No words...

Last weekend, I heard some painful and deeply saddening news. 

A young man who’d attended school with and become a good friend of my eldest had taken his own life.

This boy was such a sweet natured child, I recall him coming to the house as a teen. Always polite, with a shy smile. Just a nice kid! I’m ashamed to admit his presence didn’t make as much of an impact as the gobby, cocky and downright arrogant buggers who also used to semi-squat in our house when T was an adolescent.

My poor boy, devastated, shocked and also feeling guilty for the times he wasn't there for his friend. 

This tragic young man’s story is one of emotional neglect, drug abuse, psychosis triggered by drugs and deep, deep desperation. As the story developed, I heard this was his third attempt at taking his life, he was determined not to be here anymore.

The same group of friends, who’ve been together since they were about 12, are all about 25 years old now. Trying to make their own way in life, having (mostly) turned their backs on the recreational drugs and the high they all thought was liberation when teenagers. Yet this poor boy turned more and more towards that release. His friends at first trying to help him, encouraging him in a clean life, trying their best to support him but becoming desperate and angry when he continuously returned to this destructive pattern. Finally, not always being available when he wanted to “hang out” because they knew what it would lead to, they just couldn’t do it anymore. That’s where the guilt comes in. Going even deeper are the stories of verbal abuse by his career driven, single mother. In the hazy recollection of their parties some tell of abusive and destructive insults thrown at the child by his mother. He was a disappointment; he was the worst mistake in her life…so many cruel and irreversible blows. Who knows if their memories are accurate, we all know how teens are able to justify and remodel statements made in anger but also in innocence. I’ve screamed them myself, when hopelessly confronted with the train wreck that was my 16 year old, unable to comprehend what was happening and having no idea how to help him. Yet just to hear some of these insults supposedly brought by the young boy’s mother, broke my heart for the child that never grew up. As for the kids’ recollection, if they think this happened, to them it did happen and being party to that (false memory or not) must be so painful and damaging. I pray that anything I said in anger hasn’t left an emotional scar. My boy’s on the right track now, so are his friends or at least that’s what I assumed until I heard this awful news.

What I do know for sure, is that his mother must be feeling an unimaginable pain and I feel so sad for her. Whether or not she was the distant, cold parent the kids remember, she has to live with that for the rest of her life, a position I never want to experience. 

How can you explain the reasoning behind suicide, when you can’t grasp it yourself? T said one of his friends became angry when another said that at least the boy was now at peace and no more tormented by a life he could no longer tolerate. I said the same thing, it’s the truth but possibly only a truth you can accept when having reached a certain age and experienced the loss a suicide leaves in your life, unfortunately more than once. A psych nurse once told me that interview research with ‘saved” suicides, stated it was also an act of punishment, that it was a means to make the people they felt were abandoning or hurting them, pay. Some people stated it was indeed, a cry for help and hoped they would be saved in time. This boy’s final act ensured that he could not be saved, again.

Whatever the reason, it’s the final act of a distraught mind that knows no respite from its demons. The only way to stop the pain.

Go with God, young man. I hope you have found peace.

"Death may be the greatest of all human blessings". ~Socrates