There has been a lot of media in recent years about kids who contemplate or execute the taking of their own lives. They want to off themselves for a variety of different reasons, some of which, if we were to be perfectly honest, make a lot of sense.
When your life sucks beyond belief, when you can't think of one single reason to keep going, it makes sense to shuffle off this mortal coil. Shakespeare knew this. A lot of people know this.
In the last couple of years, the talk about suicide prevention for teens has reached a fevered pitch. Millions of dollars are being spent on ad campaigns, help lines, bullying strategies but guess what? Some kids are still killing themselves.
Well, duh.
Let me tell you a story.
Our young family friend, let's call him Carlos, tried to kill himself back in his teens. He attached a rope to a sturdy beam, put the noose around his neck, and was just about to jump down when his cell phone rang. He couldn't resist the temptation of answering it -- just this one time before, you know.
He never got back on that step. Since that time, he has coupled and produced a darling child, taken a job as a superintendant in an apartment building and is the happiest man on Earth.
Recently, his past came back to haunt him, when he saw personally what suicide looks like. His wife heard their apartment building shake and saw that a young man had clipped their balcony on his way 23 stories down. Carlos and Kelly rushed to the pavement below to see a gurgling mass of brains and goo, what was left of the boy's head which was swelling to thrice its size.
Carlos was distraught not just because he had witnessed something gruesome but because he saw a flashback to the night on the step when his friend's call had barely saved him from becoming a Mr. Pumpkinhead himself.
He knew he had made the right choice. Nobody had to tell him. Nobody had to lock him in a room, swaddle his head and tell him it would get better. Which things did.
I've long held the belief that if somebody is going to take the high jump they surely will -- and nobody can stop them.
We can be there for our kids or our spouses. We can be sensitive and not judgy.
But inevitably it's up to the person who wants to launch themselves into nothingness to work it out.
They will look at the razor or the pills or the lake and ask themselves how suicide is going to help their case. All it will do is give them several minutes of excruciating hell on top of how crappy their life already feels. Then they'll go "oh shit" just as the blood begins to ooze from their veins or at the moment they feel their lungs become paralyzed as they gasp for air.
I simply can't imagine any scenario where a kid is high-fiving himself at the end.
You've got to think at the moment of impact that there is no God, and this pain is the last fun thing you get to experience in this jolly old life of yours.
But there is another way, even more diabolical, a way designed to get back at all the haters and those who lack understanding.
They could do what Augusten Burroughs did after a couple of aborted suicide attempts.
They could choose to end their life, but not kill themselves.
You may not know Augusten Burroughs -- the author of Running with Scissors and a Wolf at the Table -- but if you have a twisted mind, you should get to know him.
Burroughs has been to hell and back a few times. He started with an abusive yet absent father and a nutbar mother who sent him away to live with an insane psychiatrist and his family, where he was sexually abused by a pedophile, which is probably how he got into advertising.
He is a reformed alcoholic, an openly gay man who channelled the twisted wreckage of his life into a bunch of outstanding books.
He is the prophet for all the sick fucks out there.
That's right, I'm saying it.
He may be on to something.
I recently picked up his latest book called This is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude and More. For Young and Old Alike.
It is changing my life as we speak.
It will change the lives of every teenager living in their own wasteland if you buy it for them.
I'm not going to tell you how to end your life without killing yourself.
That would be too juicy a spoiler.
That's for me to know cause I spent the money and so should you.
Every kid should read this book .
Everybody who's ever been fucked up should read it, too.
He has a solution for everything that makes sense to me.
I'm recommending it to people I know who have problems with their inner dialogue.
Friends, my kids and their fucked up friends.
Maybe there will be a few people saved in the process.
P.S. It has nothing to do with God.
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