The M*A*S*H Theme is Wrong

Suicide is not painless.

I am writing this almost eight months to the day that I found my father in his bed just a few days into 2020. You can prepare yourself for a lot of things in life -- hell even just finding him dead would have been not that unsurprising based on his health. But to be set up to be the person he wanted to find him with a gunshot wound isn't one of them.

Looking back there were signs of it coming, but certainly not when I spoke to him the night before, confirming the time I was coming the next day. Could I have magically prevented it? No and I truly believe that.

Following the death of my grandmother, with whom he lived, in 2010, combined with his colorectal cancer diagnosis and the issues that followed his survival and treatment left him in a bad place. I knew he was depressed and we talked about making sure he was taking his meds, but it turns out he stopped taking all of his medicine 18 months before he took his life.

I was there that day to clean his house because it dawned on me that he had been avoiding me coming there for nine months to a year. We only met for lunch or breakfast during my trips to NJ. As he fought me coming the week prior, I said that I had offered to have professionals come in for as much as was needed the prior Christmas -- even contacting a company that he just had to call to schedule a stop into get me a price -- and enough was enough. It was either I do it now, or "I'll have to do it when you're dead," I said.

I walked around the house, surveying the damage as I looked down the hall and saw his leg stretched out on his bed down the hall from the kitchen. I assumed he was napping since he never adjusted back to real person hours following years of second and third shift work.

As I took pictures of the messes and the empty pill bottles from 18 months ago on the counter, I made a mental list of the cleaning supplies I needed to go buy and I planned to talk to him about maybe getting into assisted living when he woke up. Enough was enough.

I left the house, spending an hour or more at Walmart loading my car with cleaning supplies. Three hundred dollars and a quick stop at WaWa later, I returned and he still hadn't stirred, so I turned on the TV and cleared off a place to eat a sandwich quickly before I went to wake him up if Roseanne's laugh on the TV didn't do the trick. Then, as I talked to my long-divorced from him mother on the phone, something hit me and we decided I needed to go check.

I flipped on the light and truly don't remember much after that. Hours of waiting. Talking to different cops. Feeling relief as my family circled the wagons and sheltered me out of the rain as they ruled out the guy with a bunch of cleaning supplies in his car as a suspect, I imagine. I've seen enough episodes of The Closer to know not to believe the cops ... in a way that dark humor served me well.

No insurance. Little money in the bank. Back taxes due. A house in need of a lot of TLC. And then two months later, COVID-19.

Things have moved along now ... finally. I stood in line at 6:30 in the morning to get his car title in my name last week. The house is as cleaned out as it is going to be after four dumpsters worth of items left from him, my grandmother, her third husband, and his first wife. Sentimentality for much of it went out the window pretty quickly, but hey, I had a supply of masks and gloves before it was cool.

There are financial costs to suicide. There are emotional costs to suicide. There are therapy costs to suicide (thankfully my therapist now takes my insurance to help me out).

To be honest, I don't know if I'll ever be the same. People say there was life before COVID and now. For me, I got a jump start on that by a few months.

So, the M*A*S*H theme (Dad's favorite show) is wrong. Suicide is not painless. For him. For me. For my family. For his friends. Suicide sucks.

I'm telling this story because September, of course my birth month, is Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. But I don't want to put the burden on you as a family member or friend because I can say "what if" and "why didn't I", but really, it was on him. He needed to just say he was overwhelmed or that things were worse than we thought ... and help would have been found.

I ask you ... the person reading this considering suicide to make that call or text that person and say I can't do this alone or not right now. Just tell someone. And if there aren't people in your life you want to or can reach out, call the number below.