Trigger warning: suicide, self-harm
***First off, I want anybody reading this to know that I am not at risk of harming myself, but rather this is a long-overdue session of reflection, therapy and healing. Writing this, even before I’ve finished saying what I have to say, has lifted a great weight from my shoulders that, until recently, I hadn’t been willing to admit I carried. Thank you in advance for your concern and understanding. This is not a scientific post, and what I say should not be considered compete or applicable to all situations, but simply my own observations and experiences made manifest in a stream-of-consciousness journal entry.***
Last night, I returned home from watching Japanese band One OK Rock perform in Denver, surrounded by more than a dozen of my friends, all of us singing what words we knew. By all accounts, it should have been an enjoyable, fun time, and yet when I got home, changed, and lie in bed, I started to cry. In fact, the tears continued to flow freely right up until I finally fell asleep.
One OK Rock was supposed to be touring with Linkin Park, one of their special guests on a tour of their own, when Linkin Park’s lead singer Chester Bennington committed suicide. At the show last night, One OK Rock played a quiet and deeply emotional cover of Linkin Park’s “One More Light” as a tribute to the band who inspired them, who befriended them, and who now was left broken by suicide, like so many acts before them. By the time the last note cleared the air, it was obvious that myself, along with so many others, were brought to tears by the incredibly heartfelt performance.
I was brought back to June 8, 2014. It’s a day I’ve revisited so many times this year, and so when I got home last night and re-watched recorded performances of One OK Rock giving this tribute to their good friend, it’s no wonder I cried myself to sleep. June 8, 2014 is the day I received a terrible phone call, that my friend and former colleague Erik had died. It didn’t take long before it was known that he had taken his own life. And like so many others touched by suicide, I couldn’t outrun the dreaded questions, like “what could I have done?” and “why wasn’t I there?” I didn’t feel as though I had any right to even try.
Every time I hear about someone committing suicide, whether it’s on the news or it’s from someone I know, I’m immediately taken back to that day.
Last year, I met a man at the airport waiting, like myself, to board a flight to Orlando. He had recognized my last name on the standby list and had worked with my dad and, it would turn out, would soon be working with my mom. We chatted for a while, friendly and cordial as one might expect when meeting a parent’s co-worker. I texted my dad that I had met him, and proceeded to think nothing of it for months. Then, barely more than a month ago now, my mom told me that he had committed suicide. She had seen him that day, thought he looked “not-himself” and decided to try and engage him in friendly conversation about how she had heard that he had met me at the airport, and that the conversation, superficial though it was, had seemed to cheer him up a bit. She later heard that he had asked to go home because he wasn’t feeling well and his supervisor (quite against union rules, btw) told him to “not bother coming back.” So he didn’t.
A couple of months before that, my brother and his girlfriend told me of a mutual coworker they had had at my brother’s old job (where the two of them met) who had just killed himself as well. My dad, too, let slip a story about someone he knew who had committed suicide, years before, though he had just been hanging out with him that day. But suicide had touched our family long before that. My grandma’s neighbor’s kid used to babysit my cousin and I when we were very young and he was in high school. I don’t remember his name or his face, but I know that he took his own life, too.
Whenever my dad hears of a suicide, he shuts down like a mall shop closing for the day. He talks about how he can’t understand what could be so wrong that the only way out is death. He says he’s never been depressed, nor felt any desire to take his own life. People like my dad are denial about the power of depression and, frankly, unsympathetic to the way it sickens your mind and your soul the same way a cold sickens the body. And it drives me insane. Because I almost succumbed once, too.
And now every time I hear about a suicide, be it a celebrity, some kid with a really messed up girlfriend, or someone’s co-worker, it’s like a fresh knife straight to the heart. And when I heard the words, written by Linkin Park themselves and covered by One OK Rock, dripping in emotion at the loss of a friend, Erik died again.
Should've stayed, were there signs I ignored? Can I help you, not to hurt anymore? We saw brilliance, when the world was asleep There are things that we can have but can't keep
Studies show that once someone has been touched by suicide, the risk of them taking their own life goes up as well. It’s contagious, because it is, in fact, a disease. The desire to end one’s own life goes against human evolution, against self-preservation and is a wholly unnatural thing to do. It’s a fatal symptom of a disease, one that can be caught, can be spread and, like a disease, can also be cured. To the depressed one, the answer is quarantine. It’s a logical thing to think, given that it’s the first line of defense against other contagious pathogens. However, the problem with depression is that quarantine is impossible, because you’ve already touched hearts and a heart touched can never be untouched.
It’s for this reason that, after I heard that Utada Hikaru’s mother had committed suicide that I became worried for Utada herself. When a long period of time passed and she remained as invisible as any celebrity has ever had the luxury of being, the worry increased. Granted, I don’t know what she was doing to heal, but I know how isolation creates echoes that only increase in volume the longer they are allowed to sound. It appeared she found therapy of her own, her newest album, in my mind, laced throughout with what I felt were references and tributes to her mother. Chester Bennington was not so lucky, and he followed a dear friend in self-actualized death.
It’s a lonely, it’s a lonely, it’s a lonely road
But I’m not alone, not alone, not alone, not alone
So what is the cure? What is the treatment? I don’t know. I’m like a survivor of some vicious plague trying to explain how he managed to live while others didn’t. I don’t know the antidote to the poison. But I know what helps. And what hurts.
Kindness, empathy and willingness to simply be there – to listen, without judgment or unsolicited advice – are things that help. A smile, a hug, a reminder that somebody cares, that you matter to someone, and that someone would miss you dearly if you were gone. The ties to this life become easier to cut the more detached you feel from that feeling of importance (and make no mistake, you are important). Show someone you care about that you give a damn.
Cold, callous and otherwise demeaning words, often thrown about flippantly and without any weight whatsoever to the speaker, are often the most powerful agents of depression. It’s often actually the casual nature of these words that makes them so powerful, because it is a reminder that maybe you don’t matter, that you’re not important, that the world would keep moving on even without you there. “Don’t bother coming back.” “These songs are boring and the band is selling out.” “Good riddance.” When someone is vulnerable, off-balance, it doesn’t take much to tip them over the edge. Mind your words, because they are often heavier and more burdening than the speaker can ever know.
It’s this latter point that I couldn’t get over when reading the story about the girl who, over phone calls and texts messages, literally drove a boy to suicide. When he stepped out of his carbon monoxide-filled truck, ready to live, wanting a second chance, she told him to get back in. She drove home the message that nobody cared and as good as stuck a knife in his back. It made me sick to even think about it.
For those of us left behind, there is a long period of soul-searching that I believe will likely never end, though with time and healing, it can get better. We can learn from what has happened, and emerge a better person for it. We can learn compassion and empathy, and the ability to see depression for what it is: a sickness, a disease, and not weakness or failure of character. We can better learn the signs, and, with luck and preparation, put ourselves in a position to ease the pain. Often the most dangerous moment is not when a person is at their deepest, but when they appear to be emerging from the darkest depths. Healing is a form of vulnerability, and it is in that state that those emerging from depression and those touched by the suicide of a loved one need us the most. We must remember that healing is a process and not a achievement, and thusly care need too be a continual offering, and not a momentary gesture. It isn’t enough to extend a hand to stop the fall, one must commit to helping them up to safety again, lest they lose their footing and fall again. A halfway effort can possibly be more dangerous than none at all.
In the end, though, we must be willing to accept the fact that not everybody can be saved, that not everybody wishes to be saved, and that not everybody is crying out for help. We must be willing to forgive ourselves if our best efforts are not enough, otherwise we risk falling prey to the same cycle that claimed Chester Bennington. In the end, we must take care of ourselves, be in a healthy place ourselves, before we can realistically expect to be able to save another, or else we risk catching and passing on the disease ourselves. After all, a sick doctor can be worse than no doctor at all.
It is imperative, too, that we not forget those we have lost in an attempt to move on. We must honor what they brought to our lives, the love we felt for them and they for us, otherwise we have proven their worst fears to be true. If, as Bruce Lee claims, the key to immortality is to live a life worth remembering, then I (and many others) am a testament that Erik mattered, and always will. In that sense, Erik is still with me; he never died.
Who cares if one more light goes out? Well I do
