I wrote this letter in 2004 to the members of Survivors of Suicide (S.O.S.), a support group that my friends Sharon Haydon and Marilyn Busse were facilitating. It still has relevance, so I've decided to share it with you on this blog. It's long, but I hope you'll find something in it that will help you in your life.
Dear S.O.S. group members,
As a manic-depressive with a background of incest and drug and alcohol abuse, who has spent nearly four decades trying to commit suicide, I, too, am a survivor of suicide: my own.
Your loving facilitators, Sharon and Marilyn, have shared their personal stories in the Write Your Life group that I facilitate, and when they heard my stories, they suggested that I write to you on this subject from my perspective. This is one of the few times that I’ve ever tried to write to a group of readers that I don’t know personally.
Having never attended an S.O.S. meeting, I’m not certain what your issues are, and I worry that what I’m going to write on these pages might come across calloused, preachy, strident, or condescending. In fact, this information may not be anything new to you. Still, it’s my hope that something in these words will comfort you and help you along your road to peace of mind and healing. I want to begin by expressing my condolences for the loss of your loved ones through suicide and my respect for what you choose to understand and believe as you walk through your grieving process.
Perhaps it would help you to know something about my own inner experience of suicide ideation and attempts. Suicide thinking became a way of life for me in my childhood. I can remember getting very angry with my family members and fantasizing that if I could just die, they would be very sad and guilty for their behavior towards me.
I was 22 and newly married when I first started thinking of actually killing myself, rather than wait for some natural event. My emotionally abusive husband became the target for the bitter rage I already held for men. My reactions to him were guilt-producing and felt out of my control, and the first time they combined into a nearly-deadly combination, I lay on the floor in front of a gas heater all night while he slept, ready any minute to blow out the flames and breathe myself out of existence.
From then on, the cycle would begin with a mood swing into depression, causing me to be ultra-sensitive and unable to cope with others’ behavior; then anger towards someone else; then anger with myself; and the final Big Voice booming the death sentence in my head, “You’re a BAD PERSON. You have to DIE.” And I tried, covertly by living recklessly and refusing to eat and starving myself; overtly by taking combinations of sleeping pills and straight vodka, or just pills.
I can’t count how many nights I’ve gone to sleep, hoping I wouldn’t have to see another day. I believed I had a huge black rotten place inside myself. Many times, my mental pain has been so unbearable I thought a leg amputation without anesthesia would feel better. Each time I started planning to commit suicide, the closer I got to carrying through with it, the more determined I was to hide all signs of having problems for fear someone would try to stop me. My suicide notes were always the same: “This isn’t anyone’s fault. I know how much all of you love me, and I’m grateful for that. If you knew the pain I’m in, you
wouldn’t wish me to go on living. Please be happy for me, knowing that I’m finally at peace.”
I’ve been seeing psychiatrists and therapists since I was 24. At the age of 43, I was finally hospitalized, diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and given medication which calmed me, but didn’t stop my mood swings or improve my ability to cope with my life. Over 16 years, I’ve been on every medication there is to treat bipolar mania, depression and anxiety. Three years ago, I was able to get on Social Security Disability, which took away some of the stress in my life. I’ve been off all medication for almost 2 years, and with my stress at a manageable level, and in a church environment of love, I seem to be doing just as well, if not a little better than I did on medication.
Through my long years of mental turbulence, here are some things I’ve come to understand:
1. No one can take away my mental and emotional pain, and I can’t take away anyone else’s. And it isn’t my job. I have Rev. Sue Bailey to thank for this profound insight. A few days after putting my mother into a nursing home, I called Rev. Sue for help. I tearfully told her that my mother was angry and demanding to go home. Almost before I could finish the sentence, Sue, who is also a well-trained hospital chaplain, said in a stern voice, “You can’t take away her pain.”
In that moment, I remembered an episode from my past. I saw my mother standing in her driveway a few days before my birthday, begging me to spend part of my birthday with her, and I heard myself shouting back, “I’m not celebrating my birthday at all! I HATE you for bringing me into this world. I don’t want to be here.”
The look of anguish on her face is an image I still see every day. My mother could never take away my pain then. I could never take away hers. From the beginning, each of us has been on our own life journey.
And now I ask you: Has anyone, except you, ever been able to take away your emotional pain? Reverse the direction of your grief, heartache, chemical imbalance, or low blood sugar? Has anyone, except you, ever been able to change your thinking? Has anyone else ever been able to force you to let go of the attachments you hold on to that cause you pain—attachments like: expectations of others’ behavior, attitudes, opinions, and beliefs; expectations of the outcome of situations that involve other people? So if no one has ever been able to take away our pain, how did we ever come to believe that we’re able to take away anyone else’s pain?
2. I’m a militant believer in everyone’s fundamental right to choose, even down to deciding when, where, and how we die, even if it appears to everyone else that the decision was based on faulty thinking, which we all have, in each other’s estimation. It isn’t up to us to judge someone else’s personal choices.
As a keyboard player/vocalist, I performed for several years at the lounge at Barefoot Bay, a senior retirement community. Fred, a man in his 60’s, who had been an accomplished big band trumpet player, often sat in with me. We didn’t talk much, just played music together, and I loved him for never getting bossy or uppity with me, the way other male musicians had in the past.
Fred’s wife spent a lot of her days and nights in that lounge, down at the other end of the bar drinking by herself. I knew she was depressed and the cancerous tumor in her throat was making swallowing difficult. One evening, when I came in to work, the regulars rushed over to tell me that Fred’s wife had committed suicide that morning. She had sent him out to buy a six-pack of beer for her, and when he returned, he found her dead in the shower stall. She’d shot herself in the head.
Being a veteran of the suicide wars, I decided to write a note to Fred from my perspective, even though I didn’t know him very well. I wrote about my sadness at his loss, and then went on to tell him of my belief that everyone has an inalienable right to choose how they live and when they die. I told him that she was in mental and physical pain, and he couldn’t have changed her determination to die, nor could he have read her mind to learn the appointed time to have prevented her from the act.
Our friendship lasted twenty more years, and Fred often thanked me for that note. He said it was the only one he received that actually comforted him, brought him back to reality, and restored his peace of mind.
3. Committing suicide doesn’t condemn a loved one to hell. If you’re secretly assuming that your loved one went to an undesirable place after death, remind yourself that this is only a belief, not a fact. What happens to us when we die is a true mystery.
In the Bible, it says that God knows the secret heart of each of us. I choose to believe in a loving God that knows the secrets of my heart, knows my pain and remorse, and forgives me, over and over and over, beyond the end of time. That’s what Jesus teaches his disciples about the heavenly father’s forgiveness. And I choose to believe that that same God lovingly welcomes its children home, regardless of how they get there. Remember, I can choose what I believe, because the facts aren’t known.
4. As children, we believe that we are all-powerful, that everything that happens to us or anyone else is our fault. In our adult understanding, we know this isn’t true. My parent’s divorce was not my fault, even if their fights were about how to raise me. I couldn’t have prevented or stopped those fights unless I could have magically transformed myself into another sort of child with another temperament. They could have restored harmony in the home if they had learned parenting skills and changed their thinking.
Mental illness is prevalent in our society, which means there are many people walking around with a chemical imbalance and mental illness, diagnosed or undiagnosed, who are unable to process and resolve on the basis of reality, the normal, everyday events in their lives. Recent new statistics show that one out of five people in the United States is bipolar (manic-depressive), and of those, 60% are undiagnosed. The suicide rate for diagnosed bipolars is 20%.
It’s important to realize that our actions and behavior are based on our thinking, and that thinking can change from one minute to the next. And just because we get angry with someone doesn’t mean we’re going to kill ourselves. That action comes from our own thinking and processing. No one deserves to live every day in the fear that a word or action will cause someone else to kill himself or herself.
If you have any lurking thoughts that you were powerful enough to have caused someone else to become angry or hurt and to kill himself or herself, or that you should have been able to read someone else’s mind, to have known how serious their intentions were, or that you could have physically prevented them from ending their lives, you’re still thinking in the all-powerful, all-knowing, self-centered fantasy kingdom of a child. Yes, maybe you could have interceded in a moment, but you can’t spend every waking minute with every person in your life—especially when you realize that one out of every five people you know is likely to be bipolar!
We all spend our lives in the grieving process. We grieve when we lose material belongings, and we grieve when we lose the love of someone we love—when we or they move away to another community, or when we suffer neglect and abuse, divorce, our partner’s alcohol or drug abuse, and, of course, when a loved one dies.
This reality of loss and grieving can be stated simply: life is a continuous, painful process of letting go of our attachments to old concepts, beliefs, and expectations, so that we can experience the pleasures and blessings of life.
Although it sounds simple, letting go of our attachments and moving into an adult reality isn’t easy, but let go, we must, if we want to taste, smell, hear, and touch the sweetness of life, and to feel the love that others so much want to give us.
The sadness we feel when we remember our loved ones will always be there, but it becomes a longing more pure and uncomplicated than when it was mixed with self-recrimination, shame, and blame. Our past becomes our teacher, making us more sensitive to others and more careful and loving in our actions, and more willing to look at all events as they unfold in an adult understanding of reality and a respect for each person’s fundamental right to choose.
As you walk the sacred journey of your own life, love and blessings,
Renelle West
August 2004
