(I was going to write this as a response to another blog, but knew it would end up being too lengthly to be a comment.)
If you’ve tried to kill yourself, or wanted to, or felt helpless enough like you might, you have the capacity to know what this feels like…
Knowing what might be your last breaths escaping your lips, your veins bumping with blood that will slow to a stop and end their hot journey through your body until they run cold, until they no longer run at all, until they become stagnant. Thinking not of when your body is lifeless, but what happens to what and who you are after the thing that carries you—the flesh, the organs, the brains, the cells, the physical means that make up the pieces of yourself—when it is gone, what happens to the rest of you? The spirit, the soul, the person. And the pain inside—Will it really die with you? Will it really go away?
My last words before I tried to kill myself were—“God forgive me and please take me.” But surviving a moment like that… waking up and only remembering that… when you wake up and no one is there for you this may seem like true death—does this sound like the most depressing blog ever? Keep reading it’s not.
It took months later to understand what that moment meant, what it was for. When you have a chance to die by choice, and a chance to die by chance, all the variables change. Now, I wasn’t given the chance, I was given the choice. My sister was thrust with the chance. Her life was taken away. Only a few weeks ago did I realize that, the cliché that life is a gift is true. If you’ve witnessed people up close and personal who by so many material and mental means have nothing to live for and yet do it so brilliantly, it makes you wonder. It makes you want to find out why. It makes you want to keep searching. It makes you feel alive. This life is a vapor, mist, like the morning dew. It lasts for a moment and is gone. It’s okay not to know, to feel, to heal, to get angry, to be happy, to be sad, to be analytical, or artistic. The point is to be. To live. There’s only one of you in the whole world. And just like George Bailey, the universe wouldn’t be the same without you. Who knows, what life that you’ve touched that would be forever altered without you in it.
Richard Milous Nixon, 37th President of the United States quoted one of my favorites with:
“Only if you have been in the deepest valley can you know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.”
If he can see it this way, even though he made mistakes. Give yourself, just as I give myself, a few more chances. Or should I say, a few more choices. We only get so many.
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