Sunday morning dawned cool and moist.  Summer had given way almost overnight with the passage of the Autumn Equinox, and warm sunny weather passed the baton to a cool rain.  After my alarm went off, my brain started to leap into its usual anxious frenzy of thinking about the day to come when I remembered that wasn’t necessary.  I did have plans for the day, but it was a day dedicated to remembering the fallen, not a day to stress over the so-called real world.  I shifted mental gears away from my daily worries and focused on the morning’s task.

It wasn’t a difficult one: go to a beautiful park and walk in the rainy forest with my husband and a couple of hundred other people to honor family, friends, and loved ones who had either succumbed to suicide or were left behind by someone who had.  We gathered in the rain in our jackets, hoodies, and ponchos, while a few huddled beneath umbrellas.  This is Oregon and we are used to the rain, even welcoming of it, especially the first major rain after summer such as this one, so many simply stood in groups in the grass, the rain drops no doubt standing in for tears for some.  Others like my husband wept openly.  I merely remained meditative and Zen, simply observing and taking in the experience.

I had been to an Out of the Darkness walk before back in Austin, nearly 20 years ago.  At that time I walked for my parents and for a friend.  My father, a Vietnam veteran who suffered from severe PTSD following the War, had taken his own life in October of 1974, shortly before my 3rd birthday.  My mother, never the same after his death and forced to make a wide variety of soul-compromising decisions by not only that event but also other life events, finally gave in to years of despair in October of 2003, six months after my own child was born.  The friend had tragically died about a month before our child was born.

Today I walked for 8 people, including myself.

My mother, Tracy Pacheco (October 2003).
My father, Richard Pacheco (October 1974).
My brother, Matthew Pacheco (September 2017).
My friend, Anthony Martinez (March 2003).
The musician Chris Cornell (May 2017)
The author Spalding Gray (January 2004)
The chef and traveler Anthony Bourdain (June 2018)

We wore colored beads along with everyone else to represent the people we’ve lost, whether I knew them personally or not.  They were important to me, that’s all that matters.  Gold for parents, orange for siblings, purple for friends, blue for overall support, rainbow beads for the LGBTQ community, silver for first responders, teal to support a loved one, red for spouses, and white for the unthinkable loss of a child.  I wore a green one to represent my own struggle.

At the time of my first walk, I had never suffered from suicidal feelings or ideation, which rather surprised me given my extremely dysfunctional background.  I did not know then what I know now, that the full range of PTSD symptoms can sometimes wait years or even decades to show themselves, as they did with me.  In my late 40s, I began to suffer from a wide variety of mental issues as my subconscious mind slowly stopped hiding things from Conscious me because it was no longer necessary out of survival.

Suddenly my previously unshakeable will to live became very unsteady on occasions, and it could be for any number of reasons.  Sometimes it’s merely my neurochemicals being out of balance, which is easily remedied by tweaking my medication.  Other times are much more of an internal battle between the parts of myself that still like living and want to stay, and the parts that are sick of this place and can’t wait to leave.  The reasons why the Dark Parts are sick of living are myriad.  Sometimes it’s the symptoms of my PTSD itself: the incessant mental noise, the hypervigilance, the anxiety and borderline paranoia, the insomnia, the nightmares and night terrors, the flashbacks, and the bad memories that creep up on me out of nowhere like velociraptors, triggered by the most innocent of things.  Some days, absolutely everything reminds me of something that I don’t want to think about, which means there is no escape or refuge.

While my suicidal impulses initially surprised and shocked me, filling me with guilt and shame, they no longer do.  I think it’s perfectly understandable why someone in my position would sometimes feel like it’s just too difficult to go on.  The guilt and shame came from feeling like a part of me had violated a personal pact I had made with myself due to my father’s death.  I swore I would never do such a thing because I could see what it had done to my mother, who was forced into marrying a terrible man so that she would not lose her children following my father’s death.  Having such feelings made me feel terrible, until I found inspiration in music, and on the internet.

I had a very contentious relationship with my mother, but one of the great gifts she did give me was an appreciation of music.  All kinds of music, from classical to folk to rock.  I was the happy recipient of a hand-me-down Pioneer hi-fi at the age of 6, along with the red-and-blue Beatles compilations.  As such, music has been a constant companion to me  through every good and bad moment in my life.  My audio guardian angel, if you will.  I listened to standard pop-and-rock until my ears were snared by the progressive and thoughtful melodies of Rush when I was 12.  In the absence of a decent father figure in my life, Neil Peart’s words and the music of his friends became my source of fatherly wisdom, not to mention hope on more than one occasion.

Later in life, in a different city far away from my horrid family around age 20, Nine Inch Nails hit the scene, and my ears were snared once again.  Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral became the soundtracks to my life at a very difficult time.  I didn’t feel like dying, but I was desperate to change my life.  The raw energy of the music and the way he screamed his words spoke to me in a way nothing ever had before.  Some part of me screamed back, “YES!!!”

Years later, when I first started therapy, my therapist asked me to bring in a board with pictures of inspirational people on it.  There were a variety of historical and modern figures on it, including Rush and Trent Reznor.  He pointed at Trent and asked who he was and why he was there.  All I could say was, “No one speaks the language of pain like Trent Reznor.”

A person unfamiliar with what it’s like to sit in that blackened room in the basement of your soul that has a door that is only locked by your will not to go through it would probably think that listening to music that screams pain might be a bad idea, but it’s not.  Not for me anyway, for the simple reason that it tells me I’m not alone.  This is probably the single most deadly mindset of a person in danger of suicide: they feel alone, and someone who feels alone has nothing to grab onto anymore to prevent them from sliding further and further down their spiral.  Rush and Nine Inch Nails: that’s what I grab onto.  Rush says “hey, here’s some light for your darkness”, while NIN says “I’m right here in the darkness with you”.

I have also gotten inspiration from the recent wave of awareness regarding mental health matters that is sweeping our country (and the world, I hope).  This has generated anonymous support for me in the oddest of forms: memes.  A favorite that I keep a snapshot of in my head is a view of mental illness as seen from that of a Klingon therapist, if one can imagine such a thing.  To paraphrase, “to battle an enemy that dwells within and emerge victorious on a daily basis constitutes the most honorable combat.  To constantly spar with an internal force that changes shape in an effort to defeat you on an ongoing basis represents the highest form of courageous battle, one that all warriors should aspire to.”  And perhaps most importantly to this essay, “when a warrior falls in internal combat, their death brings NO dishonor to either themselves or their families.”

It’s important to understand that a suicidal person is essentially suffering from the equivalent of a psychotic delusion.  Unless the circumstances of their lives are truly so desperate that they literally have no one left to help them, most suicidal people have someone that would miss them, but they can’t see that anymore.  Their perceptions have become twisted by their depression and the neurochemicals that come with it, altering how they see all of their relationships.  They’re often perfectly aware of how their mental health is affecting those around them, and quite often their goal in committing suicide is not so much in alleviating their own suffering, but of those around them.  Their depression won’t let them see how much more their loved ones would suffer in their absence.  They literally don’t think their lives matter anymore or that their problems are insurmountable and inescapable.

So it’s important not to judge the suicidal, no matter how angry we may be about the aftermath of such a life event.  Judge the events that made them suicidal, because it is not in our Nature to subvert our will to live.  It generally takes horrifying circumstances, whether externally induced by life or internally by neurochemicals (or sometimes both), to make us think that dying is preferable to living.  Advocate for a kinder society that makes sure we all have enough to eat, a good place to live, and appropriate clothing for where we live.  Advocate for kindness to our children, because evidence is piling up in mountains that tell us it is childhood trauma that leads to so much mental illness.  Advocate for more research dollars for mental health and better treatments.  Advocate for a society that does not brush the mentally ill under the carpet, so that we may walk out of the darkness and live in the light.