Choosing Life

Something inside you changes when a loved one commits suicide. Until that point, life is just something that you do, a simple, unavoidable, unchangeable fact. But when someone embraces death as an alternative, everything changes--even more so when that person is a relative, someone close to you.

After that, you begin to doubt yourself, and your own ability not to make the same choice; after all, you think, if my friend, my husband, my brother, my parent has chosen to die, what is stopping me from doing the same? Am I strong enough to continue facing the confusion, frustration, anger, anxiety, and depression that comes along with everyday life? And if that person is a relative, you start to wonder whether suicide is in your genes, if you have inherited genetic material that will cause you to come with stressful situations in the same way. Not a day goes by when suicide is not in your mind--your loved one's suicide, and its implications for your own desire to live.

As time goes by, the direction of these thoughts shift ever so slightly, yet significantly. In the beginning, when the pain of losing your loved one in such a violent and destructive manner is still terribly raw, you don't know how you will possibly manage to continue on, living each day with such pain for years, even decades. In your anguish, you wonder about the pain your loved one must have felt in order to make such a desperate choice, and you question how you, in your despair, will possibly find the strength to avoid descending into the same irrationality. But then, as the months pass, your thought processes shift. Slowly but surely, you begin to realize that your loved one's choice is not the only one that you can make. There is another choice to be made: to live.

From that point on, each day you make the conscious decision to live, a choice of empowerment, rather than helplessness. And this choice means that you are no longer a victim of your loved one's suicide; you are now a survivor.

Silence

Silence is golden, or so the cliché says. But to someone with depression, silence becomes something to be avoided. Silence becomes an opportunity for those frighteningly dangerous thoughts, with which you have become so familiar, to seep into your consciousness, for your inner monologue to race into directions that you cannot control. And so, silence itself becomes scary. As such, it becomes difficult to begin to trust silences again.

As a teacher, prolongued silences in the classroom taunt you, make you feel as though your students are neither engaged nor interested. Once again, these silences seem to become gaps to be filled, and you have to fight this natural inclination, allowing the students the time to process information and develop necessary critical thinking skills.

With my husband, I have not yet become accustomed to our companionable silences. My natural inclination is to make small-talk; his is the opposite. Instead of being bothered by this, I need to embrace the kind of closeness that that being in the same room, or even in the same house, in silence can bring. I know that some of the most meaningful conversations can be held without words; now I must remember viscerally, as well as intellectually, that these conversations can be, and are, valuable to a relationship.

Silence truly can be golden.