WHY? THIS IS THE REASON. CAN YOU SEE IT?

He smiled, he laughed but I knew the emptiness and sadness behind that smiling face and those loving embraces.

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CAN YOU SEE IT? CAN YOU REALLY SEE IT?

Bruised, Broken, and Scarred

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Upon being told of Christian's death, one of the very first things asked was "Why?"  The unanswerable question for my daughter who volunteered to accept the burden of making the calls.  Most parents, family members, and friends beat themselves up searching for the answer to that question.  Sometimes we never know and sometimes we know all too clearly.  Does knowing help or does it just led to more guilt and greater feelings of helplessness, sorrow, and depression.

Dr. Calvin J. Frederick of Washington D.C. wrote "most candidates for suicide are hapless**, hopeless, and helpless".

Inside me there is a huge void which I can only describe, under close examination, as helplessness.  Helplessness caused by my inability to protect my son, to help him, to make him whole again.  Helplessness because I cannot go back and fix all the things that went wrong and make them right; thereby changing the course of our personal family history.  But how? For a sentence with only two words, it is a huge, huge question.  The answer:  I didn't know then and I don't know now.  It was all those circumstances, those unforeseeable, unpreventable circumstances.  Things that happened in his world.  A world that I was either not a part of at all or one that I only walked around the fringes of.  The one that I was only a visitor to.  A world different from the one he and I shared.

There were things that I could see happening and then there were things that I learned of only after they had happened.  Life's cruel happenstance.  People's cruel actions, his cruel reactions.  His very great need and sorrow in not being able to go back and change his reactions and his striking out.  Change his misspoken words, change his attitude.

We talked. We shared. Often.  My heart ached with him and for him.  I understood,  I felt his hurt, his desperation, his frustration, his lost hope.  How greatly he suffered from losing the love of his life, his child, and his home.  I understood his anger at not being allowed to see the little boy that he had devoted his life to from the day of his birth; his anger and resentment at having another man dictating his relationship or lack thereof with his son.  I understood his anger and frustration when he would go to pick up his other son and either no one was home or no one answered the door.  And this happened over and over again.

His business failed and after losing his home to foreclosure, he had to move in with us - out in the country, isolated and near nothing at all.  What a blow to his pride!  He hated it.  He had lost, in his mind, everything that had any meaning to him.  Everything he had worked so hard for for so long.  He felt he had been stripped of his ability to get a meaningful job.  He had lost his driver's license because of a DUI but could have gotten it back if he had had the money to install the Guardian Angel Breathalyzer; but he didn't and I didn't so he had a car he couldn't drive and no public transportation was available.  He felt stuck.  No job, no money.  Bills piling up.  He felt he had lost his social status and his friends and he was embarrassed.  Some of his friends that he had trusted betrayed him and took what little money he had.  A man that once lived a successful life, had made a million dollars by the time he was 25,  flew all over the country just to party with friends, and had celebrities calling him was now bruised, broken, and scarred.

He was feeling utterly and totally helpless and adrift.  He felt he had no hope for the future. Nothing to offer.  Nothing to give. He had a girl friend that enjoyed tearing him down instead of building him up.  A girlfriend so cruel, so violent that none of us could understand why they were together.  We couldn't understand why he didn't just walk away.  The old Christian would have.  This is the one burning question I have no answer for.

He had attempted to take his life on several occasions but something or someone always prevented it; and in an odd way he even felt he was a failure at that.  All the attempts had damaged his brain and he was no longer able to distinguish between real and imagined events.  But this was one battle he was determined to win.  And win it he would on his own terms, in his own way, and at the time of his choice.  Part of me knew that some day he would succeed but a bigger part of me never accepted that he would.

And on January 18, 2010, he was the victor.  The battle was won; and all those worldly pressures and disappointments slipped away as his life's blood spilled crimson onto the ground and his spirit escaped his heavily burdened earthly body.  He was at last free.

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**hapless: unlucky; unfortunate