Yet Another Tragedy in the Family

Heard yesterday of another suicide. My family this time. A distant cousin, but that makes four we know of in the last four months. It seems to me that this is an epidemic that goes under the radar. All four of the suicides that have touched us have had to do with a divorce or impending divorce. After my SO's son's suicide, we read a lot and found a startling statistic: 68% of all suicides in the USA are related to divorce. It brings it home again how traumatic relationship breakups are to people, how deeply we connect ourselves, our very identities to those we chose to love. So the rise in the divorce rate can be directly connected to the rise in suicide rates. It is a hard thing to face, to have to work through, a fact I can attest to just by watching the effect it has had on my SO and his immediate family.

I believe the person who commits the act of suicide is suffering a kind of insanity. They definitely are not themselves at the time, but are under the influence of such a severe and debilitating depression that they cannot see past their own misery to the terrible legacy they leave, the devastation that their deaths cause those who love and depend on them. It is such a quick, but agonizing, severing, like an amputation. Questions left unanswered, guilt and helplessness, anger, confusion -- all those things are the leavings. And a sadness, of course, that defies description.

But this is not a subject I am ready to discuss much here, primarily because I haven't reached a complete understanding of it, although I think it's something that has been in my mind for a long time. I had a cousin, a much closer one, who killed himself about 15 years ago, and I think his suicide was on my mind when I wrote THE PASSION OF DELLIE O'BARR, the book that I am now editing for Kindle conversion. There is a suicide in this book, and while it isn't the direct focus, it is certainly a catalyst for all that happens to the main character in the book. The suicide of her father is the thing that causes her to question all aspects of her life, and leads her down the path she chooses, a tragic path certainly.

It's been odd to me to re-read this book at this particular time. It isn't that I had forgotten the thrust of the story, but it has been a sort of black irony that I wrote a book like this so long before the subject matter touched me in reality. I have no explanation for it, other than that life presents some amazing ironies. We can examine them and find some kind of meaning, but an irony is often just that, a paradox, an anomaly, and sometimes simply cannot be explained.

Acceptance, or more correctly acquiescence, I believe is the ultimate goal in dealing with painful issues. Submission to it, acknowledging that some things are beyond a person's control, the old roll with the punches adage. If only we could take the suicidal person by their shoulders and shake that understanding into their brains. Same goes for those left behind. Unfortunately, life doesn't always work that neatly.

Onward ....