Quote:You have to be in a very dark place to see death as your best option. 

 

I had a cousin who was in just such a place.  What was sad about the entire situation is that he was talented, and just a great guy.  He tried to live a normal life but, as we found out from his suicide note, it was impossible for him to do so.  His oldest brother was gay, and when he came out to his family he was shunned.  As a result, he moved across country and never looked back.  When my cousin started to get the sense that he too might be gay, he had a difficult time dealing with it, keeping it to himself the entire time because he saw what happened to his older brother.  As a result, he bottled up everything and played the good son right up to the point where he couldn't do it any longer.  He wrote notes to everyone in the family, highlighted passages in the Bible that expressed his torment, went out in the back yard, and hung himself from a tree.  It was a shame, but he really didn't see any other option because he expected his parents, who had eventually come around and accepted the older son's announcement, to shun him the way they had done previously.  He was being bullied at school, and had no friends to talk to, so he saw his only option as killing himself.  It's been more than 30 years, and you can still see the pain in my aunt's eyes when we get together as a family. 

 

That's very sad indeed.

 

My friend that I spoke about was a childhood friend.  We went to school together from kindergarten all the way to high school.  He dropped out of high school and joined a band.  They were successful locally at the time, and eventually moved to California to "make it to the big time".  It didn't really happen, though they did record a few albums.  Of course, in that kind of environment, drugs and alcohol were a "regular staple" of their every day life.  The band eventually ran out of money and fell apart.

 

He was an active user of Facebook, and posted some updates of his journey back to Albuquerque from California.  His last few posts made it evident that he was struggling and in need of rehab.  Another former classmate of mine arranged for him to have a room to stay in on the condition that he enter rehab the next day.  When they went to pick him up the next morning, they found him essentially the same way that Robin Williams was found.

---