Suicide; it’s a scary word. The very mention of it brings up thoughts of sadness and heartache, and it also begs the question “Is there anything we could’ve done?”
Perhaps what’s scarier is the fact that in so many incidents involving suicide, there probably isn’t anything that could’ve been done to prevent it.
We’re just left to feel helpless when someone has been battling a darkness brewing inside of them, and then we feel that heartache when the darkness wins out in the end.
This past week, the music world lost a true icon and pioneer when Chris Cornell, one of the leading rock n’ roll voices behind the Seattle grunge music scene at the turn of the 1990’s, was found dead in a Detroit hotel room just hours after performing onstage. He was discovered with a rubber band around his neck, and the death is being treated as a suicide.
Cornell was 52 years old.
It’s the kind of news that I hate seeing when I power up my laptop and go online. Not only seeing the news that someone you admired has passed away, but to learn that it was due to them taking their own life? That’s a cold slap of harsh reality that is equal parts sad, bizarre and a puzzle to comprehend.
I think back to other people that the world has lost in the same sad fashion. Take Robin Williams, for example. A soulful personality and one of the funniest performers in modern history, and yet, somewhere behind that smile and those goofy faces lay a hurting, fractured human being.
We just don’t know, do we? We don’t know what kind of darkness may be overshadowing someone – ANYONE – at any given time. It could be the complete strangers you see out in public, or it could be the people who make up your family and friends.
I can understand that darkness, at least to a certain extent. I struggle at times, though thankfully there are many more good days than bad. For too many others though, there are more bad days than good. And what it comes down to, I believe, is a need for those who are suffering to have a platform.
Initiatives such as Bell Media’s “Let’s Talk” days are a great start. The annual day-long social media event aimed at openly discussing mental health issues and raising money for programming that deals with those very things is awesome. But I guess what I’d like to see is more than just one day that openly deals with it. There are 365 days in a year, so is asking for more than ONE day where some of the most emotionally-crippling problems can be talked about with no judgment asking too much?
My favorite writer, Stephen King, wrote something that I think captures perfectly what it’s like to be someone who wants to say so much, but doesn’t because of the risk of any backlash or of being ostracized.
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
It’s true; the most important things ARE the hardest to say. And sometimes, when they aren’t said to the right people, that darkness has a way of creeping up on some souls and coming up the winner.
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
