When I got the news that my boyfriend killed himself on a rainy morning three months ago, I experienced shock for the first time in my life. I walked around not knowing what to do with myself. Once some time, screams and tears had passed, I took some deep breaths, calmed myself, and then sat down at my laptop to google “San Francisco suicide support groups”. I was acting on instinct because it occurred to me that I had finally come up against something in my life that was larger than me, something that I couldn’t handle all on my own. I needed the direction of professionals, of those who had been there before me, of others who, perhaps, were receiving the same news that same week, or even, in that very same moment.
When I could focus on the screen between tears, I found statistics that were staggering. Suicide ranked as the 11th cause of death, while homicide, which we see constantly on TV and read about in the newspaper at least one time every day, ranks 15th. One person every 16.2 minutes kills themselves and white males lead the percentages. Every suicide left at least six bereaved friends and family members, so I did the math, and that equaled 180,000 people who were affected each year by such trauma. San Francisco Suicide Prevention was the oldest volunteer crisis line in the United States and their newest program was their Survivors Group, a weekly group for the surviving family and friends. I picked up the phone.
My head started running through a case of the “shoulds”. I had left our relationship a few months before as an act of self-care. I say this to myself to this day because it’s the only thing that keeps me from feeling the guilt around the “shoulds”. It’s the “shoulds” that are always there for the taking. There’s the “I should have known” or “I shouldn’t have said that”. The “I should have done this” and “I should have done that”. The problem with the “shoulds” were that they lead me nowhere safe. They lead me nowhere where I could gain understanding, faith, forgiveness or peace. Our society wants to blame and I want to blame, it’s part of the process in trying to find answers around suicide. But I had done all that I could with what I knew how. And the reality was that now my boyfriend was out of his pain, a deep knowing said this to me, that now he was in peace. He had to be, because he had been struggling so much there at the end.
