Burial

Here are some emails Alan and i have been exchanging over the last day or so.

Hi Alan,

How are you doing?

I had the longest night. I only slept three hours. I had to sleep with a light on because being in the dark made me think of death and of where Kirk is now. I can't concentrate on anything. I just keep getting images in my head of his lifeless body laying on the bed with a garbage bag over his head. Then i think of him in that cold impersonal morgue, and finally in the ground rotting away. He shouldn't be like that. He should be here with us.

My emotions are going haywire. Sometimes I feel numb, other times I just can't stop crying and thinking "why why why."

This is the worst feeling I've ever had. I think it may even be worse then the depression. Just knowing that I will never see him again, that I can never bring him back, and that he chose to leave this earth of his own free will is tearing me apart.

How are you feeling?

Carla



Hi Carla,

I know just how you are feeling. He is being buried today.Some of us just don't belong on Earth. Kirk was one of them. I'm dealing with my rage by making trouble for his psychiatrists. Maybe,this will be a legacy for Kirk in that they will remember by treating other people. I had to do something concrete.

It is said that you are a "virgin at life until someone you love dies". This is not new to me unfortunately.Pray he is finally at peace.Call me this weekend. Hang in there.

Alan




Are you going to the burial? Will you let me know where he has been buried so that I can maybe go visit when I come home? I wish I could be there. If I had known I would have hopped on a train Sunday night so I could be there today.

The Dean of students has excused me from classes until next week, and my boss has excused me from work. I'm very thankful for that because I don't think I could have made it through class yesterday.

I went to the library and took out some books about grief and suicide. You know me, when I'm faced with a problem I head straight for the books. Obtaining knowledge is the only thing I feel I can actively do, particularly in this situation.

I'm glad you are making touble for his psychiatrists. I've been thinking that he would still be alive if someone had had the foresight to keep him in the hospital after he messed up his legs. But then I think, well, he had decided to die before I even met him. Even if he were alive and institutionalized now, he probably would have just tried again when he got out. It was the one thing he really wanted more than anything else.

I'm feeling slightly better today. the reality that he is gone and I can't change that is slowly sinking it. I know there was nothing I could have done for him, but that doesn't stop me from wishing there was.

Love
Carla

Quotes

"Suicide is not a rational or clearly thought-out action. If suicide is any kind of "choice," it is a coerced choice, in which someone you loved was unable to see alternatives and consequences." - Adina Wronleski from Suicide:Survivors, p. 107

"I felt increasingly isolated from my friends and family. They had no idea what I was going through, all their well-intentioned advice and words of comfort seeming ignorant at best and tinged with cruelty at worst." Carla Fine from No Time to Say Goodbye p. 8

"You can't save them if they won't let you." Ibid p. 12

"People skimmed by me on the street, on their way to buy groceries or go to the bank or visit a friend. How were such trivial activities still possible?" Ibid p. 34

"People who kill themselves are breaking an unwritten contract that declares we should not be free to leave society at will...The whole horror of suicide resonates with the most profound existential question of one's life: Why should I live?...To hear that someone has answered no, that someone has broken the rules, is extraordinarily threatening to survivors." Ibid p. 64

"Ome year after my son't suicide. I saw so children playing baseball in front of my house. One boy didn't want to play anymore. The other kids offered him the ball, extra points, anything to make him stay in the game. But he didn't want to play and went away. It reminded me of my son. I did everything I could to keep him here, but he wanted to go and he left." Ibid p. 93

"The greatest myth is that if people talk about suicide or if they have had several unsuccessful attempts, they're not going to do it. Of course they are." Ibid, p. 174

"One of the most painful things that came out of the talks with survivor/victims...was the realization that someone whom they had deeply cared about had chosen to leave them; not in an "everyday" fashion - by walking out or suing for divorce - but by death. Survivors are traumatized by the notion that someone has rejected them in this fashion...one of the reasons for the great pain survivors feel (and the anger it forments) is that they have to face the realization that the dead person renounced all possibility of help from them. This leaves them feeling quite worthless." Christopher Lukas and Henry Seiden from Silent Grief p. 8

"Suicide is a public admission that my love...wasn't enough." Ibid p. 19

"Psychoanalysts call the transformation of experience in therapy "working through," and something like it can occur in everyday life. Each time you talk about a painful experience there is a little change. It's almost as if experience is a kaleidiscope: Each turn permits the elements to realign themselves. If the turn is allowed there's some reorganization, some give, things feel a little better. There are tiny transformations. You are able to shift into a more comfortable mode, so that you feel less despairing about the same reality." Ibid p. 120

"There's a part of me that knows he had to know we loved him. But it's not a matter of love, is it? Love just isn't enough." Ibid p. 125

"The ability to perform one's usual tasks is impaired. At the same time there is a diminished ability to be emotionally responsive in other ways. The survivor is likely to feel distant from others and is far less able to be intimately connected than he or she was in the past." Ann Smolin and John Guinan from Healing After the Suicide of a Loved one, p. 15

"It will generally be found that as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life." The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon p. 247

"THe man who kills a man kills a man
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world"
GK Chesterton ibid p. 252

"It is possible to understand the paths that have lead someone toward suicide, but the mentality of the actual moment, of the leap required to undertake the action- that is incomprehensible and terrifying and so strange that it makes one feel as though one had never really known the person who did it." Ibid, p.264