Suicide as a Comfort

Veteran/soldier suicide has been in the spotlight for a while now. Most of us have seen the horrible statistics of how many veterans commit suicide every day. It’s become an epidemic, but strangely I’d never wondered about the spouses or the toll they, we, are paying.

That is until I spoke to Jenny here at Not Alone about their new project Just Wait. I started thinking about my own struggle with suicide and how I’d used it as a sick sort of comfort for several years.
When things were bad, and don’t get me wrong they aren’t perfect now but they’re better… but when things were bad I would lay in bed not wanting to get up and knowing I had to face the day. I would tell myself if I needed to I could stop it all but today I needed to try and see if I could make things better before I made the final decision to end my life.

It was a strange sort of comfort I’m actually embarrassed to admit. Just like an alcoholic I used the knowledge I could stop the pain to endure more. One day at a time. Choose to live today and see about tomorrow, tomorrow.

When it was all said and done, each day I found a reason to live and those reasons varied. Today it might have been that my son had a project needing to be done. Tomorrow it may have been that we’d received a call from a congressman saying he was going to help us. The next it may have been that my husband was having a bad day and he needed me more than I needed peace.

I chose to wait each day, one day, every day until those days stretched into weeks, then months, and now years. Now that the worst of it has passed and we’ve come to understand what we must do to deal with the scars war caused I don’t look to suicide for comfort. I look to my husband, and my family. My kids. My pets. My plants. My life.

I chose to live. You can as well. Today, find a reason and just wait.