A couple of weeks ago one of the students at my school committed suicide by jumping out of his 17 floor window of his dorm room. His death brought up a lot of mixed emotions in me and the whole campus was talking about the jumper.
I’ve been there before, on the edge, one deep breath away from complete nothingness. Enough morphine pills to knock an elephant out and a couple of bottles of Heineken to wash it all down.
I understand and know that nothingness all to well. I think that’s a lot of the reason why I used to cut myself when I was younger.
I just felt overwhelmed with feelings- hate, anger, sadness, loneliness, shame, all of them boiled up inside me but at the same time I still felt nothing but when I cut myself I felt alive-real that this pain that I was feeling while I was cutting myself meant that I was still alive and able to feel something, anything.
It was the cold blade dragging across my skin, the sharp pain, the blood- my blood made it all the more real, made me feel real- alive when I felt so dead inside
I told my parents about it and the told me there is
never anything you can’t come home with But deep inside me I don’t believe it because shame and loneliness can be overwhelming emotions and there are some things worse than death
But then I started thinking back to Pat’s death senior year, and, how quickly things can change.
It was all over the news that Friday morning. A local high school student hit by a train and killed.
No name had been released yet so I walked into school hoping it was no one I knew. When I walked through the glass doors the first thing I saw was a huge piece of paper that had to be over 2 feet long with RIP Pat written in huge black letters and a colorful array of handwritten messages going in a million different directions all across it. My heart sank.
Everyone I knew was all gathered together in a room with a grief counselor sharing stories and tears but I don’t/can’t do public grieving my pain is enough to handle I can’t handle someone else pain.
I walked into my last period Spanish class ,sat down and there staring right in front of me was a picture of Pat. I lost it. I put my head down on the desk and the tears started flowing. They were uncontrollable, I had made it this far without crying in front of anyone and now as my teacher is going over verb conjugations, I lost it. Once I regained control of myself, I got up and left and went home.
His funeral is a blur in my mind. It was surreal experience I know I was there. But it feels more like a story someone else told me that is playing in my mind. Like I was in auto pilot and went through the motions but I wasn’t really there. But I was there. I saw the football in his casket and if I close my eyes I can still here the kinking of the metal rubbing together as he was lowered into the ground I can still smell the staleness of the cigar smoke by the man who lowered him in the ground.
I remember Pat’s mother sitting there as the seemingly endless parade of young faces, each a painful reminder of what she had just lost, came to pay their respects to her son. The only thing I could of think of as I looked at Pat was that fucked up saying
only the good die young, well, one look into the eyes of a mother who has to bury her child made me feel ashamed for every thought of suicide I had ever had.
to be continued....
