by Irethere

Created on: April 08, 2009

No one should have to bear the pain of losing someone dear, what more lose someone to suicide? It is hard to put things into perspective again once you see someone treat life like it was a piece of junk. Worthless and not worth fighting for. When I was younger, I have seen four of my friends lose a parent. Out of my four friend's parents, two of them passed away by committing suicide. How do you explain to a mere child that his or her parent committed suicide? How can you comfort your friend or try to ease their pain? You can't. You can only sit back and watch as your friend go through hell. Literal hell. Even for an adult, it doesn't get any easier either. Maybe she/he was suffering too much, we may reason with ourselves. Maybe it was better that way? But at the end of the day, no matter what triggered it, it will always remain a great tragedy. It is just not something that you can accept easily, because the choice was in their own hands.

Losing someone to suicide is different from losing someone to a road accident, although they are both sudden and shocking. The difference is in the after, in the way the family copes with their grief, for we know that one was not by choice. With suicides, it is harder for the ones left behind to make peace with themselves. It torments the family and their loved ones long after because the tragedy will playback like an old broken record over and over again, making the family question themselves, what could have been done to prevent it from happening? Even worse, it makes their loved ones blame themselves for what happened. And that's painful to live with.

I believe that everybody has a responsibility to live life to the fullest, this is true not only to themselves, but to their families as well. This life that we are living is not our own. We share it with so many other people who love us. Many depend on us to be the one who will see them through graduation, the first job, the big wedding, the joys and the pain, the falling in love and the falling out of love. Sometimes it is all too easy to let the pain and suffering take control of our lives because we feel dead inside. But if we only think for a minute about the people whom we will be leaving behind, we will realise that this life is not ours alone. Suicide solves nothing and is nothing but selfish. It only alleviates one person's pain while forever casting a dark cloud over their loved ones.

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