I used to feel at times suicidal. This happened a long time ago, when it really seemed as though my life was already over and there was no point in taking up space that could be better used by someone else. I was completely out of hope. I was through. As I was on a downward spiral towards mental illness and homelessness I really thought it was all over. I was forty-two. I had already threatened twice to kill myself during the first of what became my seven major breakdowns. I was unemployed and had no idea how to access the new and changing job market of the Nineties. There was no one around to show me. I did attend a couple of compulsory job club introductions when applying for social assistance, but the moral of the story was that I had to kiss ass big time, give up any semblance of having a life and allow any employer to walk all over me and not only fake enjoyment but to actually like, or should I say love, revel, and exult in being treated like a piece of shit by sadistic bosses for minimum wage at a job that would never guarantee me enough hours to live on or any form of security. I also had full blown and undiagnosed post traumatic stress disorder which made me basically unfit for the workplace. Still with me?
In short, my life was a train wreck and there was no sign that anything was ever going to get better. unable to pay my rent I became homeless and stayed part time with my father in Robert's Creek, a small coastal community that is a forty-five minute ferry ride from the Lower Mainland, the rest of the week couch surfing with various friends in Vancouver. My father began to mistreat me and that was when I came the very closest to ending it. Two days before Christmas one evening I was all set to walk into the cold ocean and drown myself. What stopped me? I could best call it divine intervention. I was just headed towards the beach when I felt this incredible force trying to stop me and I knew that if I resisted this force it would be to my peril. I believe that there was an angel present stopping me from doing it. I knew that by killing myself I would be violating one of the most cardinal laws of the universe.
I remember now when I was nineteen years old and living in Toronto. I got high on mescaline late one night and had an almost overwhelming desire to die by cutting my wrists. I did not want to die. I was a backslidden Christian who still believed in God and I was terrified of facing him in judgment given what a mess I was making of my life. I got onto Yonge Street at around five in the morning and began to hitch hike hoping that someone would pick me up and talk me out of harming myself. I lucked out very nicely. A kind stranger gave me a ride all the way past Richmond Hill and back and we talked about life, values, philosophy and related crap and he strongly warned me that suicide is the cardinal sin and that I must never even think of doing that. He also wanted to know where I got my mescaline! Two hours later he dropped me off in front of my apartment safe and unharmed and perhaps a little bit wiser and a little more grateful for the existence of good and kind people in the world.
Fast forward to September 1999. I was forty-three and living in a shared apartment with an eccentric Czech and his Slovakian roommate. I finally had a place to live, was on social assistance and sort of looking for employment though miraculously people were buying my paintings again though it wasn't a huge gain because whether I did anything or not my Czech roommate cum landlord reported to one of the financial aid workers at the local welfare office whenever he got word that I'd sold something and I would see the estimated value of the painting deducted from my next welfare check. The financial aid worker was Czech so there should not be too many dots to connect here. Needless to say I have never spoken to my former roommate since I moved fourteen years ago.
Back to my story. September 1999 one evening I was standing in line at a local café when I heard a young man in front of me say to his companion "Why should anyone care if I kill myself. It's my life anyway." Or something like that. I told him "If you were to do that then you would be depriving the world of what only you have to offer." Oh, the look on his face! I trust he is still alive.
I was also talking to myself, I suppose. Even though I still had next to nothing I knew that my life had been given a new start, a new beginning. It was as though I had returned from the dead. My life has since taken a decidedly different direction. I would not have imagined that I would be spending much of my later middle years, hopefully until and after my retirement, working as a peer support worker with people living with mental health issues. Or that I would have a decent apartment that I could afford. I can't say that I have achieved really a lot in tangibles. I don't have my own home, family, car, investments, or vacation condo in Mexico. I have since come to speak Spanish fluently and have amassed an impressive library of over five hundred books, more than one hundred in Spanish. I seem to be doing well as a painter even though I haven't sold anything in a while. I travel every year, usually to Mexico or Costa Rica or someplace where Spanish is spoken. I have also found a church community that feels like home for me and this is a first.
I like the person I have become and I enjoy life moment by moment. There are still rough spots, and there will always be rough patches. I embrace life as a gift and I try to offer it as a gift. I am glad and eternally grateful that the light I have been given has not been snuffed out, not even by me. Every day I wake up excited and wondering what is going to happen next. I hope I never lose this curiosity.
It is always painful when I am working with someone who is considering suicide. They are always incredibly sensitive and lovely people whom I know that we would be so much poorer without. It is hard and long work convincing them of this and even then it doesn't always work. So far (touch wood) I have not lost anyone with whom I work to suicide. I sometimes wonder if there was enough good and available support for those who are vulnerable to suicide if that alone would make that nasty statistic plummet. It is hard to say, but I think that when a lot of us are feeling so faced with our mortality, that we have exhausted all our options and there is nothing left, if it would help to know that this is also a time of rebirth and transformation. All we have to do is hold on and walk through that dark night, but too many of us walk through it alone. We need people in the world who are specially gifted to walk with the suicidal together through these dark nights, someone to be there, to encourage, to reinforce, to remind that this is not the end, that who you are, that what you have to offer is too beautiful and too precious to lose.
It is not our place to end life, not the life of another person and not our own lives either. My wish and prayer is that we can come to see our lives, and all lives as a precious irreplaceable gift, and to in turn offer up our lives as gifts to one another as we walk together through the darkness. Again we will find the light. I know this because I speak as one who has returned from the dead.
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