Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade

A dear friend of mine wrote a lovely, caring post during the week we lost both Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade.   She offered a true woman’s heart to reach out to if you feel you’re in pain and the reminder that their are help lines to call for professional help.

I could feel her caring so deeply that I wanted to respond with my own perspective on the role Depression can take in a life as well as our part in helping another being get through it … or not.

I feel your Love from here. Everyone does deserve to know they matter and that there are resources out there for help when they need it.

However, part of the animal that is depression is that it lives INSIDE its person. Her arms are way too heavy to reach for the phone much less pick it up if she gets there. On bad days that must have been happening for the 2 celebrities who took their lives this week, she/he has only silence for a vocabulary so the phone doesn’t help anyways . No words … a deeper grief than words could express … INSIDE of their world where everything is SO heavy, dark and cold.

Depression has an occasional word but it’s hard to hear … I can’t. I don’t want to. I can’t. I can’t. I just don’t want to.

Depressions whole body, mind, spirit weighs 40,000 lbs but she can only manage to maneuver 2. Even the energy needed for a single facial expression is too great to muster up down here under the blanket.

Mental capacity is replaced with something that has the consistency of cotton.

Reaching for thoughts creates frustration so please don’t ask her/him to. I know it’s an easy question for you but please stop asking.

Looking at them with irritation, like they should know what kind of cheese they want on their burger doesn’t help.

Do you know the burger may be causing the symptoms to be worse? Do you know the cheese may be causing the symptoms to be worse?

Do you know depressed people don’t necessarily have family who support them any longer.

They have family who have long since grown tired of them not showing up for family functions.

They have family who’ve grown tired of them “playing the victim “ and trying to get attention.

They have family who haven’t done anything fun with them in years so they no longer relate to them as friends they would treat well.

They have family who don’t know they’re depressed and wait until they’ve gone home to talk about how weird they are or what a pain in the ass they’ve become.

Or they have … any number of less than happy scenarios going on

Remember that depression is a Physical condition that manifests emotionally. Most people don’t know that so the person takes on a lot of blame for not “trying hard enough”

There are many circumstances in life that also trigger depression. Each one as devastating as the next. Especially to the person experiencing it so please know that this is not a competition of who deserves more sympathy than whom. The pain is identical.

We have Veterans who needed to override their fight or flight mechanism in order to do their jobs. Then they come home with their full human experience intact and all the overwhelming emotion that was suppressed for far too long.

We have assault victims, battered spouses, a stalkers prey, Lost Love, the death of a loved one, sexual assault, betrayal, society overwhelm, __________ (You tell me)

I’ve often been asked “Why would someone who is receiving medications for depression kill themselves now and they didn’t when they were not on the meds?”

The medications that people take to treat depression are not like street drugs they take to get high to forget about it all. They help your brain chemistry do what it was supposed to be doing in the first place. They make connections in your brain that your brain was meant to be making all along.

So once a person with depression has been treated with the proper medications to manage the symptoms and realign his/her brain physiology they’re actually able to make clearer decisions. They now have the organization to act on things they wanted to act on before but they had the 40,ooo lb. gorilla of active depression sitting on them and their brains were filled with cotton.

So now, while they have the chance, they get to choose. Once that gorilla comes back they no longer have a say. This is their opportunity to finally be like everyone else.

Peaceful, loving, happy and light. Transition (suicide) is not the way out it’s their way in. In to a world of presence with God (Source, Energy, Allah, etc.)

When someone commits suicide everybody realizes how much they used to love them. They imagine that they could have lived the same happy life everyone else does if only they would ______________.

They imagine there was something more that could have been done to keep them alive and on this planet. “If only I had _________.” “If only the doctors had ______________.” ( If this is you try imagining a 40,000 lb gorilla on top of you, cotton in your brain and the utmost depths of grief in your soul. Would someone who loves you bring you back to that?)

They imagine a scenario where they knew what the symptoms were. They saw them and they made all the difference. They go over and over things that, now, make sense. But at the time they had no idea what it meant or what to do.

BECAUSE IT WASN’T YOURS TO DO. What if you know it now because you’re meant to help other women, men, mothers, fathers, servicemen and women or whom ever the demographic you may be a part of?

Believe me, if you were meant to know what it all meant to help your loved one  ~ God is certainly sophisticated enough to have made that happen. Your job is on this side with what you’ve learned from Your experience, not back there to have “saved” your loved ones.

In closing, we may well see other suicides now that we’ve had 2 celebrities kill themselves this week. It may give others permission to honor themselves enough to stop the suffering. And whether they are famous or not I hold that each of us has great value and hopefully will be missed by someone when we are gone.

In the mean time, send someone a single 🌸 flower, a bowl of fruit. Let them hold your cat. God made cats for the healing energy they convey 😃. (The dog may be too hyper …. or not)

Many blessings to you, Denise