Out of the Darkness Walk

This Sun­day, the Birm­ing­ham chap­ter of the Amer­i­can Foun­da­tion for Sui­cide Pre­ven­tion (AFSP) is host­ing a walk in Heard­mont Park, on 119.  It starts at 3:00.  So far, there are 369 reg­is­tered par­tic­i­pants, but I’ve not even reg­is­tered yet.  I’m sure there will be more.

There are many pur­poses for this walk.  Some peo­ple will be walk­ing to raise aware­ness and hope­fully save lives.  Pro­ceeds are going to the AFSP to fund research, edu­ca­tion, and ser­vices for those in cri­sis and to sur­vivors.  There’s so lit­tle known about sui­cide.  Those who are the sick­est aren’t around to answer ques­tions  any­more.  Yeah, we know some con­fus­ing stuff about dopamine lev­els, and sero­tonin, and of course there is what lit­tle we under­stand about the men­tal ill­ness that is often asso­ci­ated with sui­cide.  But it’s a sick­ness that often hides itself until it is too late.  The only way to make things bet­ter is to shed light on the issue.  Thus, “out of the darkness.”

I’m sure there will be those there that want to show sup­port of sui­ci­dal loved ones and show they’re not alone.   And of course, there will be the group that I’m a part of, those strug­gling to make sense.  We’ll be doing what we can to honor the mem­ory of those who actu­ally com­pleted the act.  Later this month will be the Sur­vivors of Sui­cide Day, and pro­grams to go along with that.  Those will be things to help me.  This is about lit­tle lost Lau­ren.  I still see him as a kid.  It makes me so mad still.  I’m so strong. For a while there I wasn’t sure if I really was, but now I know.  I would have helped him if I could have, but he didn’t give me that.  I found out fairly recently that he threat­ened this reg­u­larly, but then he’d be embar­rassed and say he only said it to be manip­u­la­tive.  That sounds like shame to me.  He didn’t want to be seen as crazy, or weak.

The stigma of sui­cide is very strong.  Peo­ple don’t talk about it very much, not really.  Yeah, peo­ple say they want to shoot them­selves, or get irri­tated when some­one threat­ens it.  It’s an evoca­tive word, sui­cide.  Peo­ple use it to describe all lev­els of self-destructive behav­ior. But actu­ally talk­ing about the act, why it hap­pens, and the after­math, is rare.  Now I under­stand partly why, though at first I didn’t.  It’s so hard to make sense of and sur­vivors don’t want to inflict the bewil­der­ment on inno­cent bystanders.  It’s bad enough that we’re deal­ing with it.  We love our fam­ily, we don’t want to besmirch the mem­ory.  It’s uncom­fort­able to oth­ers, too.  It’s hard to wrap your head around, not want­ing to live. But the sur­vivors need to talk, to mourn, to grieve openly.  We need ways to honor our lost ones, espe­cially because they didn’t honor themselves.

There’s so lit­tle I can do for him now.  But I’ll be there.