Last week, I read these words by P.D. James (Time to Be In Earnest):
The suicide of the young is more common now than it was in my youth. I can’t recall the suicide of a single friend or acquaintance during my childhood or adolescence. Perhaps today we all take happiness as our right and unhappiness is seen as shameful or insupportable. Or is it that some people have an imperfect appreciation of linear time? For them, the present moment is immeasurable, fixed in an eternal agony. There can be no hope that things will be better tomorrow, because the idea of a tomorrow has no reality.
I sometimes lose sight of the fact that time marches on. But the empty milk cartons in the fridge tell the story of the voracious appetite of teenagers. Those teenagers who stand and look me in the eye were seven months old just yesterday, it seems. My baby girl declares, “I am a big girl now!” and looks forward to her fifth birthday (in September). The mirror reflects back an aging face. I put my fingertips just below my eyebrows and lift up my sagging eyelids in a parody of my youth. The crocuses push out of the earth, eager for their turn to bloom.
I thought this week about those moving walkways you find in airports. You can stand still, yet be propelled down the hallway, moving while not moving at all. Time is that moving walkway, carrying us along regardless of our willingness. Even if I stay inside all day and cuddle with my children by the fireplace (and turn off all electronics!), time races along, carrying us into a new moment, into a new day. Whether we’re ready or not. (Ready or not, here I come!)
I remember when I was a teenager, feeling like I was stuck in a vast whirlpool, never actually moving forward, just swirling around and around in the angst that is adolescence. And yet, though I thought I was circling, I was moving forward, propelled (in slow motion) toward adulthood. No experience, devastation, delirium or delight was eternal. Time inches us forward, so slowly sometimes that we can’t tell we’re in motion, so quickly at other times that we get carsick.
This morning at church, a 4-year old boy nodded to my daughter and said to me, “Where is her other mother?” I said, “I’m the only mother she’s ever had. She just has one mother.” He asked me because last summer, his mother killed herself. He has another mother now.
And yesterday, I went to a memorial service for a 23-year old man who ended his life.
Words fail me when I try to make sense of this sort of hopelessness and decisiveness. I understand sorrow. I understand loss. I understand the terror of feeling that life will never change, that things will never improve, that the clouds will never lift.
But I also know that with dawn comes hope. Time itself brings a change–if not a change of circumstance, at least a change of scenery and perhaps a change of perspective. Time, linear, sequential, inevitable. Time, our friend, our enemy, rushing us along, even when we feel like we’re slogging in slow-motion through quicksand.
No more time for those with broken hearts who break the clock, stop the hands from tick-tocking. Farewell, strangers I never knew. All the same, I feel the empty space where you should be and hear the silence you left behind.
Actual Unretouched Photo 
A permanent solution to a temporary problem. 😦
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It’s a little weird how different it feels when an old woman like Carolyn Heilbrun decides to take her life (though it was sad nonetheless) than when somebody so young makes the same decision. I’m always torn between the feeling that everybody should have the right to make decisions like those and the feeling that suicide somehow is the ultimate sin.
BTW I’m not sure P.D. James is right. I can’t recall anybody commiting suicide either and I’m way younger than her. And there were times where all one had to do was join the army…
Fortunately I don’t know how it feels to be without hope.
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In a 12 month time frame I lost 2 co-workers and a friend to suicide. The co-workers one hung himself (HIV) the other blew out his brains in his pick up at the beach (a couple of kids found him next morning) The friend, shot herself in the heart (she was a nurse) In 2003 I had a nephew shoot himself with a 12 guage shotgun, his mother found him in the woods.
We can never know what is going on in their minds, for each one was in a different place in life, 25 to 55. It is very hard on the families-what could they have done any different-what could I have done?
We each pray (I’m sure) that is wasnt’ some thing I say, I did or didn’t say or didn’t do.
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Mel, this one made me cry. I had to leave my desk at work and go to the bathroom.
My cousin, my close friend and confidant, killed himself when he was 23 and I was 22. My daughter was born in December, 1995. He came to see us at the hospital, at home. He brought her a bear and me flowers. He loved to laugh and always made everyone else laugh. He was beautiful and young and yet, he harbored a deep sadness and self-hate that none of us understood or could reach. I tried, I spent many hours riding around in the car, talking with him. Having him over, making him dinner, setting him up with my best friend. They got very close, and then he pulled away. She too felt his loss, we still talk about it now. I think about Brian often, and I think about my aunt, who lost her youngest child. It always makes me tearful, especially now that I have been a mother for 11 years and can only imagine the pain she feel each day when she wakes up and realizes he is still gone.
Another story of suicide that marks my family…my husband’s father suffered from depression years ago, before I knew them. He tried to kill himself but my mother-in-law found him and they saved him. He had a stroke as a result of his suicide attempt with drugs and has never been fully functional since. Today he lives in an assisted living home, after my mother-in-law decided he could no longer live at home with her. She works and he was home along during the day. The time came when she felt he needed someone around all the time. He is still alive, although not much really. My husband visits him out of obligation, he says his father died a long time ago. His whole family dwells in this weird state of limbo, with Tony still alive, a constant reminder that they couldn’t help him or save him. They all blame themselves, secretly of course, and none of theme very talk about it. Except for me of course, I can get my husband to talk about it sometimes. And he always cries. It is so sad.
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So why is there so much depression around now? Was it always there? I don’t really think so. Do you think perhaps it is the expectation of the perfect life that seems to be what so many people think everyone has a right to? This is really making me think Mel. I work with kids who think it is their right to be happy, have everything their own way,live the life they see on TV, and their expectation levels astound me, especially as they do not expect to do anything to achieve this. Like work. It is just going to happen.I can see what lies ahead, and it breaks my heart at times.
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Not long after we were married we had a friend of Dear Hubby’s over for dinner. He seemed fine. A short time later we heard he’d blown his head off with a shotgun. Came from a good family, seemed to have everything going for him. It just goes to prove none of us know the true heart of another. He was 21.
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wow, sad, thought provoking. your words are so eloquent.
(it’s me, new site again! sorry!)
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I hate the way people say “blown his head off with a shotgun”. Every time I read that I cringe.
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There is nothing worse than the siege of hopelessness. It is worse than disease, poverty, grief or the most profound trauma.
I have been in the grip of this monster–over big things and embarrassingly silly things. And I am still here, by the grace of God. All it takes is one impulsive act in a moment of despair to utterly destroy yourself and everyone in your orbit. Life is amazingly fragile–even more so when we don’t see the possibility of relief.
God delights in changing our circumstances, healing our hearts, opening our eyes and injecting intense rays of hope- even when life is most dark. We aren’t built to navigate this life without Him.
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