Robin William's suicide is all I'm seeing on Facebook. He touched many lives, my generation grew up watching him first on Happy Days, Mork and Mindy and then his big screen movies. I proudly wore a pair of Mork suspenders during the first grade. I liked his serious characters even more: Good Morning Vietnam, Good Will Hunting, Awakenings. I feel like I lost someone I knew, but I can't forget he intentionally took his own life.
I understand depression; I've lived with it most of my life. I've worked in social services / healthcare for over twenty years. I've known many struggling with addiction and mental illness and I've known people who have taken their own lives. People who commit suicide truly feel that the world is better off without them and their anguish is so strong that they can't see beyond the immediate situation. I get that. But I can't reconcile people ending their life when others are struggling to keep theirs. If it had been a heart attack or a car accident, that would be tragic. Suicide isn't tragic, it's just sad.
I especially don't understand people who have supportive family and friends, who have access to treatment, who have resources available to them. People who leave behind young children. Many of us in the Northwest followed the recent story of Jennifer Huston, the 38 year old mother of 2 young boys who disappeared without a trace only to be found to have committed suicide. How do you do that your children? This will forever taint and shape their lives.
It's especially sad when young people end their lives, but teenagers don't have the capacity to truly understand the long-term consequence of their actions. Suicide is also common in the elderly who may feel they have lost too much in their life (parents, spouses, friends, independence, physical mobility) for it to be worthwhile. But the group in between the two should be at their highest level of mental and physical health. Life is relatively short already, how do you end it sooner when there is so much to experience in life?
There's so much stuff I want to see and do in the world, I want more time not less. I think of all the people valiantly fighting cancer every step of the way. I remember a young preschool friend of Melody's who lost her mom to cancer at the age of 3. We attended her 5th birthday party and saw a letter her mom had written to her to be opened on her birthday. She lovingly prepared a letter for her children for every year up to age 18. Do you think she understands someone willingly leaving their family?
So, no. I won't be participating in tributes to people who take their own lives. We don't know what "led them down that dark path" and we don't know what kind of battles they were facing but ultimately it was a conscious choice. I'm saving my sympathy for the family. I'm saving my heartache for those who are murdered, or suffer accidental deaths or succumb to cancer.
