:
My brother and his wife were killed in a car accident in May 2004, not quite a year ago yet. At the time I was living in Los Angeles and had been for several years, and when the news got around my work and friend circle, everyone knew that my family was terribly important to me, and how much of a blow it was.
Subsequently, I’ve moved to Seattle. I find myself in something similar to your situation - no one here knows what happened, nor can place it in the proper context of significance when they find out. Sure, anyone can (and they generally do) express thoughts of sympathy, but they don’t get it, and they never will. It puts me in an awkward situation when I’m asked about my family - “Oh, how many brothers and sisters do you have?” Do I say I have three brothers, but one was killed, or do I just take the ‘easy’ way out and say two? sigh
I doubt in ten years I’ll be over it either. I’ve always thought that death was the hardest on those still living, and nothing’s proved me wrong thus far. I’m sorry this is so difficult for you. I can sympathise, to an extent. I’m also sorry that I don’t have any helpful advice to add. I just generally try my best not to think about it, not get sucked down that vortex of grief. Not the best way of dealing with death, but it leaves you functioning, at least.
Rage against the dying of the light indeed. It’s an extraordinarily apt phrase.
herownself, I’m here because another Doper sent me a link with this thread and asked me to help. He wanted to make sure I saw it and thought I could help. (To that person, thank you.)
I sympathize with you on a couple of levels. First of all, two weeks ago today, I was told my grandmother was dying. About 24 hours later, she died. Thursday, I went to choir practice, thinking I’d gotten through my grief. Instead, during one particular piece, I started breaking down. I couldn’t agree more with your " HATE this FUCKING SHIT and how much it FUCKING HURTS!!!" Even knowing it’s natural, even knowing it’s normal doesn’t make it stop hurting. I wish it did. Damn, I wish it did.
Second, I have been suicidal and I’ve come close to succeeding. I’ve got two younger brothers and a family who loves me. I remember what it’s like to be at the point of suicide and what was going through my mind. As someone who’s been there and only survived through a miracle, let me tell you something. It’s not your fault!!! Let me repeat that, because I cannot put it strongly enough. It’s not your fault. When I have been at the point of suicide, I haven’t been thinking I’d be hurting my family or friends; I was convinced I was relieving them of the intolerable burden of having me around. By committing suicide, I was doing them a favor in the long run, not unlike removing a cancerous tumor. Yes, I know that’s not rational. That’s one reason I’m certain depression is a mental illness. A person who commits suicide is out of touch with reality, at least in my experience, because he or she can see no value in his continued existence. It’s very nasty and insidious. Two years ago, I was unemployed and had been for sometime. Reason and logic, or rather the twisted things that passed for them in a depressed person’s mind, convinced me I wasn’t going to be able to find a job which would allow me to support myself and that I was going to wind up becoming a burden on society, therefore it was better for society as a whole if I killed myself, rather than burden my friends and family with this.
I understand about being alone in a strange city. I moved to Hawaii for a job knowing only that there was a YWCA downtown and bus service to Waikiki. I moved back to my home city knowing that what few friends I had had moved on. In both cases, I found friends and people I love and trust. One of them is lying in the room next to me. I met him a year and a half ago. Things will get better. In the meantime, you’ve got a message board full of the finest people on the planet looking out for you. Trust me. I’ve known these people for four years.
Oh yes, my e-mail address is also in my profile. I’ll make a point of checking it throughout the day. I carry a cell phone now, so if you want to send me your phone number, please do so and we’ll talk. You’re also welcome to come to Cecil’s Place, a support group I set up on Yahoo for Dopers who are battling depression. It’s completely private and I know they’ve helped me.
I know it stinks to high heaven, but what you’re going through is understandable. As a friend of mine pointed out to me, though, you don’t have to go through it alone. We are here for you.
With condolences,
CJ
With some experience of suicide, I have to say that IMHO one of the important things to “get” after a while is that in most cases, we put too much emphasis on the suicide itself, as if it were a seminal failure or culminating event that everything before was leading up to. Thinking about it that way really drives home that feeling that there was something people could have done to stop it, that maybe we could have stood in the way of that path and arrested it.
But suicide, and the depression that usually underlies it, is rarely like that. Instead, it comes in big crazy waves. The plans, the obsessional thoughts, they come and go. It isn’t inevitable, it’s rarely predictable, and sometimes even if it’s pre-planned, it’s still almost accidental. So I find that you can spend way too much time trying to find deep and painful significance in what someone might have been thinking, or the last couple of days, or whatever. The reality is, the mood or thoughts of suicide aren’t any deeper or more true to the core of a person than anything else in their lives. In fact, often the person themselves acknowledges them as extenal: a disease they’ve struggled with. They can’t always be talked away, or cured by support. And in the end, you can’t blame yourself or the person anymore for that one tiny part of themselves that ended their life than you can for any other disease that takes the life of a loved one. Nor can you think you could have necessarily cured it anymore than you could cure someone’s drug-resistant TB.
That probably doesn’t make it any more real. Heck, my most painful loss was someone to an auto-immune disease that they fought tooth and nail, and yet my brain STILL after so many years from time to time slips into some fantasy of how I’m just waiting for the cure to be discovered so I can go back in time and administer it and save them. I mean, that’s REALLY crazy, and yet I STILL want to believe that there’s something I’m still doing to prevent them dying. We can’t turn off our desire to help and fix and understand even after it’s no longer needed. Human psychology was, well, pretty shittily designed in some ways.
But then again, I think one of the obvious things a thread like this is good for is in demonstrating that even if you are living in a strange new city where no one knows you and specifically what you’re going through, you are still nevertheless almost certainly surrounded by people who have had to face many of the same sorts of things you have gone through. Barriers of social custom and familiarity and shyness prevent it from being obvious, but you are not alone in what you’re going through, and as you meet new people in the city you’ll find that there is an incredible wealth of common, shared experience out there. They can’t act like they “get it” because they don’t know you yet, or they have a hard time opening up themselves- but it’s there, and it will come as you find new links. A messageboard is a weird tool that somehow gets people around that: gives easy access to the deeply personal. But the people are the same in both worlds.
herownself, I understand. I understand not wanting hugs and platitudes. I understand that it doesn’t get better. I understand the guilt, even knowing there was nothing you could have changed.
I understand, because my son, my only child, commited suicide in 2000. He/they were found 2 days after my birthday. He probably died the day before. His wife survived. They had a suicide pact. She was critically ill for 5 weeks.
When she was able to leave the hospita,l she came to live with us for a year. I think if I hadn’t had her to care for during that year, I might have followed.
I’m better now, and so is she. But, I am changed. I will never be the same person I was before. I’ve lost friends who just couldn’t wait any longer for me to get back to “normal.” This is as normal as I’ll get.
For many years, working in critical care, I dealt with grieving families. I thought I was soooo helpful. Now I know I didn’t know shit and I didn’t do shit for them. Grief is so much larger than anyone can imagine. The grief that comes with a suicide, is double that.
People tell you, time heals. Bull Shit. Time is only time. All it does is pass. Granted, the moments of forgetfulness that lie within the cracks in that glacier of grief, over time, widen.
There are actually whole days when I don’t think about it, but it isn’t gone, it isn’t healed or healing, its there, lying in wait for me to trip over it.
But, [paraphrase Elizabeth Kubler-Ross] grief is like staring into the sun, you simply can’t do it for long, you have to look away or go blind.[/paraphrase]
I’ve never felt angry. We’re supposed to be angry, at some point. I can’t.
What’s left of my heart goes out to you.
Be well, and be strong. Its all we can do.
Hi herownself, some one else here listening.
Let’s toss another couple of fuck-yous out there…
Fuck you suicide. Of all the deaths to throw at a family, this one is the fucking worst.
Fuck you, world, for putting anyone in a position where suicide seems like the only reasonable option. How fucked up is that?
Fuck you, parents who make it clear that your kids need to be perfect. Perfect is un-fucking-attainable, and even if your kids figure this out intellectually, they’ll never be able to lose the feeling that they’re letting you down.
I’ve got more, but the baby has other plans for me.
I’m sorry about your sister.
I was just talking with my best friend about her loss of a sister-in-law. They were very close. The S-I-L’s car broke down and she began to walk. A drunk driver clipped her and threw her into the weeds on the side of the road where she died. He left the scene and hid the car. It got uglier after that (the search, trial, etc.).
It’s been 9 years and my friend still finds herself in need of talking about it- sometimes I will do and sometimes she sees a counselor. My friend feels like that because so much time has gone by that perhaps (others feel) she should not still be mulling over her S-I-L’s tragic death, but I understand. I only met the S-I-L two times and found her friendly and likeable and interesting. It was not fair what happened to her!
Hi Everyone.
I really didn’t mean for this to turn into therapy club, but I do appreciate this.
Out of everyone, picunurse has really hit it on the head. I wish I could have said it that way. In fact, if you don’t mind, I may steal it for future use.
I’ve never been angry about the suicide either. I know that you’re ‘supposed’ to be angry, but I’ve never been good about doing what other people tell me to do.
I totally understand why she did it. There is a lot more to the story, which I haven’t posted and don’t plan to post, because it’s her story not mine. She tried as hard as any person possibly could to cope with her situation, for a very long time, and it didn’t work.
So the anger I feel is toward the circumstances that set up her depression, and mine, not so much the genetic as the environmental. And because it just really, really sucks to hurt. And hurt. And hurt …
So thank you all, again. Especially the folks who waited up last night night.
Of course, you may use it. I know its hard to articulate these feeling. People make you feel guilty for not getting on with it, because they have no clue.
I hope this has made you a little stronger to be able to go live your life for a while again, because its what we do.
If you’re up to it by then, we can do this all again in late June, for me.
We’ll be around tomorrow too – and next June, picunurse, if you’ll let us know you need us.
As a child of about ten, Katharine Hepburn found her brother’s body. He had hanged himself, apparently accidentally, when he was about twelve. They had seen a play or read the book A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, I believe. And I think he may have been acting out a scene. I can’t imagine having to live with that image.
I’m sorry for the suffering of those who go and those who are left behind.
It must be really frustrating that there are so few who have any idea at all of what you must endure.
It is so rare to find someone who even understands that they don’t have a clue.
I’m in a pretty calm place today, thanks to a migraine and some vicodin, and waiting to see what tomorrow brings.
I don’t have a door on my cubicle, but I do have a big ugly SAS program to write (and then comb minutely for semicolons, this being SAS) tomorrow. That, along with my boss knowing the general circumstances gives me a reason to be fairly antisocial - or even totally antisocial.
I don’t have access to the boards during the day, because I work for the feds and someone narked us out, somewhere in the beaurocracy, so no SDMB for anyone.
Again, thanks.
picunurse, after reading your post, I’m going to make sure that if any of my friends lose family, I’ll be patient with them. It really is hard to understand what someone is going through in that situation, but I know what not to do if it happens to anyone I know at least.
I have been trhough this myself. Not with a blood relative, but with a much beloved boyfriend. It’s been since August of 1984. Wow, over twenty years.
He’d shot himself in the head, and I found him, still alive, but not conscious. They operated and he lasted for about a week, but though he had some response to stimulus, he never regained consciousness, as they say.
I am also available to talk if you’d like.
I’ve been there, too. My sister took her own life in August 1988. She had a hard time with depression. She was a recovering alcoholic/druggie, and her lover left her. Though we didn’t know it at the time, she came to say goodbye to the family. (She lived in another town.)
I wish a lot of things were different. I wish she could have reached out for us to help her.
So I know some of how you feel. It does suck, big green ones. 
I miss Diane.
This thread has scared the hell out of me.
Last Thursday my son’s school councelor called me. When the school district was doing some testing for learning disabilities, the diagnostitian said that she recognized signs of depression. She wanted permission to send home some questionaires for his mother and I to fill out and then we would proceed from there if needed.
I was scared when I got the call. I freaked out. I remember what it was like to be a teenager and it was no fun. It sucked balls. But my son is only 10. I am terrified about what to do, how to help, or what I did wrong to cause the depression so that I can stop and fix it.
I am very sorry for your loss, herownself. Fuck the hurt and fuck the depression sideways with a stop sign. These are some damn good people here on this board. When they offer to talk or help they are geniune. I would also offer to help or talk, but I honestly cannot even begin to imagine how you are feeling or what would help.
Greathouse, not to in any way diminish the power and devastation that depression can cause, don’t be too scared. Your son may not really be depressed, or it may be transient. Talk to your son, and use your own good sense.
I was diagnosed (accuarately) as depressed when I was 10. I’ve had waves of depression ever since, but they’ve gotten easier to handle as I have grown up. I have never attempted suicide, and never been on medication (although there was one time I certainly should have been). Just because it’s diagnosed early doesn’t mean it will be worse.
mischievous