Trigger warning: This post discusses suicide and may be distressing for some readers.
I have to talk about this. I have to re-live it here and now to try and find some peace. I have to tell you because this isn’t some sad story you see on the news. This happens every day, in every day homes and real life families lose their loved ones to suicide.
Bloody, broken, disfigured, deliberate, deadly, petrifying, dark, soul shattering suicide. The stuff nightmares are made of. It happens, and it happened to my family.
My father was a dedicated Christian who believed suicide was an act of ‘sin’ that sent you straight to hell. We were the kids who were always in Sunday school, taking holy communion, sleeping under the seats at the Sunday night church service and being subjected to Hillsong’s CD on repeat on family road trips. That was us, we were that family.
My father was a motivational speaker. He wrote a book called The Key To Life which spoke about how we are put on this earth for a greater purpose.
His catch cry was ‘never, ever, ever give up’. Over his lifetime he sat and prayed with perhaps hundreds of people, most of them strangers and dedicated his life to saving the world, one lost soul at a time.
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As someone who has lost too many loved ones to suicide, I can say that you will never fully recover from this, and that in reality none of us should. BUT you will learn to move on, live again, I mean, really live and not constantly beat yourself up about what you could, would, should have done!
The thing is with suicide, once someone has made up their mind, which no doubt your Dad had done, probably thought it out a million times in his head, they are going to do it no matter what! It wouldn't have mattered if you had locked him up in a psych ward, got him medicated, he would just have changed his plans to a later date, different location.
What you need to do is make peace with yourself, and with your Dad. I know that you are probably really angry with him, but once you make peace with him and realise that this was his choice and his alone and nothing anyone did would have stopped him from his end goal. Death! So now you need to forgive yourself and know that you are still here and you need to make the most of every minute of every day, life is what counts and if you are really struggling seek professional help and lots of it, medication and whatever gets you through the hard times.
I have lost both my parents and I honestly struggled deeply with both of them. But I watched them both suffer so much and it has shaped the person that I am today. I miss them every day but I try to do something that will make them smile every day, which makes me happier. I struggled a lot with depression and suicidal thoughts for a long time, but its taken a long time to get back from that.
I wish you all the best, it was a beautifully written piece, straight from the heart!
I just wanted to further add this link about corticosteroids and aggression and depression https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...
You dad would have been on them without a doubt before and after a transplant. His difficult behaviour could well have been drug induced and if he had an infection the previous week a higher dose would have been used.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...