Family Legacy

A co-worker was telling me about a tattoo she was getting removed. One of those "it was a good idea at the time" tattoos.  A stain from a past she hopes to forget. Thats how suicide is.  It stains a family.  You try to cover it up, hide it, pretend it never happens.  You can get a tattoo removed.  You can't erase suicide.

I first learned about suicide in the fifth grade. My best friend came to school one day and told us about how her sister's boyfriend tried jumping off a bridge.  He broke several bones, but survived. When I told my mother about it, she told me that the boy was very lucky. She said that suicide was a mortal sin and people who kill themselves go straight to hell. I don't believe that, but she does.  Four years later, the same little girl who told me about her sister's boyfriend took her own life.

When I was in the seventh grade, my oldest brother Joey tried slitting his wrists. He was 16. I didn't know it at the time, but it was his third suicide attempt.  His first was when he was eight.

Several years later, my mom's brother killed himself. If you ask her, she'll tell you he died of "depression." She won't use the word suicide.  In 2004, my mom tried taking her own life with a Valium-alcohol cocktail. She was unsuccessful.  Its unclear to me whether or not she really meant to kill herself, but it got her a bipolar diagnosis. I wasn't living with her at the time.  I was living with a roommate, who coincidentally, tried killing herself using a similar cocktail a few years later.

I'm not sure what percent of the population attempts or commits suicide, but the rate seems disproportionately high in my family, on both sides.  I have no doubt that there's a genetic component.

Recently, my dad told me about his great Aunt Val. She lived with him and his mom when he was child after she unsuccessfully tried to kill herself with a gun. Val lived years and years with a hole in her head. A hole that my Grandma Rose use to rub salve in twice daily. My grandmother was no stranger to suicide. Her older brother killed himself while living in a state run insane asylum.  Thats where they put people who were mentally ill when my grandmother was young, in state run insane asylums.

People don't like to talk about suicide, but avoiding the topic makes the problem worse. Lord knows I've had moments in my life where it would be easy to give up, check-out completely. The temptation is there, sometimes more acutely than I'd like to admit. But I would never kill myself because I am keenly aware of how it impacts the people left behind.  If families with a predisposition to suicidal thoughts and actions openly discuss the consequences of suicide (specifically the long term baggage their loved ones have to carry for the rest of their lives) perhaps the suicide rate would decrease? Just a thought.