Tag Archives: suicide

Suicide

Posted on by
Reply

Suicide. This treacherous word burns into the marrow of your soul, leaves those behind with wrenched hearts, eyes flooded with tears, or dead as stones. Questions drift through the air, if there is air. Questions unanswered. Unanswerable. Never asked. Never answered. The knee-buckling burden of not knowing. Never knowing.

You are, if someone you know has committed suicide, in a kind of hell.

I know this hell. A beautiful young man I called my brother, one year my junior, put a rifle to the side of his head and fired. He was 23. The end. The birth-father I never met because he put on a tuxedo, slipped a flower into his lapel, put a handgun to his head, and fired. He was 68. The end. My mother who raised me, raised me I tell you, gathered pictures of her family all around her before she loaded her body with pills and alcohol. She was 68. The end.

I remember carrying her stained with blood from hemorrhaging mattress outside. I remember packing up her home, as if we were taking apart and packing away her life. I remember sitting on the floor of the empty room where she died writing, writing writing, writing in my journal, desperately hoping I would wake up and find the horror was all but a nightmare.

I ask you in gentle tones carried on the wings of angels to consider something for a moment. Try it on, if you will. Because if it lifts you, sends some warmth into the chill of loss and heartbreak, you deserve it. There is a cliché that says, Living well is the best revenge. Now breathe and think for a moment. Living well is the best revenge. In the case of suicide the revenge is not against the person who committed suicide, it is against the act of suicide.



There is something else I can tell you too. When someone you know commits suicide, it is not your fault. I know these words may sit like pebbles in sand right now, hard to see, believe, hard to breathe in, but they are true. I will not lie to you. It is not your fault. Laying blame against yourself or any living person is understandable because you, we, are trying to make rational sense where the norm of rational sense does not apply. Have the feelings you have, but don’t let them define you. The person who committed suicide is responsible for the suicide. This truth does not make them bad or evil. It very likely means they were in so much pain they were tragically only able to identify suicide as a way out of the pain.

Hold them close to your hearts. They are not gone from there. Even death has its impotence. But as close as you hold them, hold yourself and each other even closer. You are the living, and you deserve each others loving embrace right now. You do. I promise.

Remember the basics. Remember to eat, bathe, brush your teeth, wash your hair, – breathe. You are alive, and that is a beautiful thing. I promise.

________________________________________________________________

THE AMERICAN BRAIN INJURY EPIDEMIC

Posted on by
Reply

As a brain injury survivor and one who works with brain injury survivors I am saddened but not surprised that a leading expert in forensic pathology says former National Football League player Andre Waters’s November 2006 suicide was likely tied to brain damage suffered by Mr. Waters over his playing career.

The New York Times today said forensics expert Dr. Bennet Omalu of the University of Pittsburgh “determined that (Andre) Waters’s brain tissue had degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with similar characteristics as those of early-stage Alzheimer’s and that if he had lived, within 10 or 15 years “Andre Waters would have been fully incapacitated.””

There is an epidemic of brain injuries in the United States and we, as a people, are playing catch-up. In some quarters we are waging the catch-up battle valiantly, but we have a long way to go.

I sustained my brain injury in 1984 when I was held up and shot in the head at point blank range. While I received extraordinary medical care, no one, and I mean no one, mentioned the words brain injury or brain damage to me. And so I left the hospital with a bullet in my frontal lobe, bone spray in my left temporal lobe, and a sharp awareness that I would be wise to avoid contact sports.

It would be nearly 10 years before I learned that the damage to my brain impacted my daily life in a very real way. I am far from alone and not even in the same room with unique on this front. Millions of Americans deal with brain injuries. Think this is an overstatement? Try these facts on for size.

– With more than 50,000 Americans dying every year from brain injuries, it is safe to say more than 1 million Americans have died in the 22 years since I was injured, including more than 150,000 children.
– 1.4 million Americans sustain brain injuries annually.
– In 1995, direct medical costs coupled with lost production cost the United States an estimated $56.3 billion.
– Many members of the American military wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered brain injuries.

If you think only football players or those in contact sports run the risk of injuries like those suffered by Mr. Waters, you are sadly mistaken. A couple of years ago I went to a conference on brain injury at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. A forensics expert showed that if you have someone lie down on their back, lift their head 12 inches off the ground, and let go, the skull is travelling 40 miles per hour when it strikes the surface.

We are not quite holding our own in this catch-up battle. There was, after all, no brain injury association on the national level until 1980. Now we have the Brain Injury Association of America, a wonderful organization. States have their respective brain injury associations, all deserving of their citizens support. I am a member and board member of the Brain Injury Association of New York.

Unlike cuts and bruises and broken bones, brain injuries do not heal. Yet the reluctance of so many to take simple precautions is mind boggling. I have seen the following scene too many times. A family is on a bicycle ride. The children are dutifully wearing their helmets (sometimes) while the parents are not wearing their helmets. Perhaps the parents think that adulthood means they are no longer beholden to the law of gravity. Or, perhaps, there is a bit of vanity at work, some concern that one’s hairstyle will get messed, or, some “real man” doesn’t wear a helmet because he is , well, a “real man”. Dazzling displays of reasoning for sure. Tell you what though, when you’re paralyzed and/or you can’t remember what happened five minutes ago, remind me to ask you who your hair stylist is, or what it’s like to be a “real man.” But then again, why should I bother? You won’t remember anyway.

If you are from New York State, you can contact the Brain Injury Association of New York, the one I belong to at http://www.bianys.org/

Contact the Brain Injury Association of America for information on a Brain Injury Association near you. Please visit their website at http://www.biausa.org/