six twenty-six on the twenty-sixth day of the new year. a decision to say 'fuck it' and get on with it has a bit more gravity at 47 than it used to in my thirties. i didn't write yesterday. i had a maelstrom of emotions to contend with and though it would have helped to sort through them, i wasn't in the processing mood.
bit ticket item; my younger brother tried to kill himself. or so the story goes. i have scant details but what i have is that he took pills and his wife found him unresponsive (or unconscious or even sleep) and she got him to the hospital. this was apparently on saturday, and sunday my mom knew about it and didn't say anything to anyone. and monday she said something, only because the 'guilt' that she felt about her lack of 'mothering' skills in regard to a 45 year old man overwhelmed her.
before i turn this entire thing into something about me, let me say that i am sorry my brother is hurting to such a degree that he feels the need for either attention or breath cessation. i say it this way deliberately. my brother has a wife, no children. my brother is a baptized Jehovah's Witness. my brother moved to Florida from youngstown and then to Alabama with the eldest, or where the eldest lives, anyway, and then back to Florida and then to Pennsylvania. my brother is a good person, but he's a sad man. he's always been sort of sad, i guess. as with most of the rest of us, my brother doesn't communicate with any of us, as we don't communicate with him. there is no logical reason for this. but it speaks volumes about our state of mind, collectively. my brother works, usually in health care as far as nursing homes, or in cleaning usually at hospitals. around the sick but not able to do anything about the sicknesses. again, indicative. my brother is a good man. he's a sweetheart. but he has issues as we all do, and some of those issues, as with everyone else, become apparent if you look close enough. i'm not here to speak on my brother's issues. I would personally wonder if this is his first 'attempt' at suicide. i'd wager it's not. but i have a severe lack of data to make any kind of correlation. he was at home, his wife found him. i don't believe suicide is always intelligently worked out, but i do believe that a sincere desire to die usually means you seek solace, or at least minimize the chances of being thwarted.
i tried to kill myself in sobriety. i think it was about four or five years in. i was separated from the woman i would eventually make the mistake of marrying. i can say that it was perpetuated by discovering i was replaceable; in my separating from her she got on with her life, and i was childish to the extent that i felt, as she was 'the cause of all the problems', she should be mourning my absence. but she wasn't. and i felt as if i should just give up on everything, which is how i dealt with sadness. in the end, i went to the emergency room myself, got my stomach pumped (all my blood pressure medicine and some sleeping pills, figuring if i fell asleep my bp meds would eventually lower my blood pressure until i died) and they contemplated putting me into the psych ward. i was in counseling, which is the only reason i didn't end up there. that was my last ACTIVE attempt at suicide. qualifier is because going years without regularly taking my blood pressure meds, not giving a damn about my health, my weight or my well-being, was a pretty sure sign that i was passively trying to die, that i'd given up on life.
i'm saying all that as a way of trying to clarify that there are reason for people attempting to end their lives. the ones whose reasons are good enough for themselves succeed and nothing on this earth stops them. the ones whose reasons aren't good enough for themselves tend to live, or not go through with it. they have numbers, statistics on the number of people who kill themselves, though i'd bet they are not accurate at all. but they have no statistics on how many people TRY to kill themselves, or how many people contemplate suicide on a regular basis. i wish they'd study that, because an accurate picture of that kind of mentality would do so much more for being able to address mental health issues than exists at this time.
i will wait for more information about my brother. i will wait to see if i should speak to him, because talking after the event when you don't talk much before is a pretty sure sign of not really caring, at least to the person inside the bubble. again, that's from both my experience and my life observation.
smaller ticket items; i pulled out all the papers i could find in my apartment yesterday, but could not find my paperwork from my settlement with the company i worked for when i came down with CHF, and they fired me while in the hospital and blackballed me from getting hired anywhere else with falsified data about my termination. i am going to email them this morning and see if they can email me something on my payment to them, but i fear i'm going to end up being penalized for bureaucratic reasons. if so, i am at least partially at fault, so i will have to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. but it goes with what i was saying about my younger brother.
this life can be hard as rocks thrown at your head by religious zealots. sometimes, the only recourse that seems to make any sense is to just step away from the table permanently. when i think of not being able to even scrape by, that someone could casually decide to triple my burden, which is already considerable, and they wouldn't lose a night's sleep, it makes my brain prepare for panic mode, and possibly shutdown. but what i have to remember is i've dealt with hard stuff my entire adult life. i'm not going to check out because i don't want to do hard stuff now. i have spoken to my counselor about the possibility of me killing myself after i get Syd grown and gone. i don't know how serious i am about that. i think i want to downsize my life, but that seems to be a little too compact, even for me. but my responsibility is to get Syd grown and gone, regardless of the burdens that accompany that. any decisions on an exit strategy have to wait until that job is done. i just think that's the right thing to do.
okay, i have to send this email and then i'm going to prepare for breakfast with my older brother. this can stand as my entry for the twenty-fifth.
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