i am so sorry that happened to your friend, and also to you. life isn't fair, and i resent the irony of young lives full of potential being snapped from existence while my miserable old ass is still here.
i feel like death always stings more when it's right in front of my face. be it my own past attempts or loosing someone i cared about, it puts a unique perspective on things.
it was ~20yrs ago, i was in a recovery program and doing well for some years since late teens, and my mother's heart disease advanced to the point she needed a heart transplant. i think i was preoccupied with not fucking up my own life again, i was supportive and there for her the whole time, but it didn't feel real. it's pretty sudden when they call you for major organ transplant, needs to be a fresh heart, and so it all happened really fast. basically the heart wouldn't start correctly once transplanted to her body, and she was on ECMO for too long. that resulted in a person in an already nutty family tree being mentally affected by the time the situation resolved.
it wasn't a year later and my 19yr old brother died of a similar genetic heart condition. we knew he had it, and he'd had a pacemaker since he was 11, but his heart condition became acutely critical in an isolated outdoor place mid-summer, and he died before anyone could save him. i still couldn't internalize any of this shit, but i maintained and went thru the motions of what people are supposed to do. life just got real floaty, and fragile, and distant, and years later when i again needed support neither my family nor myself could hold anything more.
after some success with a new therapist and in a recovery community, i saw it again. there was this boy who would get puppy eyes at me after meetings, who repeatedly very respectfully asked me out, and i'd declined bc he was early 20s and i was almost 40. finally one afternoon as we're all chatting, sipping coffee and smokin cigs after group, i replied to him- fine. if you wanna hang out, as friends other than a meeting, you can find me at the local cat shelter scooping shit boxes, open invitation on that activity. he came twice, we had lots of laughs. turns out you can have a lot of fun cleaning shit. he was a grade A shit scooper too, most volunteers were seniors or community service, and just didn't wanna or couldn't move very fast. the second time he'd shown up at the shelter to help, i hugged him goodbye, and he gave me this realtree beanie hat with a flashlight on it, so i'd be safe walking the rest of the way home. we smiled, said i'll cya at group the upcoming weekend... and a freak work accident happened that killed him instantly. one that could've been avoided with better company safety protocols, too, so i really had someone to be pissed at for taking that chance from him. i don't have many possessions left, but i kept that hat thru the last few miserable years.
i can't stand the cruelty of someone so young, so hopeful, just gone in a flash. that along with a lot of other horrible experiences left me basically numb to life. i wished i could trade places with them, more often i think of that when i'm at rock bottom for one reason or another. if only i could offer up my randomly resilient good physical genetics, gift it to someone with manageable mental health and most important a sense of hope for their life.
i'm sure after i ctb some people will quietly say, oh, that fuck up that just couldn't get her shit together, could've done so much with her life. and maybe their right, but they can't feel what it's like to be the one behind the wheel. i guess if putting that "...your kid has so much potential" on my permanent report card helps them sleep at night, fine, i won't know or care. it's not the whole picture tho, kinda like i couldn't process those young deaths of friends and family at different points in my life. i guess life's cruel irony gets creative like that sometimes. anyways, sry for rambling.
i don't know much about you, PxB, but i do know how hard that situation is, and i hope you have really good people in your life that care about you and will help you come to terms with things. there's no quid pro quo to the whole thing, tho. really i know what little human connections i still have, i am going to do them some harm when i ctb. for me, it comes down to mental health and situational shit, and being old and tired of disappointment, pain, loss. there's no avoiding death, and it is somewhat self serving to want to put an end to the metaphorical beached whale i call life. i did give it a helluva try tho, and mathematically i'm at peace with calling it quits now. over years of temptation, planning, and a few attempts to ctb, this feels different. there's no impulse to it, there's no changing my mind over a long period of time, and most importantly there's no hope left for my life.
not tryna prolife you or anything like that, but just a really long rant to share my experience that life is always unfair, and my candle had a random chance to flicker out as it did to burn brighter. maybe if i'd been a little luckier somewhere i'd still want to be alive, but to me it's comforting to know that i really tried and from this point, my odds and condition are just getting worse. i hope you have better chances, no matter what your goals might be.
i think to myself everyday, if this is still what i want, and for years, i've answered yes quicker and louder each time.
