We’re going to spend today in Tuscaloosa for the Out of the Darkness Walk. My brother’s birthday is today, so I decided to do this one instead of Birmingham. The Out of the Darkness Walk is for those of us whose lives have been affected by suicide — those who have died, the survivors, and even those who are plagued by thoughts of suicide. People walk for many different reasons.

We’re walking for more than just my brother, of course. C’s aunt intentionally overdosed last year. We’ve lost far too many family members to suicide. It’s horrible and uncomfortable, but I have to talk about it every once in a while. It’s important. Close friends have had their families ripped apart by this illness. In part, it’s because suicide looks intentional. We’re programmed for survival, so the mind that can not only conceive of self-destruction, but actually act upon it, is a diseased mind.

My perspective on life has violently shifted since 2009. I am much more serious. I no longer can laugh when people say they’re so frustrated they want to kill themselves. I notice with true horror Halloween decorations of people hanging from nooses. For about a year, I had actual PTSD symptoms. There were times I couldn’t drive because of mental images. I still don’t like to dream. In the months following my brother’s death, C probably lost his job due to the aftermath of dealing with the loss and a wife who was absolutely shattered by grief.

My brother would have been 31 today. We should have talked on the phone about 4 times in the last month. He should be laughing at all of the Auburn fans and cheering for Bama. But he’s not, and I get sick watching football.

I’ve lost more than a brother. My relationship with my family has been wrecked. With my brother’s ghost haunting every function, I feel a weight on my chest every time I face anyone who knew him. He haunts us. I try to think of the right thing to say and simply find myself counting the seconds til it is over. Church is also very hard, and as a result we’re currently unchurched. We’re much more aware of the importance of love and grace, and hyperaware of how absent it is.

But all is not lost. I have learned so much. I have learned who my true friends are, and how to be a true friend. I have learned compassion and begun on a journey that might actually save my children from this anomaly. It’s strong on both sides of our family, and that’s scary. It is especially scary, since no one will talk about it. That silence perpetuates the cycle, because people do not know how to reach out when they feel this way. Even if they do, we don’t know how to prevent, cope, or deal with suicidal ideation.

Coming out of my own personal darkness has been a hard struggle. Because of him, and losing him, I love harder than I ever did before.I am more mindful. I notice the beauty and preciousness of all life. I have realized that life is too short to waste on things I despise, and when it became clear that my “career” at a dead end job was a waste of time, I was able to walk away easily without looking backward.

A few thoughts to leave you with:

• Think before you joke about killing yourself.
• Remember me, and other survivors. Treat us kindly. We don’t get to grieve the way other people do, because suicide is stigmatized in our culture. If we are excited to actually talk about things, understand it is because we often feel we can’t.
• If you’re about to start antidepressants, please get someone to watch over you and check in often. Don’t go it alone. Read those warnings and be truly advised. Suicide being a side effect is not theoretical.
• Don’t be afraid to talk about suicide. It’s no more shameful than losing someone to heart disease. Lives can be saved when we don’t stigmatize mental illness.
• Most personally, remember my brother today, if you knew him. If you want to write a note here in remembrance, that would rock my world.

The outpouring of love and support I’ve gotten this week has been incredible, and buoyed me up when I felt I was foundering. I’m very grateful.

I read The Bell Jar today.  Started it last night, really.  I enjoyed it, very much in the same way I enjoyed The Catcher in the Rye, though I think today’s book was more pertinent to me.  No real revelations, though.  I can seriously empathize with mentally ill people, and there are times when I wonder if that just means I’m sick, too.  So many conversations that I had with Lauren the week before he died, and me saying, “Me, too, I totally understand that!” and now I worry that there’s some hidden monster in me waiting to kill me.  Especially on days when I just don’t want to get out of bed, when life just seems a dreaded chore, I worry. What would I do if something overcame me?  Am I wired the same way?

Obviously, mental illness is on my mind, and the holidays, and so many other things.  The parts of The Bell Jar I sympathized the most with, though, were the feminist portions, and the life decisions parts.  Feeling paralyzed that one decision excludes all others is a very familiar conundrum to me.  Right now I’ve got to choose something for survival that might throw me off a track that I was enthusiastic about, that I thought my whole passion was behind.  Was it really?  Was it driven out so easily because it wasn’t my passion, or am I just going through what all the books really say?  Why don’t I believe that the books and the psychology apply to me?  What is the right decision to make for my family?  (What about the right decision for me?  And why do I think to add that when I’m reviewing the blog post 10 minutes after I originally published it?)

Tomorrow it’ll be different, after the kids get up and get out of bed I’ll concentrate on them, and doing the laundry, and all the other steps that need doing.  But now is the time I’m thinking and whirling in my mind and all I catch are shadows of what would have been if I weren’t such a dumbass and could figure it all out.  And I don’t know what to do and I’m sick of not knowing what to do and I’m tired of walking into the other room to discreetly cry a few tears and then pull my hair down to hide my face behind.

So maybe the book did do me some good, and was cathartic, since I’m a wreck right now.  I’m just going to revel in being free and having finished what I started.

So I couldn’t find it in me to smile or put on a brave face. It’s awkward and bizarre walking to benefit the prevention of something I knew next to nothing about just a few months ago. I suppose I should feel a kinship with all these people.  Instead, I found myself feeling alone.  I have felt very much alone in the last few months.  I try to reach out, and people will meet me halfway, but I feel my trust in nearly everyone is so damaged.  I mean really, who is going to burn me next? Working past that feeling is a real struggle.

To make matters worse, an acquaintance on FaceBook is telling the world how he doesn’t want to go on living.  At the same time, he claims not to be suicidal, but he sounds so familiar.  I’m not sure if he’s being melodramatic and trying to get attention, or he really needs help.   My brother was very melodramatic.  Suicide seems melodramatic to me, still.  Of course I have to reach out to the friend, and I am trying.  And naturally, he won’t even respond to my appeal.  I just want to talk to him, to tell him… something.  I guess I’ll try to write him a simple message and hope he understands I really do care.

It was an emotional day, and I’m tired and drained by it all.   I am glad I went, though.

Becky is a small business owner — she refurbishes furniture and sells knick knacks and candles and other bits of charming sunny home decor .  Business fell off with the recession, and her son’s death didn’t help things.  She thought she would have to close the store, but, friends helped her out with a move to a new location in Homewood. She was making a fresh start.  Though it is so very hard to move on, her outlook was improving.  But this Saturday, she got robbed at her new location. Ironically, it’s one of those places that you’d actually feel very safe visiting.  I suppose that was the idea, a nice low profile little boutique on a shaded street.  No one would expect it.

I’ve visited her since then, and other business owners on the street have been introducing themselves and offering to help her watch.  Still, she’s been manning the store all alone, and is frightened and simply overwhelmed.  Every time she seems to be doing better, she gets kicked off her feet again, she says.

So, if anyone is in the mood to do something just plain nice and helpful, maybe you could stop by Minerva’s in Homewood this month. It’s on Linden Avenue, which is just a right turn off of Oxmoor.  Even if you don’t buy anything, every moment a legitimate customer is in the store, it eases her mind.  And if you do find something cute, hey, all the better.

After the last  post, I did go to the Survivors of Suicide group meeting.  All I knew is that would be hard and it would help.  It was very informal, and basically everyone in the group just took a turn updating on themselves.  The date was exactly a month after my brother died, and so painful.  My grief was the freshest, and I was the youngest person there. Everyone in the room had been in my same state just months or years earlier.  They all understood exactly what I was going through, and there was no awkwardness or expectations on me.  The outpouring of love in the room was heartbreaking.  If only these men had tapped into the strength and love in the room.

My brother told me, not a week before he died, that I was his best friend.  My heart just filled with love; I believed so firmly that was a sign that we were rebuilding that old trust again. Sadly, this is the second time I’ve had to make my peace with never speaking to him again, without so much as a good-bye from him before he deserted everyone.  So in some ways, I’ve already done this once. But the sword has two edges, because I feel like he’d still be around if I had only done something, been better to him, not thought, Oh great, more drama! while I tried to help him through his newest issues.  In fact, I’ve finally realized why I tend to blame myself for whatever happens around me.  I take control over the situation by taking the blame on myself.  If I did something wrong, I can do something to undo the situation, or at the very least, mitigate it somehow. As I’ve been reading more and more, I’m realizing that I wasn’t in the position to change his mind, even had I known it.

Blaming myself isn’t going to give me any control over this situation.  But that hasn’t stopped me from trying.  Oh, my brain knows better, but my heart has been too devastated to listen to reason.  I couldn’t have fixed it, and I’m also finally realizing I can’t will him back to life.  Seriously, this was a major theme of my thoughts. I’d go to bed, try to will time backward and the last two months into a horrible dream, and spend all my dreams trying to rewrite it.  I’ve finally moved past that bit of irrationality.

And generally, I’m having more and more good days. Every two weeks, I have a time set aside to just deal with this at the group meeting, and that helps.  While I ache that my brother can’t be here for it, life is sweet again.  My thoughts return again and again with a need to understand and make sense of it all, but it’s not the dominant thought anymore.  When the kids are playing with me, I’m not sad that they look like he did as a child, or trying to figure out how to keep them from some tragic decision 20 years hence.  I’m beginning to see more to life than death again.

“Put first things first” is pretty self-explanatory.  Do what’s important, and don’t allow that to get pushed down your priority list.  To illustrate how people should prioritize, there’s a nifty grid with four quadrants.  Activities are categorized in terms of importance and urgency.  Quadrant 1 is Urgent and Important. Crisis falls squarely in this category, but so do deadlines or other normal busybusy times.   Important but Not Urgent lies in Quad 2.  Health, relationships, mental well-being all fall under this category.  Quadrant 3 is the realm of the Unimportant, but Urgent.  Things that scream to be done now, but really aren’t all that important, take up a lot of time.  And of course, Quadrant 4 is those things that fall under the headings Unimportant and Not Urgent.  Frivolity, time wasters, et cetera fall into this category.

Alright, now that I’m done with all that Irritating Uppercasing, I should personalize it instead of simply summarizing the chapter.

My June and early July were nearly constantly in Quadrant 1. It was horrible, but obviously, that was situational.  Churning and burning and doing what needs to get done now under pressure has its joys, in the right situation.  Still, it’s an exhausting place to stay for long periods of time.  The prevention for that is to spend more time in Quadrant 2. Sometimes mental or physical health is neglected because it’s not urgent.  Usually it’s not a deathly situation when that Quadrant 2 issue moves to Quadrant 1, but as my past month has illustrated, it easily can become so.  Quadrants 3 and 4 are really often just wastes of time, so I’ll just say that taking the time to identify what is unimportant really is the biggest step. What is important to one person is frivolous to the next.  If an activity’s only accomplishment is that minutes have passed, then that time would have been better spent in doing something more important.

Please note, decompressing and recreation are important, by the way.  Some people wouldn’t count fun as important.  They’re making a terrible mistake.  It’s very easy to see when life is bleak just how laughter and joy make us whole people.

The most vital thing I take from this is learning to identify what is important, and to always remember that urgency is a separate issue.  Triaging time according to urgency ends up shortchanging many truly crucial issues.  Far too many people let their own personal situations slide while they take care of “what needs doing.”  I’m very guilty of that, myself.  I’ve been trying to remember that I’m never going to have time for my health, my career, or other personal goals if I keep waiting for some “me time” wrapped up in a pretty box with a bow.  Time is going to continue to move even if I don’t use it to exercise, tell people I love them, follow my dreams, or take care of myself.

In related news, I’m going to my first ever support group tomorrow, for Survivors of Suicide.  I’m pretty nervous, but also anxious to do something proactive for myself.  Wish me luck!