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Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, call 988
Emergency number, call 911
This week, I watched, for me, what was an emotional social media video about the Augment Program in my hometown, that, among other things, seeks to provide mental health services to students. In establishing it locally, Dr. Becky Blakley was inspired by losing a 9-year-old student, Dylan Lowe, to suicide. I have long known Dylan’s family and my heart shattered for them and the emotional obstacles that lay before them. Dylan’s death, in 2021, rocked the community. My family knew something about that. Dealing with tragedy – and certainly dealing with it in public – is a learned reality.
November 5, 1986 changed the trajectory of my life. I woke up that morning with two siblings. That afternoon, I answered the telephone and there was only one. Unbeknownst to me, that day also began a long, perpetual journey toward healing, of processing a plethora of emotions that encompasses my family’s daily lives, but it also made us empathetic, and, if not outright activists, at least advocates for life.
With September, Suicide Prevention Month, underway, it seemed important to share my story. It’s one with many tentacles. It’s a story that left me, initially, in shock and numb and then increasingly terrified, in a way I’d never experienced before.
I know this: suicide is a plague and, as I write this, it’s not getting any better. It attaches itself to those involved, and it’s often an uncomfortable subject, riddled with stigma, but the statistics are clear. In 2022, the National Center for Disease Control released their most recent findings: suicide remains on the rise nationwide, rising by some 50,000 annually. Statewide statistics are even more alarming, exceeding the national average. One person dies by suicide every eleven hours in the commonwealth, and it’s the 2nd leading cause of death for those ages 10-34. For every suicide among America’s youth, there are 100 who try, counting among the 1.6 million attempts every year.
The menacing tentacles of suicide reach into our everyday lives, even as adults – even if you’re not a survivor – and into our schools, where the connection to another epidemic – bullying –is further alarming. School age victims of bullying are between 2 to 9 times more likely to consider suicide than non-victims, with statistics surrounding 10–14-year-old girls even higher. Where is the accountability? Where is the help? Where is the outrage?
Because of families like Dylan’s and his mother, Lacey, who works so hard toward awareness, I know that I am not alone on this journey. Writing this was, ultimately, for another project, and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever written, but write it I did, in hopes that my story, and the loss of my brother, saves one life, one family from the debris.
I’ve read a lot of books in my life. Books about werewolves and vampires, serial killers and haunted places. When I was a kid, I used to absorb books about ghosts, and then not sleep for weeks at a time. But the scariest book I’ve ever read is Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge. I don’t mean that disrespectfully. I admire Anderson immensely for writing it. I don’t think I could have done it. I certainly don’t think I could have done it with the same courage and clarity. While reading it, I put the book down several times, my heart racing, flushed with anxiety and fear. A combination of all those things left a swell in my chest. It wasn’t war. I was mortified to read of someone else’s experiences.
It wasn’t until I was an adult that I began to really think about how my brother had died. For years, it had sat there like a rock, deep in the back crevices. These are not thoughts that I desire. They just come, unexpectedly, with the fury of an on-coming train. At times, they haunt me. I can’t close my eyes; don’t want to. I was so young when he died, that maybe I didn’t get the full impact then, or maybe I’d blocked it out of my consciousness.
In 2007, what would have been his graduating class held a class reunion, and I met a lot of people who had attended school with him. Because I was so young, my memories are scattered. Shreds of broken glass, really, but these were his peers. They knew him. I can’t tell you how much I appreciated their stories, but they were a double-edged sword. Some kind of self-sabotage. Sometimes wanting to hear, sometimes not. Never ready. It kept coming like a train in the dark, hell bent for the sunshine. The nightmares, too, would come.
It’s funny, when you talk about someone who died “that way,” no matter what’s being said about them, no matter what memory someone shares, good or bad, their death hangs over any conversation. Maybe that’s paranoia, but it’s seemingly an unspoken black cloud. No one wants to mention “that.“ Talk about “that.“ Even I struggle with that word: suicide. It just hangs there. It changes everyone around it. It changes them forever. Scars them and batters them. You never escape it. You, at times, try to reckon and make peace with it. You try to take the public curiosity in stride, especially, for me, given my physical similarities, when people have gawked and stared or have, on occasion, wanted to touch me, my face. In those moments, you try to be someone else’s strength, often near strangers, and then there are people who take curiosities to extremes. They can be hurtful, intentionally or not. That double-edged sword cuts deep and opens wounds.
For those left in the debris field, there are perpetual questions that cannot be answered. Others often fail to realize that. The inevitable question is why. So many years. Still no answer.
When my brother died, he was on the brink of manhood. I was not. There were some years between us, miles of maturity and experiences. His death robbed so many, me among them. A few years ago, a friend of his private messaged me on Facebook to say my brother would be proud of me. It was a jolt, a multitude of emotions. I was shocked, saddened. It lingered and wouldn’t go away. Partly, because it was out of the blue. Partly, because I’m so conscious of his memory. But there it sat. My mind does that. When it’s shaken into focus, it cradles the jolt and harbors it, torturing itself with the magnitude. It took me a month to respond to that message. The truth is, I do wish I’d gotten to know my brother as men. That was an experience I missed out on. I can’t help but wonder what that might have been like, where life would have taken him, us. Kids. Career. Family. The bullet that took his life left shrapnel in all of us. I think that’s a good way to put it, if there are words to express it.
With the years, I have also found it is true what Dickens wrote, and I think true of all survivors, in spite of how they process the perpetual lifetime of emotions, whether they choose, in their own way, to combat the issue, to tell their stories, challenge the stigma, seek change: I have been bent and broken, Dickens wrote, but I hope into a better shape. That better shape is born of empathy, and it walks hand in hand with us, wherever we go, for the remainder of our lives. It is hope. It is faith. It is a desire that one day we can say “no more;” it’s a fixer mentality – sometimes progressive and sometimes buried deep within – that wants statistics to change, the pain to stop, the life to be saved. That today and every day is the hope.