Why?

Why?

The one word question that I asked myself and God and anyone who would listen was "why?"  It took me all of these years to answer that question and the answer is "I don't know and I never will know."  Not having an answer is very hard but getting past the point of racking my brain for a reason was much harder. 

Ken's last face to face words to me were "My life just never really worked out."  It was only in hindsight that I realized he was talking about himself in past tense. I didn't pick up on that at the time and you probably already know we grab on to any possibility that we could have done something to stop them.  I replayed that conversation a million times and each time I would think "why didn't you see it?  Why didn't you sit him down and talk about it?"  I simply didn't see it and I can't blame myself for that anymore.  If he meant it to be a hint he failed to convey it.

It is a fact that my brother had talked about suicide for at least 25 years.  As early as grade school he spoke of his desire to end it all.  As I said in my previous post our childhood was awful.  Our father was a small man with a quick temper.  Our mother was a master munipulator and suffered from borderline personality disorder.  The combination of the two of them was gasoline and fire. When stressed out from being munipulated by her our father would beat us and berate us.  Ken got the worst of it.  It was as if he had hated him from the day he was born.  I think deep down my father did love me but I am just as sure that he did not love Ken.  Again, I do not have the answer to "why?" 

Ken was correct when he said his life had not worked out but I think it could have if he had tried a different way.  He had suffered from an autoimmune disease which was painful and added to his insecurities about his appearance. In his eyes he was ugly. In truth he was a very good looking. All of the years of growing up in a house where you are told you are stupid and lazy and a loser take their toll and he had internatized every insult.  As he entered his teen years he experiemented with drugs.  He continued to self medicate his physical and emotional pain until the end. It would be easy to blame the drugs and claim a quick answer to "why".  I don't think the reason someone takes their life is ever that simple. 

If you have lost someone to suicide you may find yourself going back over every conversation you can remember having with them and second guessing the meaning of every comment.  You may try to reconstuct their last days, weeks or months.  I did that too.  I even used mapquest to see the roads he would have driven to get from his apartment to the spot where he was found and I looked at that road on a map every day for a long time.  It was as if I was trying to turn the clock back and make what happened not happen.

I'm sure I will be talking about the "why" question many times as this blog goes on.