The letter ...

I think I was around 9 or 10 years old

I was home from school at lunchtime (it was the 70's)

My mom was in the kitchen, I was sitting in the family room watching the Flintstones or Brady Bunch while eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich

Then I heard it.

It was a sound I had never heard before
   I had never been touched by anything so raw
                                                       so mournful
                                              so filled with pain

My mom
    my beautiful mother.
       She was one of two kids, twins, a boy and a girl

(I always imagined that I would have twins some day… I really had wanted that huge Brady Bunch, Waltons kind of family)

My mom's twin brother, Uncle Albert, was a tall, handsome, blonde, football player-built kind of man.

I don't have many memories of him.
But I do remember he was quiet and gentle ...and tall

My uncle was not a man who chose to stay put … he traveled, lived in many places.
He was a wanderer.
Maybe that's a symptom.
    He just wasn't physically in our lives very often.

Back to lunchtime - in the 70's - eating my pb&j

A letter.
She was told devastatingly, life-changing news through pen and paper.
No human comfort
No arms to hug her
No eyes of compassion
Just ink on parchment.

Her twin brother had committed suicide in a small hotel room in a small town…alone

Writing that down is hard.
How do you even talk about that?
Why talk about it?

Well … here I am.
Fifty years old - decades later - and it's on my mind.
Suicide … in all it's ugliness, cruelty and violence, it doesn't impact less if it's not spoken about. It impacted me. It changed my young mind and heart forever. It made me aware of a pain. I didn't understand the pain, but I knew it was there. At that moment, when my mom cried out in despair, I recognized that the world was bigger than my Brady Bunch existence.

Many people equate suicide with selfishness … and yes it is self serving in a way. But my tall, handsome, gentle, football player-built uncle was suffering with a disease of the mind.
It's called Schizophrenia.
It took me many years to put all that together.
The journey I'm on
watching my sweet family deal with a mental illness that has affected our family. Yes … not just the one diagnosed but all who love him … we're all impacted

Read  "A Beautiful Mind"

In college I did write a paper about the perceived eternal consequences of taking one's own life… my take on it was not cut and dry. My mom, in the middle of her suffocating grief, taught me the Grace of a God Who sees us, saw my uncle, sees me and mine today. I didn't understand, really, that he was not well. But it makes sense, as much sense as schizophrenia can make, now.
And intense, serious, heart touching moments speaking with my sweet boy about the struggles of his beautiful mind help bring some clarity and maybe just a touch of sense to the invisible diseases that so many suffer with.
Whether someone is consumed with dying, entertains the thought, or feels compelled to finish life on this earth. Or if they act on that driving force and commit the deed. It is suffering beyond my ability to grasp. It makes me weep, it confuses me, and it makes me profoundly grateful for Grace.

Ahhh  this is exhausting stuff.
I think I'm done for now … writing about this