LIFE IS PRECIOUS – SUICIDE IS OVER-RATED

NO, THANKS, I RATHER BE ALIVE

I was prompted to write this post because I just returned from a funeral. The neighbor in the corner of the street where I live committed suicide. When his daughter found him he had been dead for over two hours hanging from a rope. There was nothing anybody could have done for him. If only I had known he was so despondent I would have talked to him...maybe talk him out of it. He was my age and lost his wife a year ago.

With all the recent suicides caused by homophobic and bully actions from piers and society in general it is amazing that there are not any more of these. It seems that hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear of a youngster taking his or her life because they were humiliated, outed or otherwise bullied.

At the moment this happens and the time of their lives it does, nothing is more important than being accepted, being appreciated and being loved. When these young people meet with stupidity and prejudice, with others in their peer group trying to gain validation at their expense the whole scenario seems hopeless and dim.

Suicide among teens over their inability to come to grips with their sexual orientation is probably the most common. It may also have a home environment to go along with it that is not conducive to acceptance…be it because the parents are too stupid or because they are super religious which is the same.

Tyler Clementi

My aunt Nina passed away last year and there was one thing about her that will always remain with me; whenever she was asked how she was, her answer would be “I’m ok, isn’t life wonderful?” And the poor woman had several debilitating and fatal ailments. She suffered from osteoporosis that was so severe it had almost destroyed her spinal chord…she had hairline fractures everywhere and yet she kept on going. She survived a bout with cancer when my mom, ten years older than her went to take care of her in the Dominican Republic. She even traveled often back and forth to Cuba to see her daughter and grand-daughter (in a wheelchair) and in one of those visits she fell in the shower and broke her hip. The operation that followed proved to be the cause of her demise as she was unable to withstand it.

There are so many of us struggling and suffering from debilitating and lethal diseases, fighting for our lives every day and when we see the waste, the foolishness of those who have young, healthy lives deprive themselves of the pleasure of living because some asshole called them a name; we can’t fathom it, we can’t understand it and we want to shake them and impress upon them how wonderful life is.

We want to tell them: Hold on, IT GETS BETTER!