Ideations

When you are so distressed you have thoughts about but no plan or actions tied to committing suicide they call these ideations. Most people have had transient thoughts when things are tough of killing themselves and if all followed through our population problem would cease to exist. As it is suicide is the third leading cause of death for children 14-19 years of age and children as young as 8 years of age have died of intentionally self inflicted injury.

 In previous posts I have told of my own attempts starting at approximately age 9. For many years I found comfort in having my plan formulated, it gave me a kind of peace that treatment did not. I am a sufferer of chronic depression. If you know someone with chronic depression you know that living with them day in and day out can be draining, medications that worked suddenly stop working and you start the cycle of trying to find balance all over again. We also have a tendency to stop taking meds when we are doing well because there is still a heavy stigma attached to mental illness and we think the depression won't reoccur.

Suicide is often referred to as a selfish, cowardly act, a permanent solution to a temporary problem, I do not see suicide this way. One of our most basic internal instincts is that of survival, the tiniest of premature infants will try to push away things that touch their face and are occluding their airway, they are not strong enough to stop it but they will try.

 Suicide is self execution, the person must override the most ingrained instinct to preserve their own life often using methods of execution that the ACLU would brand as cruel and unusual.

Why this subject? On November 18th my youngest son will be 14 years, 4 months, and 11 days old, he will have outlived the brother who we lost on Fathers Day June 17, 2001. Colley was our second child, part of the Sensational Six, bright, talented, not perfect, but perfectly ours. I name him here by his pet name because I want to remain as anonymous as I can, although I so dearly want to see his name and hear it, to feel this most important part of my heart has not disappeared. Colley died of depression, the instrument he used to self execute was a nine millimeter handgun, I do not often talk about him not because I am ashamed but to protect him and his brothers from the intentional or unintentional cruelty of others.

Colley has a story and in time I will give voice to it, I miss him fiercely, I will never be who I was before he died, but he was not selfish or cowardly. He was broken and felt that he was so damaged by his own secrets of abuse that for our family to be whole he needed to remove himself. I know that pain only chance has kept me here.

Enough for Now