Daily Archives: January 1, 2012

I have found that there are two types of deaths that seems to hit me the hardest and it is the death of the young and suicides.  I especially take it hard when the deaths are in December.  Being raised up in a Christian family there is supposed to be a certain happiness and joy surrounding Christmas but there are years where this month is far more difficult for me.  First, let me say that I do not believe in the Christian theology since I re-evaluated it long ago but years of celebration with family and friends will always allow me to have a special place for this time of year.  In December,  I lost a friend who no longer could face this life and apparently found no one to help.  His death brought up that old memory of losing my father during this month.  Immediately after my father’s death and quite unexpectedly his youngest sister died suddenly just eight days later at the age of 43.

I am not sure whether his death trigger past memories of great pain or if it was losing someone I had known for 30 years.  He was a few years older but we went to the same school.  Fresh out of high school I went to work at the same law enforcement department as he was working.  It was from this that we really developed our friendship and our understanding.  I can still remember when I left the department and went to another agency.  It was shortly after that we had a discussion about him coming over to work in the same agency as it was a better place to work.  That was over a decade ago and up until his death he still worked there.

He was dedicated to being in law enforcement and believed in the overall good of law enforcement.  However, like so many of us who have been in the job and having seen so many different ways a person can experience pain, death, tragedy, and misery, it begins to weigh on you.  I remember after the death of an individual; myself and some paramedics were waiting on the OMI, we were joking and having a pretty interesting conversation while a man laid dead within just a few yards of our position.  It didn’t strike me on how callous that seemed or uncaring because you see by that time I had changed.  I had learned to deal with death differently than most people and found ways to distance myself from the situation.  I had become harden to it but not impervious.  There were certain calls that no matter how hard you tried, you had an extremely difficult time keeping it together.  The death of a baby from SIDs as parents cried in agony of their baby’s death, the death of children in an automobile accident, the murder of children by their own parents, the death of friends who you had to be the first responder, well the list does go on.  Then there are just death of the person composition but not their body.   I was out with another officer who I considered a friend and a situation went badly resulting in him having to shoot and kill a young man in his early 20′s.  It was one of those suicide by cop situations but it forever changed him.  In just 10 months he had divorced his wife.  I witnessed him going from a happy great guy who was full of life to a dark unhappy person who had no direction nor care to find one.  One night I got a call over the radio to meet with him.  He wanted to let me know that he appreciated everything including being a friend but he just couldn’t get the events out of his head of that night.  He told me that I was a reminder of the incident as well as the department and he wanted nothing more to with the reminders.  That night he said goodbye to his job, his co-workers and his friends.  He didn’t commit suicide in the strictest sense of the word but the man that he once was had died.  To this day I am told he has never come back from the situation and keeps a distance from those of the past.  Through him I found that death comes in different forms, but he still has a chance to change; however unlikely.  Not so for my other friend.

Just out of the blue, with very little warning other than some debt and what appeared to be some slight depression he decided to take his service weapon and kill himself.  Still in the prime of his life.  He had a wife and a daughter but they were not enough to keep him here.  He chose the ultimate and final goodbye.  In one respect, people can say he was selfish but in another some will say he was suffering.  He had many friends, family and colleagues who would have helped him in an instant if he had asked but he never did.  He kept the pain to himself and for that he paid the ultimate price.  In this final decision he left those who cared about him with so many questions that will never be answered.  Having gone through my own moments of depression from loss and just life, I can tell you that trying to reach a depressed person is difficult and at times impossible.  There is just an abyss inside you.  For those who are outside the best thing to do is provide support, get them out to engage in activities, try to get them to professional help but in the end the war within will only be fought by themselves.  The ultimate truth is that there are those who have made the final choice and no one will be able to stop them from what they see as the only way out.

My writing this has nothing really do with anyone in general but myself.  Call it therapy and my way of saying goodbye.  I just wish my friend would have made a different choice.  May he  have found some peace.

Goodbye my old friend.