LIVING FOREVER? Suicide Crisis Alert!
Would you like to live forever?
There are times I could answer YES! Other times I would declare NO!
This is one crazy messed up world! Navigating through a normal day can be a huge challenge. Ordinary “stuff” of life can overwhelm us. Then the BIG STUFF happens… break-ups, financial disasters, fires, floods and other “natural” disasters… which feel very UNnatural…illness, death and grief! I’ve lived through a house fire (I was six months old), a hotel flood, a basement flood, a hurricane in New Jersey, an earthquake in Chicago (yes, Chicago in the 60’s) …it cracked our apartment wall! I’ve lost pets, parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, went bankrupt, lost gigs and opportunities, lost friends, jobs ended, and watched cancer ravage loved ones…heart attacks steal others…suffered through 4 divorces only to lose the love of my life to prostate cancer!
Why would anybody want to keep on keepin’ on in this weary world? Maybe because we are built to WANT to LIVE!
Which brings me to this important notice:
OUR GENERATION IS EXPERIENCING A PLAGUE OF SUICIDE! It is killing our children and teens as well as adults…especially seniors.
I considered suicide while sitting on the (inside) window ledge of a 12th floor apartment on North Dearborn Street in Chicago. I was 24 years old and life had become unbearable and I thought I was SO BAD…that I didn’t deserve to live!
My 3 year old son saved me!!! YES, it was the thought of HIM… IF I threw myself out the window to the snow covered street below on that January night…my little boy would forever have to explain how his mommy didn’t love him enough to live through her pain…to take care of him!!
THANK GOD …I “heard” HIS VOICE…(God’s) reminding me of my purpose at that moment…to be the mother of the child HE had entrusted me with. Somehow in the midst of my muddled and mentally ill mind I had the sense to avoid jumping!
I was admitted to the psyciatric unit the next day…in a hospital just a few blocks away from the hospital I was born in! During that 2 week stay…I met other patients who were far worse off than I was. My middle-aged room mate was in for shock treatments. How scary it was, to see this woman delivered back to her bed with a ghost-like gray face and glazed over eyes. She looked like a dead woman only she was breathing!
Another woman took a dislike to me and burned a hole in my red wool coat with a cigarette. The hospital paid for it to be re-woven…but I always remembered the spot where that troubled lady vented her anger. I think she was jealous of my talkative and outgoing nature.
When I was admitted I was given an injection. I inquired as to what that was for? They told me it was to “make me talk”! I laughed heartily and said: “They don’t realize I won’t need an injection to make me talk”! And I didn’t! I had lots to say about how painful my existence had been over the past almost quarter of a century!!
One night we watched an old lady…try to climb the glass wall in the cage-like room she was isolated in for her own protection. This so-called “safe room” was right beside the nurse’s station…but the nurses didn’t pay alot of attention to her antics! She screamed and yelled and lept at the glass walls; first one side then the other! If it hadn’t been so terribly sad to see this patient in such an awful state…it would have been hilarious! She looked like a monkey at the zoo!
One day in the craft room, about ten of us female patients were making party favors for an upcoming banquet at the nearby Methodist Church. We were to glue pill cups on paper lace doilies and decorate them with ribbons and tiny fake flowers. Then the cups would be filled with nuts and mints for the banquet guests to enjoy. While we were working on this project I suddenly got a wave of the giggles…and just had to share my spontaneous outburst with my hospital mates! I exclaimed: “Ladies, do you realize we are in the loony bin making NUT CUPS?”
I was the ONLY one who laughed at my joke!
Later that week my shrink told me he knew I was going to be alright! He explained that I still had a sense of humor and that I dressed up in hot pink complete with a matching velvet hair bow (that was in style at the time!) and these were 2 good signs that I still had some self esteem and a will to live!!
BUT today our kids and grandkids are being bullied…rejected…overwhelmed in our society…and they are “OFFING” themselves faster than we can keep up with the reports. THE INTERNET plays a huge part in the desensitizing young people! They participate in the dangerous “game” of cyber-bullying from a distance. Do they realize the seriousness of how their WORDS can
KILL, STEAL and DESTROY! (Biblical warning about the enemy of our soul…who desires to “take us out” one way or another! This “fierce lion” is prowling about looking for the vulnerable!
We can’t afford to “sleep” through the signs!
In my day the kids threw verbal insults, spitballs or rocks at me …so the principal allowed me to be dismissed from school early. Early dismissal meant I could walk home before the bullies had a chance to catch up with me! Then in high school I endured hair pulling, pinches and slaps on the face…
delivered by envious classmates during a schoolbus ride home from a state music contest. Their initial celebration when I won “first place” in the state with my vocal performance soon turned to jealousy once again. My parents had many talks with the principal and teachers about how to handle it all! It’s pretty frightening to have your so-called friends turn on you with such vicious behavior.
THANKFULLY, I was a very determined kid…
committed to my dream of becoming a professional entertainer…and those mean bullies could not steal my dream!
CHECK OUT the CROSSROADS (crossroads.ca)
in Burlington, Ontario, Canada.
They are currently devoting 2 weeks of programming and promoting a book “Why They Die” to raise awareness and create TV and Internet programs to HELP!
IT is URGENT! They Need our help!
About living FOREVER? I live through the difficult times of this life by keeping in mind that there IS a WAY to live FOREVER in ETERNITY with my CREATOR. He sent His Son…Jesus/Yeshua to make a way for this fallen world of messed up people.
It only takes recognizing how far from HIS PLAN for our lives we have strayed…asking Him for forgiveness…THEN FORGIVING anyone who has hurt us in any way…(can’t be done in human terms but HE helps us with that too!) and asking to BELONG TO HIM…in the life that Never Ends.
Where there is no more weeping and wailing…nor pain and sorrow…nor illness and death.
TALK ABOUT AN OFFER YOU CAN’T REFUSE?
I think THIS IS IT! I’m Goin’ for it…YOU?
p.s. Let’s do everything we can for the kids who are dying far too young…and not knowing there is HOPE!