**TRIGGER WARNING** This post is about suicide.
This is not an uncommon experience for me as a counsellor. Obviously, I receive people into my care who are usually at their lowest ebb. Nobody likes to admit they need to talk to a counsellor. Few people will willingly engage with a counsellor for extended period, not only because of expense, because it is difficult work. So this scenario I will paint here is something I’ve come to expect. I’m glad it is also something that I have personally experienced, because it puts me in a place of empathy I otherwise may not have.
“I just don’t know whether it’s worth it to stick around.” “When I get to that point....” “I just don’t know if they need me.” “I feel like an absolute failure.” “What if I’m getting it completely wrong and just stuffing them up?” These statements and more are common.
These statements are predicated on such care that prove the existence of a love just about nobody else will give. Think of the odds of a loving father or mother being able to be replaced. It’s just not going to happen. Not by far!
During a session some time ago, I pondered with a father of young children the scenario we had both faced, and it was a salient moment. A minute or two of silence as a full gravity of the moment was felt. I have come to realise as I have reflected, together with experience I’ve had having known partners and older parents and siblings and friends who have been left behind, that the worst destruction occurs within the children left behind. These are very hard things to say let alone write, because the last thing I want to do is to make anyone feel guilty, or to cause anyone to feel distress for how their circumstances have played out. But there is an undeniable fact in the loss of a parent, particularly to suicide. For children left behind, it is a devastating impact, but not just that, it is devastating over a lifetime.
As a father who has seriously contemplated his own value as a life to be lived on this earth, I get it. I understand what drives us to sincerely question our existence. It’s at these times that we lose our comprehension of how crucially important we are in remaining alive, in going the journey, in holding out hope, however painful the process of life may be. If there is only one purpose we have in being here it is in being here for them. Once we are gone, there is no coming back, and there is a missing out on thousands of experiences that without us fall flat. And not just that, they don’t just fall flat. These experiences take on a completely different meaning, every single one of them, and they are railroaded by one experience that young people so often cannot get past.
I don’t know how much plainer I can make it. And I don’t know if this does any good. But from one parent who has felt like a failure to another, I implore you to stick around. Every single time you are dogged by emotions that are overwhelming, by thoughts that are confounding, by pain that is unrelenting, make yourself a promise now, before the next time, to pick up the phone and to call someone you trust, and if that person isn’t there, to keep on calling until you get the assistance you need.
The world cannot afford to lose you, let alone to those for whom you are the whole world. You are never failing if you always want what is best for your children. You, present in their lives, is the best thing for your children.
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