War Child: My Battles Against Suicide

Well, man proposes and God disposes.

Over time the emphasis in my Commentary posts has shifted from the rise of conservative media to our toxic political culture to the beginnings of a consideration on manic episodes; and most recently to my suicide attempt in May 1977.

I am a faith-based person, and for me it is difficult not to see the hand of God in this.

So I’ve decided to shift fire and do a book on suicide, possibly suicide in general or possibly limited to teenagers and young adults. I won’t know until I’ve done more research in that area.

But the basic idea is to write a book about what might be called the interior experience of suicide: what it is like to feel suicidal, and, in the one case, to attempt suicide and then recover from it.

I decided it had to be a book after reviewing the abundance of material I have bearing on the subject. From April 24, 1975 (the spring of my sophomore year) through June 5, 1977 (the date of my high school graduation, I kept a detailed journal totaling exactly 900 pages of single-spaced, handwritten entries on college-ruled notebook paper. The journal continues through July 1987 and covers other key developments. I also have several 3-section notebooks consisting of poetry, stories, etc., some of which foreshadow the suicide attempt pretty clearly. In addition, I have five three-ring binders, most of them 2-inch D-ring binders that contain a lot of retrospective observations on the earlier periods. Plus a lot of other documents that will have to be filed, or already have been.

So basically I’m loaded for bear.

I’ve already announced this effort to the Facebook group for my high school graduation class (Westerville South High School Class of 1977) and my fellow alumni have been very supportive and have supplied me with additional information, much of it concerning a classmate who shot himself to death about two months before graduation.

This is something I feel called to do, and I think it can scarcely help but make an important contribution. There are memoirs by persons who have attempted suicide; but what I have in mind is a history that utilizes documents rather than memory. It is, in some ways, a bit odd to be writing a history of oneself; but my senior year was 43 years ago and when I read my journal entries for that period I experience them as having been written by someone else. They contain * a lot * of information that I no longer remembered, including some stuff that was very important.

It has been a very stressful project so far and, in the nature of the case, it will continue to be. So from time to time I’ll have to take a break and work on something else for a few days.

Before confirming my decision to do this as a book, I spoke by phone to several people, including a fellow alumna of the Class of ‘77; an Army chaplain I got to know well at the U.S. Army War College; my sister; and three friends. All of them approved of the project and were confident that I knew what I was doing. My therapist is already aware that I was writing publicly about the suicide attempt, but I have not yet had occasion to tell her of this new development.

As to the working title, I chose “War Child” because it’s kind of cool and it reflects a lyric from Jethro Tull’s “War Child” album, specifically “The Third Hoorah,” which has always spoken to me (as Jethro Tull generally does):

When your back's to the wall,
And your luck is your all,
Then side with whoever you may.
Seek that which within lies waiting to begin
The fight of your life that is every day.

Also:

In the heart of your heart, there's the tiniest part
Of an urge to live to the death

The subtitle, “My Battles Against Suicide,” reflects exactly that: although I have attempted suicide only once, I have had to battle suicidal ideations all of my life; and once every few years I experience a day or two of a really acute compulsion to commit suicide, a phenomenon I call “Tornado Weather.”

I have done a lot of work to protect myself from yielding to that compulsion. I maintain a network of friends I can call in an emergency; and I would not hesitate to call Suicide Prevention Services—speaking of which, I once served two years on SPS as a volunteer line worker. So I have a good understanding of the dynamics of suicide, the single most important of which is that acute suicidal thoughts are time-limited to about 24-36 hours. If you can put in place a plan to cover that period, then the “tunnel vision”—the sense that there is no other way out of the circumstance in which you find yourself—abates. You’ll probably still feel miserable but you won’t feel suicidal.

I find Facebook posts (and in an earlier period, blog posts) an effective way to generate text and, in most cases, to receive support. The posts, obviously, will not be footnoted; but the identical text on my laptop will be. I have found it an effective method and will apply it here.

So: thus for my direction. I would really appreciate your support and whatever comments you may have.

Well, time to heed Jethro Tull’s injunction:

WarChild, dance the days and nights away
Sweet child, how do you do today?

I’m doing well, thanks for asking. I feel as if I have found work that speaks to me personally and also bids fair to make a significant contribution to reducing the number of suicides in this country.