Not just a post but a question to all those who follow me. When is enough, enough? When do we stop giving to those who only take and never return in kind or in any kind for that matter the gifts you offer them. I am not talking celebratory gifts like birthdays and weddings where once in a while you go way over board for whatever reason and give extremely generously. (by the way people expecting re-gift visa vi your exuberant spending is wrong on all fronts). I am talking things like patience, going out of your way to do a favor you were asked to preform and against your better judgement or based on your friendship to that person, you did it as a "favor". When does one have the right or balls if you will to say no because you the person in question feel you have done enough for this individual? Is there a guideline to follow, is there an agenda somewhere that lists the check list of "do's and don'ts".
As I get older I find my patience for stupidity, arrogance and expectations of what should be right for all to be lacking at best. I find myself angered often by stupid ill thought out comments by juvenile minds in the bodies of adults or ridiculous self center actions. At times I grieve for my younger years of frivolity actions and precarious activities where though i was to be held responsible for those actions they were nonetheless my actions and it was an exciting time. I guess I know how my mentors felt when they observed me and asked the same question "When is enough, enough?
Sunday, February 27, 2011
suicide
It was the summer of 1985 I had a decent job working in a kitchen of a fine dining restaurant at the corner of College and University in the bottom of what was then the Hydro building. It was called Erl’s Court and for all intensive purposes it was a good job. I was liked by Chef Freddie and had a good position as the cold prep and dessert cook. All seemed well to the untrained eye.
I got up every morning at 4 am got on the all night street car on Gerrard Street and headed into work. Thank God it was one car all the way to work. Our days started at 6am and the trek that early took very little time but getting up so early allowed me to prep with a jigger of vodka and a little breakfast.
It was prior to my win of 649. Life was boring for me. I had no friends outside work save a cheating girlfriend who had gotten pregnant by a mutual friend of ours and I found this out the day I asked her to marry me. If anyone really knows me they will know I do not have the ability to have children so there was no way the child was mine. When it was born that was solidified as there is no Black genealogical history in my family and the child was definitely black or mulato in this case.
So there I am lonely, drinking Vodka to wake up in the morning, my girlfriend is gone I have not decided on my level of homosexuality and do to her indiscretion most of our mutual friends had sided with her.
I got home from work at the time I usually did, approximately 11pm. Cause after a day on the line at Erl’s it was common place to pull up a bar stool at DJ’s Tavern as the restaurant owned the bar and as revered employees and cooks we did not have to pay for our libations. We would sit there from about 3pm to 10pm or whenever the Chef left and then go, our merry way and most of the time it was an inebriated merry way.
I would get home as usual clean up the interesting little piles of half pieces of buttered bread that the lady I was living with would place in various places around the house in hopes of remembering and consuming them later in the day. She was a lovely older lady but forgetful. She loved her little house we lived in but I was the last ditch effort to keep her in that home. She could not live alone she was way to forgetful but the truth is I was never home I was always at work or out at the pub so my presence was futile but it afforded me great rent and a classic 30’s style home to live in. Besides it also gave me access to an unlimited supply of Demerol she took for pain.
Arriving home I clean up the bread and the dishes from the day snuck up to her room and took her bottle of Demerol out of the bathroom vanity and got a full bottle of vodka from my room and settled down to watch some TV and end my miserable existence. At this point in my life I was worth nothing more than a drinking buddy and though I loved my job I hated myself and for me at this point death was an acceptable exit.
It’s amazing what you can watch on cable in the middle of the night. So I turned to my favorite station for the movie of the evening and proceeded to take approximately 40 Demerol and wash them back with a couple of swigs of Polar Ice. The movie started off slow but I do believe it was called the Morning After.
I did not have to watch too long to realize the movie was about a teenager taking his own life in a vehicle suicide and what the parents and family would have to go through because of this tragic end to a very young life. I watched intently in a stupor of induced sleep from the drugs and heartburn from the Vodka.
I had a waking dream of my mother’s face looking down into my coffin and her tears of pain. That was enough for me to take the few steps to the kitchen grab the milk out of the fridge and drink as much as I could and then the vinegar off the counter that the elder member of our house used to clean everything and down about a liter or so. The nature of spoilage took over.
Vinegar and milk do not mix well and within minutes I was hurling into the kitchen sink. I was cognizant enough to plug the sink so that when I was finished I could count the amount of capsules that came up. I was violently ill, wrenching bile and leftover alcohol from the day’s events and a few Doritos I had consumed at the bar. When I had finished or so it seemed I started to count capsules. Considering my inebriation I was impressed later on that I was intelligent enough to remember to count the capsules.
1-2-3….31-32-33-34 and that’s all I could find. I counted them going in and I was 6 Demerol short. Six had been absorbed into my body. This was evident as I was having a lot of problems staying upright. I would lapse in and out of consciousness and I knew I had to get to a hospital.
I called a taxi, ambulances cost too much and East York Hospital is just up the street. I tucked the bottle in the pocket of my jacked and headed to the door but I knew if I fell asleep I would surely be dead so I took a tack out of the bulletin board and held it in my hand so that when I drifted off I would squeeze tight and the pain would wake me up enough to make my body jolt to some semblance of drunken alertness.
I gave the cabbie $20.00 and told him to get me to East York Hospital and fast that I was having an allergic reaction and there was no time to call an ambulance. The fare would usually have been about $6.00 but I hope to instill in him urgency as my life now hung in the balance of his ability to drive.
We made it to the hospital in break neck speed. I walked into the emergency entrance slammed the bottle down in front of the duty nurse and said “I have decided I don’t want to die” and I collapsed in front of the desk.
The rest is blurry I don’t remember much of it but I do remember the tube for charcoal, I do remember the tubes and being covered in my own excrement and vomit from my body convulsing and vacating. I also remember waking up and looking at my hand and seeing the tack was embedded in my hand and showing that to the doctor. I lapsed back into incoherent though an or sleep I guess where the next thing I could see was my mother standing over me telling me I was an idiot and that it was a much better view than the one that a casket would have allowed.
When I came to the next evening the staff psychiatrist asked me how many I had taken and I told him. I told him 40 but had puked out about 34 before I came to the hospital. I told him about my miserable life and the whys for this action and how I had averted a much worse outcome. He just kept saying “Thank God for Television”. He asked was there some family he could call and I told him I thought they had as I had seen my mother there earlier. He assured me it was a dream that no one had been to see me and that there would have been no way for me to communicate with all the tubes attached to my body.
I told him “no this is my failure, my indiscretion and that I would as I had done most of my life face this task alone. I forbade him to tell anyone, I was old enough to fight my own battles”. I did however ask him to call my work and tell them I would be off for a few days and I also called the little old lady I lived with and told her I was staying with friends and that she should contact her daughter to come be with her. Knowing she would forget I called her daughter and told her that I would be out of town for a few days and that she should do what she needed to look after her mother.
For the next several months I gave up drinking and saw a shrink for about one hour a week. He attributed my successful recovery to his help. I attribute it to my moral standards of not wanting to cause my parents or family the pain of burying a child. That is not fair especially when the reason is so selfish and the way is so despicable. In our church we believe it you succeed in your attempt at suicide you will go to hell. That in itself was one thing I could not do to my parents. I will admit had the movie not been on I would not be here to write this.
I am writing all of this in response to a couple of personal experiences with suicide in the past couple of months. One in which one of my very best friends lost her brother to his successful attempt at freeing his life from the unbelievable alterations of depression and the other from an attempted world exit by a friend who believed that it could get no worse than boredom at the hands of sequestering provided at the hands of almost illegal actions of an Insurance company.
In review of my own attempt it was for all the reasons my friends brother succeeded. Depression for the most part had a grip on me aided by the consumption of alcohol and by my fear of showing my inadequacy to my friends and family. I too believed this was an acceptable exit. But the difference is he was receiving help to conquer his demons and there was no way I would stoop to the help of a shirk that would deem me unable to help myself and in my own mind condemn me to ostrasization, something I could never and still cannot handle. It is one of my greatest fears, to not be in control of who I really am.
My other friend decided that after taking lots of pain killers that he should say good bye to someone he felt had pushed him over the edge that his own mind could not handle so I he text him to say good bye. Was it a cry for help, only he can answer that? Was it his saving grace, yes by all means as this person could have the death of an innocent on his hands had he decided not to act on this selfish action. My friend hoped I am sure that this person would be asleep as he dosed himself late into the night. But for some reason he chose to be awake that night and in doing so was able to alert the parents and cohabitants of his home to his plight for social freedom.
In all our cases I find it interesting we all chose the easiest way out. We all chose to deliver ourselves from the evils of life and find a space for ourselves in eternal damnation as our lives had not offered us enough of that already. I was in control of my own mind, as was my young friend who chose pills on a lonely dark night. The brother of my other friend chose the swiftness of a train right outside the entrance the hospital where he was to be receiving much needed care and coaching to alleviate his feelings of pain anguish and stress.
Even though my life now in this moment is horrible, I am stuck in a fantasy of what ifs and if onlys and find now relevant exit that could help me see a higher opportunity for myself. Thankfully now I have a support network of friends, some who cared deeply and some who believe in tough love and to offer as negative a response as possible every time I solicit advice. They depress me but not enough to push me over a proverbial edge but just enough to make me realize I have a good life and how insignificant their opinions are and just how worse off they are then me. It’s rejuvenating actually to speak to them and see how comical their responses will be.
I have learned there is no easy way out. There is certainly no painless way out and even though depression sits on my shoulders most days I still draw breathe every morning. I own a shitty car that, allows me to escape to nature and go hug a tree if I need to (it’s a long story, I will tell that one some other time) and that all I need to do sometimes is retreat to that moment when I was bent over a sink looking into a pool of vomit to remember that there are better moments in life. That not seeking out the moments of passion and not giving ourselves the option to and permission be depressed for the moment is our failing. I am not a financial success but I am a successful listener and shoulder bearer to all who need. I have the energy to persevere or to look intently at what I am and how to collectively create for myself an exit strategy that does not involve the death of the person but certainly does involve the death of an ideal or stagnant movement.
I believe in my own reality especially if it means success for me or preservation of who I am in my soul, my indiscretions of the past are just that. I am happy and sad to say that the experiences of friends in the recent past have allowed me to review and acknowledge my life as a viable acceptable existence. I acknowledge that I will have struggle but I also acknowledge there is never an acceptable easy way out.
I got up every morning at 4 am got on the all night street car on Gerrard Street and headed into work. Thank God it was one car all the way to work. Our days started at 6am and the trek that early took very little time but getting up so early allowed me to prep with a jigger of vodka and a little breakfast.
It was prior to my win of 649. Life was boring for me. I had no friends outside work save a cheating girlfriend who had gotten pregnant by a mutual friend of ours and I found this out the day I asked her to marry me. If anyone really knows me they will know I do not have the ability to have children so there was no way the child was mine. When it was born that was solidified as there is no Black genealogical history in my family and the child was definitely black or mulato in this case.
So there I am lonely, drinking Vodka to wake up in the morning, my girlfriend is gone I have not decided on my level of homosexuality and do to her indiscretion most of our mutual friends had sided with her.
I got home from work at the time I usually did, approximately 11pm. Cause after a day on the line at Erl’s it was common place to pull up a bar stool at DJ’s Tavern as the restaurant owned the bar and as revered employees and cooks we did not have to pay for our libations. We would sit there from about 3pm to 10pm or whenever the Chef left and then go, our merry way and most of the time it was an inebriated merry way.
I would get home as usual clean up the interesting little piles of half pieces of buttered bread that the lady I was living with would place in various places around the house in hopes of remembering and consuming them later in the day. She was a lovely older lady but forgetful. She loved her little house we lived in but I was the last ditch effort to keep her in that home. She could not live alone she was way to forgetful but the truth is I was never home I was always at work or out at the pub so my presence was futile but it afforded me great rent and a classic 30’s style home to live in. Besides it also gave me access to an unlimited supply of Demerol she took for pain.
Arriving home I clean up the bread and the dishes from the day snuck up to her room and took her bottle of Demerol out of the bathroom vanity and got a full bottle of vodka from my room and settled down to watch some TV and end my miserable existence. At this point in my life I was worth nothing more than a drinking buddy and though I loved my job I hated myself and for me at this point death was an acceptable exit.
It’s amazing what you can watch on cable in the middle of the night. So I turned to my favorite station for the movie of the evening and proceeded to take approximately 40 Demerol and wash them back with a couple of swigs of Polar Ice. The movie started off slow but I do believe it was called the Morning After.
I did not have to watch too long to realize the movie was about a teenager taking his own life in a vehicle suicide and what the parents and family would have to go through because of this tragic end to a very young life. I watched intently in a stupor of induced sleep from the drugs and heartburn from the Vodka.
I had a waking dream of my mother’s face looking down into my coffin and her tears of pain. That was enough for me to take the few steps to the kitchen grab the milk out of the fridge and drink as much as I could and then the vinegar off the counter that the elder member of our house used to clean everything and down about a liter or so. The nature of spoilage took over.
Vinegar and milk do not mix well and within minutes I was hurling into the kitchen sink. I was cognizant enough to plug the sink so that when I was finished I could count the amount of capsules that came up. I was violently ill, wrenching bile and leftover alcohol from the day’s events and a few Doritos I had consumed at the bar. When I had finished or so it seemed I started to count capsules. Considering my inebriation I was impressed later on that I was intelligent enough to remember to count the capsules.
1-2-3….31-32-33-34 and that’s all I could find. I counted them going in and I was 6 Demerol short. Six had been absorbed into my body. This was evident as I was having a lot of problems staying upright. I would lapse in and out of consciousness and I knew I had to get to a hospital.
I called a taxi, ambulances cost too much and East York Hospital is just up the street. I tucked the bottle in the pocket of my jacked and headed to the door but I knew if I fell asleep I would surely be dead so I took a tack out of the bulletin board and held it in my hand so that when I drifted off I would squeeze tight and the pain would wake me up enough to make my body jolt to some semblance of drunken alertness.
I gave the cabbie $20.00 and told him to get me to East York Hospital and fast that I was having an allergic reaction and there was no time to call an ambulance. The fare would usually have been about $6.00 but I hope to instill in him urgency as my life now hung in the balance of his ability to drive.
We made it to the hospital in break neck speed. I walked into the emergency entrance slammed the bottle down in front of the duty nurse and said “I have decided I don’t want to die” and I collapsed in front of the desk.
The rest is blurry I don’t remember much of it but I do remember the tube for charcoal, I do remember the tubes and being covered in my own excrement and vomit from my body convulsing and vacating. I also remember waking up and looking at my hand and seeing the tack was embedded in my hand and showing that to the doctor. I lapsed back into incoherent though an or sleep I guess where the next thing I could see was my mother standing over me telling me I was an idiot and that it was a much better view than the one that a casket would have allowed.
When I came to the next evening the staff psychiatrist asked me how many I had taken and I told him. I told him 40 but had puked out about 34 before I came to the hospital. I told him about my miserable life and the whys for this action and how I had averted a much worse outcome. He just kept saying “Thank God for Television”. He asked was there some family he could call and I told him I thought they had as I had seen my mother there earlier. He assured me it was a dream that no one had been to see me and that there would have been no way for me to communicate with all the tubes attached to my body.
I told him “no this is my failure, my indiscretion and that I would as I had done most of my life face this task alone. I forbade him to tell anyone, I was old enough to fight my own battles”. I did however ask him to call my work and tell them I would be off for a few days and I also called the little old lady I lived with and told her I was staying with friends and that she should contact her daughter to come be with her. Knowing she would forget I called her daughter and told her that I would be out of town for a few days and that she should do what she needed to look after her mother.
For the next several months I gave up drinking and saw a shrink for about one hour a week. He attributed my successful recovery to his help. I attribute it to my moral standards of not wanting to cause my parents or family the pain of burying a child. That is not fair especially when the reason is so selfish and the way is so despicable. In our church we believe it you succeed in your attempt at suicide you will go to hell. That in itself was one thing I could not do to my parents. I will admit had the movie not been on I would not be here to write this.
I am writing all of this in response to a couple of personal experiences with suicide in the past couple of months. One in which one of my very best friends lost her brother to his successful attempt at freeing his life from the unbelievable alterations of depression and the other from an attempted world exit by a friend who believed that it could get no worse than boredom at the hands of sequestering provided at the hands of almost illegal actions of an Insurance company.
In review of my own attempt it was for all the reasons my friends brother succeeded. Depression for the most part had a grip on me aided by the consumption of alcohol and by my fear of showing my inadequacy to my friends and family. I too believed this was an acceptable exit. But the difference is he was receiving help to conquer his demons and there was no way I would stoop to the help of a shirk that would deem me unable to help myself and in my own mind condemn me to ostrasization, something I could never and still cannot handle. It is one of my greatest fears, to not be in control of who I really am.
My other friend decided that after taking lots of pain killers that he should say good bye to someone he felt had pushed him over the edge that his own mind could not handle so I he text him to say good bye. Was it a cry for help, only he can answer that? Was it his saving grace, yes by all means as this person could have the death of an innocent on his hands had he decided not to act on this selfish action. My friend hoped I am sure that this person would be asleep as he dosed himself late into the night. But for some reason he chose to be awake that night and in doing so was able to alert the parents and cohabitants of his home to his plight for social freedom.
In all our cases I find it interesting we all chose the easiest way out. We all chose to deliver ourselves from the evils of life and find a space for ourselves in eternal damnation as our lives had not offered us enough of that already. I was in control of my own mind, as was my young friend who chose pills on a lonely dark night. The brother of my other friend chose the swiftness of a train right outside the entrance the hospital where he was to be receiving much needed care and coaching to alleviate his feelings of pain anguish and stress.
Even though my life now in this moment is horrible, I am stuck in a fantasy of what ifs and if onlys and find now relevant exit that could help me see a higher opportunity for myself. Thankfully now I have a support network of friends, some who cared deeply and some who believe in tough love and to offer as negative a response as possible every time I solicit advice. They depress me but not enough to push me over a proverbial edge but just enough to make me realize I have a good life and how insignificant their opinions are and just how worse off they are then me. It’s rejuvenating actually to speak to them and see how comical their responses will be.
I have learned there is no easy way out. There is certainly no painless way out and even though depression sits on my shoulders most days I still draw breathe every morning. I own a shitty car that, allows me to escape to nature and go hug a tree if I need to (it’s a long story, I will tell that one some other time) and that all I need to do sometimes is retreat to that moment when I was bent over a sink looking into a pool of vomit to remember that there are better moments in life. That not seeking out the moments of passion and not giving ourselves the option to and permission be depressed for the moment is our failing. I am not a financial success but I am a successful listener and shoulder bearer to all who need. I have the energy to persevere or to look intently at what I am and how to collectively create for myself an exit strategy that does not involve the death of the person but certainly does involve the death of an ideal or stagnant movement.
I believe in my own reality especially if it means success for me or preservation of who I am in my soul, my indiscretions of the past are just that. I am happy and sad to say that the experiences of friends in the recent past have allowed me to review and acknowledge my life as a viable acceptable existence. I acknowledge that I will have struggle but I also acknowledge there is never an acceptable easy way out.
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