What you did makes you an asshole and nothing more...

This will possibly offend some and piss off others, but I don’t care.

My heart hurts.

As I’m certain far too many of us are, today, I’m sick and tired and heartbroken and pissed about another in a far too long line of seemingly endless episodes that find apparently suicidal numbskulls wanting innocent bystanders and strangers to share in their own callous and craven and cowardly self-inflicted ends. 

Row and I lost two dear and long-time friends to suicide and a third to a selfish and unintended act based on self-destructive behavior, as we later discovered. We loved them very much and miss them even more. 

We spoke with them on the phone or in person a couple of days before they saw to their own ends. In those conversations, nothing was said about their struggles. Nothing was said about their pain. And speaking for myself and much to my eternal regret and my everlasting sense of shame and guilt, I wasn’t even remotely aware of what they might have been going through in what would prove to be the last moments I’d ever spend with them. We loved them very much and miss them even more.

This said, if anyone out there is struggling, in pain, and possibly contemplating completing suicide, please… please… PLEASE… talk to someone or ask someone to talk to you. PLEASE get help. PLEASE search for a solution, because you just might be able to find one. 

But… if you insist, instead, on taking your life as a permanent solution to what is probably a temporary problem --- and make no mistake, this is exactly what suicide is --- if you insist on depriving your family and friends of your love, of your light, of your life and their life with you, then… just… fucking… DO it. Take your life. 

But don’t you dare even contemplate taking the lives of innocents who never did you any harm, because all that does is end their lives, ruin the lives of those who loved them, make too many even sadder than you might have felt you were, and permanently, eternally, brand you as a coward and an asshole.

My heart hurts.