Book of Jamez

55 y/o malcontent, something of a writer

Tag: suicide

  • Diabetes, Depression and Death

    Diabetes, Depression and Death

    This is likely a whiny post. This was your only warning.

    I’ve recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Many years ago I used to get tested pretty regularly to see if I had diabetes… see my biological father died from complications with diabetes when he was 48 (I just turned 48). His complications were that he wanted to drink more than he cared about managing his diabetes and ended up in a coma after a stroke…. and then we pulled the plug.

    A doctor a few years back, when I asked to be tested, said to me about diabetes “if you don’t want diabetes don’t get fat, it’s that simple”. So am I fat? I’m larger than I have been ever, so I guess that could be a yes, but I didn’t think I was that fat… and I know a lot of people that are fat that don’t have diabetes so the doctor was a tool I’m thinking. But I guess I’m fat… so we have depression, diabetes and diameter issues?

    From my handbook given to me by my doctor – “Type 2 Diabetes – This is the most common form of diabetes. In type 2 diabetes, your body makes some insulin, but not enough or the insulin your body makes does not work right. The amount of glucose in your blood goes up. Over time, high blood glucose damages the eyes, kidneys, nerves and heart.” and the “Complications of uncontrolled diabetes include” Blindness, Kidney disease, nerve damage, amputation, cardiovascular disease: Stroke, Heart attack, loss of circulation in arms and legs.

    That sounds pretty bad right? I don’t have a lot of fear about this – I’m thinking I’m not a fan of amputation or blindness … but with the depression going on and the goal being an end to everything, well does it really matter that I have another thing.

    People with type 2 diabetes may need diabetes pills. Many also need insulin. I take a pill with dinner, that’s it at the moment… there are no injections of insulin – although there were during my recent trip to the hospital, they can’t give the pill in the hospital as it might interfere with things so they give you shots of insulin, wasn’t so bad really.

    I frequently already have had hypoglycemia – as a result of this. Although it’s not unique to diabetics, it’s not a lot of fun for me – probably not for you either. But now I have some ideas of what to do about it and how to get relief. Hypoglycemia – think Julia Roberts at the salon in Steel Magnolias when Sally Fields made her drink orange juice… mine doesn’t make me a demon woman like Julia was but I feel really weird.

    I do eat a little more than I used to, but my diet is still pretty limited. I love pizza, burgers, steaks and fast food…. but I’ve started to branch out. I recently fell in love with rice… white rice… yes, I’m very vanilla. I love the texture, how it feels when it is cooked just right and you can feel a gentle firmness and just melt it away on your tongue… it’s odd I know. But I’ve also incorporated a lot of chicken into my diet – cheap and it tastes pretty damn good when I dry rub it in curry. I love my chicken so hot that I start to sweat when I eat it… well almost anything that hot is good.

    Exercise is not a thing that I like to do. I like to walk and I like to ride my bike, but that’s about it (No, I don’t want to ride my bike or walk with you – not a fan of people you know). Back in school I learned some boxing during a self defense class and I liked that so I’m thinking I could tolerate a boxing class or martial arts class. Going to the gym to exercise and just to exercise seems like a waste of time – there’s no purpose out side of being or getting healthy… well I hear (and don’t believe at all) that there are some people that get an endorphin high from exercising and that’s why they do it… damn junkies… but never happened to me, the high comes when it’s over and you think you’ll never have to do it again.

    My depression is currently not in cycle, my doctor and I think it cycles through and at the moment it’s not rearing it’s ugly head too much. When it does there are no solutions to anything and even the most ordinary task can seem overwhelming and pointless. I’m taking two drugs at present to combat this – Abilify and Escitalopram – and it really seems to work, unfortunately on occasion I get giddy… which my doctor says is a good thing and I shouldn’t mind, but I do. Not a fan of giddy.

    Even when the depression is off cycle that thoughts of dying are persistent. Those thoughts have more fuel now with the recent diagnosis – don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do… well not eat what I want anymore.

    I begin to wonder what’s the point – why be here if you continually can’t do the things you used to enjoy. Many people live for others – they love so deeply for someone that it gives their life meaning or something.

    I don’t think I really want that. One of the first thoughts I had after the realization that I was in love with Bill was – damn it, now I have to care about living… for him. Fortunately, love ends, at least mine did so that worry didn’t last.

    My friend Suzanne says that I bring joy to others and that’s worth living for. I’m too selfish to believe that and there is evidence to the contrary in famous people – Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain…. they brought joy but I think they understood what I do this feeling of just wanting it to be over. It’s not a crisis it’s just a desire to die.

    I talk a lot about death being a human right and I think it is. It should be an individual choice for whomever wants to end it. There are enough people that want to live forever and ever and have those things that they want to “live for”, let them have what they want and let us have what we want… but don’t make it senseless, shameful and messy… use suicide to help others… organ donation, scientific study.

    When I’m deep in my depression and thoughts of dying are all encompassing I spend most of my time trying to plan a painless, clean death and I have a few ideas that are pretty good. I’ve had some ideas that were ruined upon further research by percentages or errors and or mistakes by otherwise well meaning suicidal folks.

    Imagine, and I do, a world where giving your life for others would be considered a nice thing… like Jesus – I give of myself so others can live. My organs, blood and body used to bring about enlightenment or life for someone who wants it. How many people are on lists to receive organs and will die because they aren’t there.. how many assisted life takings (we have to come up with a different name than suicide it has too many negative connotations and we want this to be a beautiful thing and it should be) could then be used to save the life of children, adults, loved ones that otherwise would die.

    I thought about selling my body/organs as a way to commit suicide. There is a black market (if I’m to believe TV Dramas) where organs go for big bucks…. I could sell my whole body for $80,000 – $100,000 and then they could take my life the next year… just give me a year to finish it all up and be done with it. Winner winner chicken dinner right?

    Diabetes, Depression, Death, and Diameter… added that last one here after writing thing appeared. Today, which is how AA told me to live, is just fine eating a little less, tasting a lot less and being more aware of what’s going on in my own body.

  • Trying to Let Go

    Trying to Let Go

    Sometimes, more often that I’d like to admit, I can’t sleep. Insomnia is a big deal and it literally keeps me awake at night. I’ve tried a bunch of different things to combat this – stopped drinking caffeinated beverages, stayed up really late to make myself more tired, took a nap when I first got home… and more. None of that worked for me.

    I’d done some mindfulness meditation and sometimes that can help get me to a place where I just drift off, but that then leads me to get sleepy when I mediate as well. Might be worth it if it were a guaranteed solution to the problem.

    What I usually do, instead of counting sheep, is draw xes across my hear in my mind.. one line, then another, then another. The idea was formed from an old news article I read where a kid with a tumor would imagine a video game where he was destroying the tumor with spaceships and that killed it… likely he had radiation, chemo and the like but that wasn’t the headline so I didn’t really read the entire article.. that’s the American way you know. However, I thought visualization might be the key for me.

    If I spend each night, or most nights drawing a cross across my heart it may just give out during the night and I wouldn’t wake. That would be ideal to just pass in my sleep… I had considered drawing xes on a vision of my brain but I have this fear of being in a vegetative state and no one letting me die… like that one girl congress came back from vacation to save her life… which was such a ridiculous mess if you ask me… let people die, what’s wrong with you people.

    Anyway… I’m still here and still breathing and the heart is still beating….. so it doesn’t work, trust me I’ve been doing this for a while now.

    Last night instead of doing that I thought “maybe i just need to let go, if I just relax my body and mind and completely let it all go I’ll just fade away” that kept me up for a while, thinking on that and how it might be a solution. Didn’t work, obviously, here I am writing a blog post about wishing I were gone.

    Thing is, I don’t want to go violently or make a mess… I just want to go. I mean, if I were to get shot while just doing what I normally do or die in a car crash I didn’t cause… well I’m not going to struggle to hold on… but if I had my way it would be easier to just go.

    I ponder frequently about why we, as a society, don’t have a simpler way to do this. I guess most people don’t think like this… so why would they think a solution would be needed. But I reflect on the many suicides in the world each day and how they went… can’t we make it easier for them and survivors… just make it a new part of our culture… someone wants to die… who are we to say “No you can’t”. You want to live and I’m not saying “no you can’t” so how is it fair?

    not that life is fair I guess…

    I don’t actually think that all suicide is because someone is depressed or mad or running away… I think sometimes, me in particular, some people just are done… it’s a nihilist thing I guess… not caring, not wanting to have anything to do with anyone or anything… just wanting to be done.

    So tonight, like last night, I will just try to let go of reality and pass… I’m not hopeful, but strangely it’s something to look forward to.

  • Two Pills

    Two Pills

    The depression I have is mostly under control with medication. I was taking Celexa but it stopped working so now I’m taking Paxil which appears to be working again. Working means no dark cloud around world, not everything seems hopeless and I can justify not ending it all.

    I talk about depression and how I first came to take medication in a story on my blog called “Lost” and you can read about it there.

    I have seen a psychologist or two and talked to my regular doctor about these things. The regular doc diagnosed me as no only having severe depression but now I have severe anxiety also – I don’t really want to be around anyone, or talk to anyone or leave home… it’s fun to try to live this way. The regular doc suggested I see a psychiatrist so that’s scheduled. Not to worry, we all know I’m crazy so there wont be any difference in how we treat me or you…. or those other people you can’t see.

    Last night I dreamed I was meeting with the psychiatrist – she was a short pudgy woman with wiry black hair. As I entered her office she was sitting with her back to a corner on the floor, she motioned me forward.

    I sat down on a pillow across from her and we talked about life, my new job and death and dying. I advised her, as I have others, if they would just be two pills to end it all I would take them at that moment and be done with it. She offered me her hand palm up holding two pills – one red one blue. I smiled, and asked her if she was fucking with me… she assured me no. I grabbed the pills shoved them in my mouth and swallowed.

    It was actually one of my more peaceful suicide dreams.

    Today, if there were an over the counter option to end it all, with forms or online options to donate body parts to science or people that oddly want to live, I’d be gone already.

  • Lost

    I took a long journey last year but I didn’t physically go anywhere. In October, maybe even before that, I started to get depressed. Nothing new really – these bouts have come and gone before and I just muddle through and hope for the best as eventually I’ll even out and be fine. I even wrote about it in my blog in November as I had a few good days in a row and I thought I was through the storm… but it was just a brief respite.

    It got progressively worse and then dramatically worse, before I knew it there was so much darkness in everything and I was lost. I didn’t have positive thoughts about anything, it was all I could do to smile at people at meetings or at work if I thought it mattered – most of the time it didn’t.

    I committed without fear to doing things in the future when asked – it wouldn’t matter anyway I wasn’t planning to stick around. I said yes to a trip, yes to a family member, yes to a friend – but I knew that it would be over before then. I was a yes man, because nothing mattered – not one thing in the world. (more…)

  • Long Enough

    I don’t know why people are so opposed to physician assisted suicide. What’s the big deal – these folks have or are about to experience pain, disease, hopelessness like no health person can understand at all. What’s wrong with letting them go and finding a for sure way to enable the end of that pain for them.

    I think it’s a religion thing mostly – the “sin” of suicide that you’ll suffer in hell for all eternity if you take your own life. Well and I guess family and friends might be “hurt” or saddened at the sudden loss of someone – but why is it there business if the person is sick? That I don’t understand. Don’t they want the pain and suffering to end for that person, have they seen the despair and anguish in that person’s eyes?

    I don’t know. I don’t know why it’s anyone else’s choice at all.

    I think if you decide you’ve lived long enough hell feel free to go. It shouldn’t be looked upon with shame and fear but as someone’s own choice. You want to go – go.

    Sure there should be caveats… if you’re under 30 you don’t get to choose suicide, young people often make terrible decisions (marriage, babies, college, Justin Beiber albums…). There should be a minimum 2 week waiting period and psychiatric evaluation (of course current psychiatric ideas would have to be tossed into the trash) would be mandatory. Also you couldn’t do this type of thing to escape a debt, I think people should pay their debts.

    There are so many people out there struggling to stay alive – some many people that need organs. A systematic suicide program could keep people who want to die alive long enough to donate otherwise healthy organs to people who don’t want to die. This seems to make a lot of sense to me… maybe we could find a way to kill the brain but leave the body functioning until all of the organs and marrow were harvested for use with people.

    It’s rather controversial I’m sure, but really who are we to decide that someone has to live – why is it any of our business at all? If we could offer a safe, economic way to allow people to “move on” if you will – wouldn’t that be to the benefit of society over all? Wouldn’t it be better than locking them up in institution or jails or pumping them full of chemicals to try to correct their brain? Who’s to say this isn’t a natural part of what’s supposed to happen? The planet is overcrowded.. there are too many people already.

    Me, I figure 10 – 15 more years should be long enough.

  • David

    I found out that my first sponsee, David R, passed away yesterday. David was a real alcoholic, he struggled to find the answer in AA and was the kind of drunk who’d been in treatment centers and involved with the courts countless times. He was, for all intents and purposes, hopeless – that’s the kind of drunk you don’t think is going to make it and then BOOM they get it and their whole life is changed… but that didn’t happen for him. He had brief moments of sobriety when I knew him, and then the crushing fall back into the disease – it was hard to watch for me, probably a lot harder to watch for his family. I feel guilt – maybe I didn’t read him the right part of the book, or show him how good it would be or … I don’t know, a million things, but it’s not about what I did or didn’t do, I tried – I reached out my hand and offered a way out, the same way that was shown to me, that’s all I was bound to do.

    David is the guy I wrote about and got published in the A.A. Grapevine – ( Read story here ). I was working over nights at the Fahrman Center, a treatment center/halfway house, when David called and was suicidal. I talked to him for a good long time and eventually had the police get out there to get him – he was taken to the psychiatric unit at the local hospital, but not before he made me promise to come up and see him there and bring my fellow AA’s with me. That morning, likely before the sun came up I called all the guys on my list and a bunch of us went to see him. That phone call and follow up visits by AAs to him opened up an avenue for that hospital and the District to talk to one another, we started a pager program and started to carry the message to drunks up there – it changed things.

    But David didn’t stay sober, I don’t remember when he got drunk after that – but I know he was sober for a while and he seemed happy. He kept focusing on getting his family back and how he could get sober if he had them, but I knew from the book that wasn’t the case…

    “Let no alcoholic say he cannot recover unless he has his family back. This just isn’t so. In some cases the wife will never come back for one reason or another. Remind the prospect that his recovery is not dependent upon people. It is dependent upon his relationship with God. We have seen men get well whose families have not returned at all. We have seen others slip when the family came back too soon.” Alcoholics Anonymous, pp 99-100

    He wouldn’t, or maybe couldn’t hear that and he got drunk.

    The last time I saw David he had called me and was really drunk, he was staying at a little motel down the highway and I went to see him. He looked pretty bad, was still drunk as hell and was hard to understand. He started to talk about bad things that had happened to him as a child- but then he just passed out.

    I’d get reports once in a while from friends who work in the Drug and Alcohol treatment field once in a while – and I always hoped he’d show up one day at a meeting I’d get to when I was visiting, but it didn’t happen.

    I’ve cried a bunch of times today – a few times for happy reasons before I heard this news – but mostly for David. I so want to grab a slipping newcomer and just slap him silly

    “Don’t you see, can’t you see this will happen to you to”

    “just do what we’ve asked, and you’ll see, it’ll all get better”

    but I know that won’t work… I used to hear in meetings “You can’t see until you can see and you can’t hear until you can hear” and it’s sadly so true. For some there’s nothing I can do to help them until they’re ready – and some sadly will never be ready.

    I was at my current sponsor Flo’s house when I heard about David today, I was helping him prepare a memorial for his first sponsor who passed a few weeks ago. And it was just the right place to be at the right time – I find it hard to cry in front of people, even my sponsor, and he left the room. Here we were, preparing to honor the man who had reach him only to hear about the loss of a man I couldn’t reach. That’s AA for you, I was where I was supposed to be today.

    The old-timers and the book say that even though David didn’t stay sober, I did and that’s a good thing – that doesn’t make me feel better at all. I want it all, I want David to be next to me at a meeting grinning at newcomers who can’t pronounce anonymity and shaking hands at the door. I want them all to get it and to have a better life and to see how a few simple rules can change the world.

    I believe in Alcoholics Anonymous, because it worked for me when I worked for it – I didn’t get it when I just stayed on the outskirts and watched others participate. When David was participating and shaking hands he seemed happier than I’d seen him before – I saw change in him. But our book says others are likely to see the change in newcomers before they see it in themselves, that may have been the case with David, I’m not sure.

    There is a solution, I’ve found it, it was shown to me by sponsors who had it shown to them by sponsors who had it shown to them by sponsors… it’s been working for over 75 years now. We have a lot of people to try to reach out to, I want to be the helping hand to show them the way out, I want to see them help others and watch a marvelous fellowship grow up about them. I wanted that for David, I want that for all my sponsees – the fellowship I have around me is so vast now, reach across continents, internets and handshakes – I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

    Rest in Peace David

  • Helpless

    Last week I received news that one of my best friends had tried to take their own life – thankfully they weren’t successful. Afterward, it was discovered that the suicidal thoughts had been growing more insistent in the last few weeks; they had been struggling with some issues for years; and they had kept it all to themselves.

    My first reaction to the news was one of fear and anger mixed with a lot of confusion – how did it get to this point? Then I would wonder how I had failed at the position of “best friend” if I couldn’t see how much they were hurting and how desperate they were for help. Then again wanting to punch them in the face for trying such a cowardly act as this or tears coming in sheets down my face for the thought of this world without them.

    It’s hard to sit half a country away and know all this is happening to someone you love, it’s harder still to know even the family and friends that are there with them are as helpless as I am, as befuddled, fearful and angry. I worry about the family, they are my family and I just don’t know how they’re going to get through this… then I remember God.

    I remember that I wouldn’t even have these people in my life if it weren’t for God, I wouldn’t even have my best friend still alive if not for His grace, his love, his support.

    Knowing and letting go are two very different things… and I’m still struggling a bit with the letting go. Still wondering how we got to this point and what we can do to get out of it.

    It wasn’t that long ago that I found myself wanting to jump off a balcony ( See Here) and end it all, and things were going pretty well for me at the time. I guess I don’t understand how depression works, how suicidal thoughts can get so prominent in our heads that we can’t see any other way out of situations.

    If you find yourself in a situation where you think suicide is the only option, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at

    1-800-273-8255

    There is always hope, always another way, always someone who loves you in the darkest of situations that can offer you a helping hand, a hug, a heartbeat.