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but loud, loud in that the voice speaking of loss, and pain, and regret, and giving up, is being handled with a tender manner of sending the energy to distract, and help one find reason and their path out of a dull grey fog, an abyss, a very dark place. What was done before they discovered St. John's Wort, or before they shoved a naked person into a bath of ice, there were modes of distraction through the power of listening. As human beings, there is a tendency engrained in our DNA to be with others, to connect, and to be understood. Suicidal tendencies are like PMS-they surround you, take a hold, and throttle you for awhile. But, if you can find your particular distraction, you get past it, and continue.

An unknown but very wise therapist once said, "you can choose to die, this is true. But you can't take it back once you decide to do it." Her purpose in saying that statement was to distract, and verbally get a hold of that rope around the neck and give it a good yank to bring you back down the hill. That is what makes a therapist very handy. They have a large bag of ritualistic time tested ways to distract you from your pain so that you can look inside a mirror and safely look at the core that is killing you inside. The goal is with distraction, comes reason. And with reason, beside it walks hope.

One day a few months ago, I saw on TV the story of the woman who killed herself the day her house was to be auctioned. For a couple of days she overshadowed the big boys up in Washington who were explaining live on CSPAN the why of the mortgage meltdown and in a blink took a very large magnifying glass to the human reality of foreclosures.

It took me back to 1994 and trying to find a way to distract myself from all the bleak. In my college library I met up with my best friend, who accidently distracted me from my unreasonable dark view of the moment. She asked me to take back a library book and after I dropped it off, I decided to wander about the stacks where I found a small volume of poetry called "Constance." Flipping through, I heard the sound of Jane Kenyon listening to me. Then I was allright.

For all the chemicals and treatments created in the name of healing, the best one for free is a voice to speak and the distraction of hearing it.

(For a person who has never known despression I highly recommend you climb inside the poem "Having it out with melancholy" by Jane Kenyon( www.poemhunter.com/poem/having -it-out-with-melancholy ). If you are a true romantic and want to climb inside a love story, pick up Donald Hall's "Without." It is about his marriage to Jane Kenyon.)

Learn more about this author, Jo Ann Rangel.
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