775. You don't belong to only you.

I've been feeling very introspective the past week. I learned just a few days ago that an old friend who I lost touch with from high school committed suicide in the fall of 2005.

I remember her as a cheerful, intelligent, thoughtful and kind person. Her dream in high school was to become a veterinarian. Mine was to become a pilot for the US Air Force. In my yearbook, she wrote "Don't give up your dream!" and beneath her signature she wrote D.V.M. (Doctor of Veterinarian Medicine)

We corresponded through snail-mail, because we graduated high school in 1989. (I don't know about you, but I didn't get my first AOL email account until late 1995.) In one of her letters she asked me to call or write her friend, our mutual classmate. She was concerned that her friend was feeling depressed. I remember feeling both touched by her thoughtfulness and jealous of her friend. Did I have friends who would care enough about me to do the same? Of course I did, but I was too selfishly insecure to know better.

News of Stacey's death, of her suicide, profoundly affected me. When I was a child, I was very dark, depressed, and was alarmingly close to ending my life. Three things held me back however: fear of pain, fear of the unknown (what happens at and after death?) and the aftermath (people discovering my body, and the pain of the news/discovery that would have been afflicted upon my family).

Stacey was a C.H.P. officer. She used her own gun to end her life. (C.H.P. officers have a higher-than-average suicide rate when compared to other law enforcement officers in the nation.) Had I easy access to a gun, would I be here now typing these words? If Stacey had instead became the veterinarian she once dreamed of becoming, would we have instead found each other on Facebook and be exchanging our life stories?

She died over two and a half years ago, but to me, she died the day I got the news. People who have come into my life, for however long they remained in my life, are part of me, my memories, and they live on as I remember them and wonder where they are now. Even the grumpy old man who came into The Velvet Creamery, a restaurant where I once was a waitress, one hot summer day in 1990 and yelled at me, "Can I be served?!?!" (and to whom I responded, "Are you having a bad day?") is alive and well, and annoying those who love him with his foul outbursts. Surely now, he too is dead.

So, if you are reading this and you are in depths of the deepest, darkest, loneliest, most hopeless place imaginable, I want you to pay special attention: Don't do it. You matter. You've touched people's lives. Even if you don't believe me, because I know you don't, I want you to entertain the possibility that I am right. Your death will affect 100's of people. Those closest to you will share the news with others, and those others will pass on the news to others... And years down the road old childhood friends will receive the news of your suicide. They will remember the time you gave them a kind word when they were feeling low, they'll think back to the time when you were in the high school locker room chatting with your friends and they will remember how happy you looked, and they will be profoundly sad. All the good memories you helped create in the minds of every person you know, will forever be tainted with the knowledge of your decision to put a permanent end to a temporary problem. It's not right. You matter to somebody, and it is wrong to end a life that is not completely yours. You belong to the people who love you, you belong to the people who loved you, and you belong to the people who will love you in the future.

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I went over to the Babel site, where I also blog, to publish this post there too.

*As I was editing this post, here in Siena, Italy, the beautiful spring sunny day clouded over. (It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.) When I hit the button to publish the post, thunder rattled my windows. The storm is continuing now, even as I type this. I am reminded of the passing of intergal theorist Ken Wilber’s soulmate and wife, Treya Killam Wilber, as told in his book Grace and Grit. The night Treya died, after a long physical and spiritual battle with cancer, the heavens seemed to crack open with a magnificent thunder storm.

Stacey, may you find peace in your next journey.