Take a breath;

A year ago Brent and I went to Disneyland to see the brief return of the Electric Light Parade. I had loved it when I was a little kid but Brent had never seen it. To me it's iconic Disney and I wanted to share the love with him. He's a good sport and wants to do things that make me happy so we went. It was a whirlwind trip. A day and a half in the parks just to see one parade. And to shop for sparkly Disney shirts. It was great.

When I'm on vacation my phone is tucked away in a pocket and brought out for a quick picture here and there. I'm not in touch with my friends like I am when I'm at home. I'm not aware of what is happening. I'm out of the loop. And sometimes that means I miss things.

When our plane landed in Portland I checked in "safely home" and started to read my Facebook feed. Then my messages. And the picture of what I had missed started to fill in. My friend's husband had died. I was still on the plane when it filtered through. When what I was seeing reached the understanding part of my brain. My hand went up to my mouth, my eyes filled with tears and the words that came out where, "the kids, oh my god, the kids are so young." Brent got concerned, then filled in. I just couldn't wrap my brain around it. He was so young. What had happened?

As more and more details started to come out I realized that he had lost his battle with depression. A few days later Jo made a post confirming that was the case. I hadn't even realized he was sick and suffering. Because that's the deal with depression, it gives you a few faces to look at. What I saw when I looked at Ian was a devoted family man. A supportive husband really picking up the slack that happens in a two parent household  when one goes back to school. A dad who glowed with his kids. A partner who loved his wife completely. Half of a couple who were surprised, for sure, by their tag-a-long-Charlie baby to go with their two older children, but overjoyed at her as well. This was the picture I saw. And it was completely accurate. He was all of those things. But he also was battling that bastard of a disease depression.

And depression lies. It tells you that all of those things aren't real. And that you don't deserve them even if they were. And so many other horrific things. It's your brain turning against you the way your body does with cancer. And sometimes, just like with cancer, you don't win the battle. And it's devastating.

My attitude about suicide has changed over the past decade. Before that my belief was strictly in the it's a selfish choice to make area. I will admit that. My grandfather killed himself. He was an alcoholic who would stage suicide attempts for attention and one time misjudged the timing. My sister's father-in-law at the time killed himself on the day of my wedding. He did it by drug overdose so it's still unclear if it was on purpose or accidental. Which then gave my brother-in-law the excuse to get coked up for the wedding and make his usual round of inappropriate suggestions. Not being a fan of him anyway, and being 18 my thoughts were more about my wedding than his loss. I will admit to that. It wasn't my finest moment. But again, I was 18 and he was an asshole of the highest order.

So my feelings around suicide were tied to drug and alcohol abuse. Which they often are because a lot of drug and alcohol abuse is tied to self medicating depression. Something I wasn't aware of when I was younger. Now that I am I had to revisit my feelings about suicide. Was it selfish or was it an act of desperation to make the pain stop?

I believe in death with dignity laws. I believe that if you are ill and not going to get better you should be able to end your own life by your own choice. Why didn't I feel this way about depression?

And, to be perfectly honest, I'm not 100% of the way there. I still hate when depression claims someone like this. Because I want it to be treatable. I want the battle to be winnable. And it so often is. I hate the giving up of hope that has to happen for someone to do this. To think the pain will not go away. Because depression lies. You can't trust what your brain is telling you. It's a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Except when you can't trust that it's temporary and it feels like it's forever. Depression is a dark hallway with no sign of an exit. Until you find one. And I always hold out the hope that everyone suffering will find the exit that leads to life, not an end.

Jo hates it when people tell her how strong she has been this past year. Because she knows she hasn't always felt strong. She's broken down. She's cried more tears than she probably ever thought she could make. She misses him like part of her is gone. Because part of her is gone. And I would guess that she also hates it when people tell her that she is strong because the implication is that he wasn't.

And he was.

So goddamn strong.

People who suffer from depression on a daily basis are heroic. Their brains are fighting them constantly. Their very existence is narrated by a voice either telling them how worthless they are or how they need to be careful because joy is temporary and the dark days are just waiting around the corner. While the rest of us are walking down the street they are slogging through quicksand. It's a challenge on a monthly, weekly, daily, hourly basis to just exist. When you cannot trust your own thoughts, what can you trust? And Ian lived with that. For years. He was a superman in the strength department, if you ask me.

This past year has been the worst of the firsts for Jo and her kids. The year we all suffer through when a loved one dies. The first holidays without them. The first anniversary of their death. And through it all she has reflected out at the world how much they loved each other. What they built together. The family that still holds him in their hearts when they no longer can hold him in their arms. She hates to be called strong, but she is. And the kids are. And inspiring. We go on; even when we don't want to.

And to top off the year of the worst of the first, she has had to deal with the public world not knowing how to talk to her about her loss. Because we don't know how to talk about suicide. Not really. If he had died in a car accident, or from a physical illness we would all have safer areas to speak from. But he didn't. He died from a mental illness. So Jo has had to deal with people who didn't know what to say. How to express their grief for her and the kids. She has had insensitive (dare I say moronic) comments from people and counselors who should know better, alike. I sent her articles to read. It's what I do. Reading information makes me feel better. So I gave her what I would have wanted. And that's really the best we can do. Help where we can.

Today, one year and one day after Ian's death is Project Semicolon day.  Project Semicolon brings awareness and help to mental illness and suicide prevention. The semicolon is a reminder that your story doesn't have to end; you can keep going. If you would, please consider making a donation to the project today. Because we all need a little help being strong sometimes.

Help where you can.

Which one of us is selfish again?

This week I've watched my friend group mourn for Robin Williams, a man that (as far as I know) only one of them knew personally. And I've watched and read how his death opened the door for a lot of people to talk about something they don't usually talk about. Depression, but more than depression, suicide. And it's been interesting, enlightening, infuriating and moving to read all of the points of view.

And then today is Thursday so I checked my blogs to see if I had one posted close to today's date I could put up for Throw Back Thursday and there it was the blog (blogs?) about my trip to Toronto. Which not only touched on Toronto but on the death of a friend's father. By suicide. Which got me thinking again about the issue and also about how my belief system around it has changed.

Growing up and even in to my 30s I held a very firm line about suicide. It was selfish. It was cowardly. It was the worst thing you could do. Part of that was shaped by my religious beliefs growing up. Suicide was murder. It might be killing yourself, but it's still not okay in the frame work of the church I grew up in. It was also shaped by the suicide of my grandfather and my former brother's-in-law father. They were both addicts and most likely their suicides were accidental. I know my grandfather's was. He used attempted suicide as an attention getting method. Just one time he kicked the chair out from under him before my aunt could get there to rescue him and hear all about how awful everyone was. I had no mercy or pity for either of them.

But as I got older I started to think about it a little differently. Oregon has death with dignity laws. I think it might be the only state in the union that does, I know at the time the law was passed it was. But basically if you are terminally ill and wish to end your life you can get the drugs and the assistance to do it. The Dr. Kevorkian stance. That you have a right to end your own life when you choose to do so. And that you should be able to get medical assistance to do it in the least painful way possible. We do it for our pets, it's crazy that we don't do it for ourselves. I know a lot of people who don't bat an eye at do not resuscitate orders but can't wrap their brains around this concept. It's the same thing. I don't want heroic measures taken if you know I am going to be alive only by machine but I also want to be able to leave on my own terms if I am dying of a wasting disease that is taking my health in pieces. Physical or mental.

So then I had lines. Suicide was fine if I could couch it in euthanasia terms. But if it was anything else I still would tell you that it was selfish.

But when my friend's father took his life and I watched her deal with it, waiting for the anger at him for doing it, anger that didn't come, I had to ask why. Why wasn't she pissed off? He killed himself. How selfish. And she said, it was his life. He was done. Who was she to tell him he couldn't. And I had to rethink it all again. Who was being selfish? Me or him? I wanted him to be alive. He wanted to end it. Now, I don't know why he killed himself. I didn't know the man. I just know his daughter. But I still felt like I could have feelings about how he died. If he had been suffering from a terminal illness and killed himself I would have had sympathy, why couldn't I now? And so I did.

Then a local man here killed himself. And I can tell by how I wrote about it that my view point had shifted. Partly because I knew he suffered from depression. So I knew that the decision to kill himself was made from a very dark place. Depression is an illness. Not depression with a little d, the I'm having a bad day and I want to watch chick flicks and cry in my ice cream, but Depression. The dark cloud that settles in and tells you that nothing, nothing is worth it, especially you. I wrote about my friend Jenny here. She's not the only friend I have that suffers from this sort of imbalance.

Where your brain is fighting you every damn day of your life. The chemicals aren't right. There is no simple snap out of it. It's medication and meditation and counselling and exercise and friends who check in on you and all sorts of other things to keep you on an even keel. And then sometimes it all stops working and you have to start again. Though you are trying to get better while your mind is telling you that it's not even worth trying. There are some incredible stories out there about people who suffer from depression. The level of darkness that they are swimming through on a daily basis is impossible to truly grasp.

And this is where people often are when they make the choice to kill themselves. We say, oh that's so selfish, think about the family you leave behind. When often they think their family will be better off without them. Because the depression tells them so. Tells them that they are unlovable. A burden. A fraud. A fake. A mess. A nothing.

The best essays I've read on depression all have one over arching theme. Depression lies. It tells you to stop when you just need to keep going. Because if you do keep going it will get better. You will get out of the darkness again. Sadly I can't tell you that you will never go back, but you will get out. But that's the problem with liars, sometimes they are so good at it you can't hear the truth. And when that happens we lose people. People we loved. People we respected. People we wish were still here.

But instead of blaming the person like I used to I now understand I need to blame the disease. And that it stole another light out of the world.

Depression lies. Don't listen. Keep fighting to make it through.

In the US you can call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

It's a depressing one...

This past weekend a friend of a friend killed himself. Or I guess I should say allegedly because though the first reports were suicide now the news is saying that they are withholding details until they can reach his family. But I am going to talk about it as a suicide. He was suffering from depression over lost dreams and failed plans from letters he wrote before his death. His health wasn't the greatest anymore and he had already lived an incredibly difficult life. He was a street performer who had bigger dreams on what he wanted to do and they just never worked out.

We knew him through another friend of ours and C was even a guest on his cable access show when he was younger. We saw him over the years at parties at our mutual friend's house as well as downtown where he performed for the commuters for money. His story has been on all three news sites as well as OPB today. People are shocked. People are stunned and saddened that this clown of a man, always smiling, always performing isn't going to be here anymore. And I have to wonder to myself if he even realized how many people he touched in his day to day life? How his death would sadden so many who didn't even know his real name.

And that's the way suicide works. I am not going to say I don't understand it, I do. I wrote about the one time I seriously considered it here.  My grandfather killed himself (long before I was born), my sister's first husband's father killed himself. Both of them had serious addiction issues and probably did it by accident. Her second husband suffered from depression and threatened it. You all know I worried about my nephew while he was growing up. The epidemic of young gay men killing themselves might have only recently gotten press but it's not a new issue. Being raised that you were born wrong is a heavy burden and not everyone made it out okay. He did. And as far as I know he never even considered it, for that I am grateful.

I have known friends who have lost family members this way as well. For a variety of reasons. Health issues. Money problems. Depression. The list goes on and on. But I understand that feeling of this isn't going to get better. I know what causes people to feel that suicide is their only option. That they can't see a way out of the mess they are in. But the trick is that it doesn't just make the current problem go away, it makes everything go away. Forever. You are done. And your family and friends are left behind wondering what happened. Why you left them. Trying to pick up pieces of their shattered life and you aren't there to ask why. Why would you do this? What could have ever been so bad that you didn't think I would understand?

It's a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

So today Portland mourns one of it's own. And I hope that where ever he is he is playing his trumpet, entertaining the crowd and understanding how many people he touched and how he will be missed.  And today I ask that anyone thinking about this stops and thinks again. No matter how bleak it seems right this second, it will move on. Life changes, make sure you are there to see it through. I know that is sometimes easier said than done. But try. For the people who will be left to pick up the pieces if you don't. Try.