Warm coffee on a snowy day in front of the fireplace, late night city lights, loud music in a speeding car with the windows down, 5 am sunrises and 8 pm sunsets, the smell of rain on warm asphalt, breezy summer nights and laughing until all you can get out is a faint, breathless squeak. These are the small things that make life worth living and yet my cousin Brian, along with many others in this lifetime, struggled to find peace within these small moments. These are all things many suicide victims don’t see themselves deserving of and they leave us all wondering why.
Why couldn’t you have seen all the good around you? Why couldn’t you have talked to someone? Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t I notice? Why didn’t I visit more? Why, why why. These are questions I am all too familiar with because after recently losing my cousin to suicide. I find them constantly ringing in my ears and filling my chest with a mixture of anger, confusion, sadness and leaving me paralyzed. Brian brought this ray of light to everyone’s life whether you knew him for years or had just met him—there was this warm aura to him that people couldn’t ignore, and it was obvious he had a special gift. Fighting through the pain that his rare disease, cystic fibrosis, brought him, he managed to prove many people wrong and lived longer than originally predicted. Like the stubborn kid he was, he refused to let it define him. Which makes the pain of how he left the physical world a whole lot worse.
The first weeks are hard, but it’s the lifetime ahead that is even harder to cope with. Knowing your loved one should be experiencing every good thing you are alongside you. After something tragic like this, it’s easy to say we need to be focused more on suicide prevention and while yes, I think that is true, it is definitely not the whole truth. As a community, we need to be focusing on kindness and acceptance. Too often are victims of suicide scared to come forward and talk about these feelings for fear of being judged or treated differently. It reflects in suicide being the top 10 leading cause of death in the United States. There is this stigma around suicide and suicide victims that we need to get rid of. This idea that they were too selfish and were only thinking about themselves when they decided to take their own life, when in reality, they tried. They tried so hard to hang on to what little they could, but when they made that choice, they saw it as their only way out, and no one will ever know the whole truth as to why, but maybe we don’t want to know.
As someone who has been on both ends of the suicide spectrum, the one thing suicidal individuals need is to be shown is love, compassion and support. Many will say no and will push back on the thought of others helping them, but that is simply because they really don’t believe they are deserving of such amazing people in their beautiful life and they really don’t see their life as something worth fighting for anymore—I get it. However, just be there for them and showing them that despite any horrible things they are dealing with, they have someone in their corner always.
Please check on your friends, family and loved ones. Even those who you’d never suspect. Show them a shoulder to lean on and hug them whenever you can and above all, take care of yourself. There is so much life has to offer, and it is so worth living because one bad day, week, month, even year does not equal a bad life.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or just lost a loved one to suicide, please, please, don’t be afraid to ask for help.
National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 800-273-8255
In loving memory of Brian Vasquez, who left us tragically and took a bit of the worlds light with him.