I'm going to start this blog by giving a pop quiz.. I'm guessing if I were to ask when do you think most suicides occur? Most anyone would answer Winter and around Christmas and the Holidays and that answer is absolutely incorrect and if you were like me this made absolutely no sense. I don't know about you but I've heard for years that people commit suicide during the Winter months as there is rarely a lot of sun and around the Holidays as at times that can be a very depressing and stressful time of the year but not so, according to The Center for Disease Control and Prevention Spring and Fall are when suicides are greater. I'm going to add this to yet another thing that makes me go hmmm! I'm still trying to figure it out, I find those two months to be my favorite, I'm going to have a hard time getting past that one. I'm going to be stuck on that for awhile, I can tell it's going to give me a brain hurt. Oddly, my original purpose in writing this blog when I did was because I wanted to get it posted around the Holidays as I believed in the Urban myth that around the Holidays and in the Winter months this is when the most suicides occurred, as I started preparing to write it I realized a few sad facts I bet there are at least a handful of people who will read this blog and in one way or another have been affected by suicide. My Mother relayed a story to my Sister and I as well as others, of a family who she had been babysitting for and I don't exactly recall all of the details but long story short, the couple had several children and my Mother wasn't babysitting for them at this time, Thank Heavens but the Father came home from work killed the Mother, Children and then himself and that was in the 50's. I myself have been acquaintance to someone who was affected by suicide or my children have known someone that has committed suicide. When I was old enough to babysit there was a woman that I babysat for whose husband hung himself in their garage, when I was in school a classmate of mine's Father hung himself in their house, when I was grown I lived with my Sister and her husband, another classmate of mine's Brother and his wife lived across from us and one night the ambulance came and Police and even a Life Flight helicopter landed at the end of our street, we later learned that distraught over marital problems he was having, he shot himself in the head, he died on the way to the hospital. Several years later his wife hung herself in the same house, several years after that I believe his brother also shot and killed himself. On the same street a friend that we went to school with overdosed on pills. While my oldest son was in middle school a kid that he went to school with, who was only 14 or 15 at the time, hung himself. My Daughter had a young man over to our house one night when she was about 17 and he later that night was placed in a detention center for youth. She received a call the next day from a mutual friend informing her that he had hung himself at the detention center. I worked in a High School at one point in my Career and I went to work one morning and the head of our Resource Dept. pulled myself and another Teacher to her cubicle and explained to us that one of the students in the Teacher's math classes, whom I was very familiar with had killed himself over the weekend, when she told me this I thought my knees were going to take me to the floor as he was to graduate that year and he was always making everyone laugh, never ever would I have expected that but some of us had talked to him and knew he was not happy as he was adopted and his Father expected him to be a Doctor like him and it wasn't what he wanted but I didn't know he was that unhappy. To this day I will never forget his life nor his death as it profoundly affected me. I worked with a co-worker recently whose son committed suicide. It is possible that one of my Grandchildren's Father may have committed suicide with a drug overdose, that has yet to be solidified though. This is why I had to write this blog as I wanted to bring to light just how common this problem is, no one should know of this many self inflicted deaths, this many people that saw no reason to remain with the living. How sad and heart breaking that they felt as though there was absolutely no hope for change for them. 36,000 people a year feel the exact same hopelessness and take their own lives. In recent years the suicide rate in adults between the ages of 25 and 44 is higher than persons 65 or older. The 2nd leading cause of death in young people ages 10-34 in 2018, it was not cancer, drunken driving or gun violence, it was youth taking their own lives. I don't know about you but I am so deeply sorry that a young person would die not to live out their life and learn what they were destine to do with that life or have a family or experience any of the things that are a normal part of our journeys in life. 50% of all suicides are by guns and how horrific is that when if you look up the statistics there are more and more people being killed by guns every day . The 2nd most common form of suicide is suffocation and the last form is poisoning. Half of all males use firearms as a means to exit this life as where women's choices apparently change over time but their most commonly used means are suffocation and poisoning. Suicide is as misunderstood as depression I feel. Because of how many people I or my children have known that have chosen to end their lives my heart is very heavy on this subject and this is why I wanted to do this blog. Some look at persons that have committed suicide and say, "How could they do such a thing?", and probably as when they were alive made that persons death all about them and how could they do this to their family and the people that loved them and others think that people that commit suicide are cowards just wishing to take the easy way out and others who are left behind simply are left forever with a deep sadness, sense of loss and forever case of what ifs. Sometimes there are signs someone may commit suicide and sometimes there are none. I think we could all agree that a deep sense of hopelessness is what causes most people of any age to take their life. Put yourself in their shoes, bullying happens to persons of all ages, if it happens relentlessly seeming to never end, many measures had been taken in an attempt to end it but yet it continued, it is all you can think about, you felt there was no way to make it stop and became desperate to escape from it. Some people end their lives due to ongoing illnesses that they simply feel they can not cope with any more, or persons who are terminally ill who know they are going to die and are on a daily basis may feel that they do not want to live life like this, persons who have had a drastic change in their life such as losing all their money, losing their home in a natural disaster, the end of a relationship, divorce. PTSD, military background, dealing with the aftermath of serving in the military, traumatic experiences in their lives, emotional pain, demons. One of the key elements that you must take notice of here is most who commit suicide feel a sense of hopelessness. I would like to take time right now to reach out to anyone reading this and extend some kindness at this point and say, "There is never anything in this world that is greater than you", we need to remember this on a daily basis and since I am a Christian woman when we go beyond this world, "There is never anything in this world greater than God," and sorry I do believe Christians can take their lives as the Prince of Darkness loves to send his little rug rats to torment Christians just as well as anyone else. I can understand persons literally being bullied to death and that is taking their own lives because they were bullied, or taking your life because of ongoing pain or a terminal illness and as far as though who want to judge those who take their own lives until you have lived what they lived don't you dare speak ill of someone for taking their own life. I know in these troubled times we live in with the Coronavirus and the affects it has had on everyone we live in very scary and uncertain times and I'm sure most of the time things seem pretty hopeless but we must always force ourselves to look past current troubling times and know that with each passing day things will get better. It is somewhat of a golden key or a beacon of hope to us to remind ourselves and trust it is hard as some people are hit daily, monthly with trials in their lives that seem as though there is no way through them but just as a dense fog that settles over low lying fields it will eventually lift. I feel your pain, those who feel such deep torment in their soul or sense of hopelessness that there is no way out of the fog, it will never be clear, you feel whatever your situation is it will chain you forever to the horrific feelings of despair you feel every day and every night until you are consumed and you feel the only way out or the only escape from it is to end your life and then it will be done. We as humans have feelings of hurt and hopelessness accumulate in our lives due to events in our lives that are almost always negative. Some people simply battle with self loathing or low self esteem and they feel they are never going to be accepted or good enough in any aspect of our society and maybe this was brought on from childhood as maybe they were constantly bullied and possibly that bullying has followed them to adulthood, possibly as a child they had a parent who constantly made them feel as though they were never going to be good enough, maybe one of their siblings was always put above them, and now their spouses don't appreciate what they do nor do their bosses. Possibly throughout life someone felt they were ugly both inside and out and they were never going to change that fact. I can tell you also that one of the worst ways that someone can be led to believe that they should end their life is through demons. When we are at our lowest mentally and vulnerable, easily influenced the demons can enter in and this is when the voices in our head begin telling us to end our life, your family would be better off without you, just think of how much suffering you have went through, they wouldn't even miss you, you're never going to change, you have no chance to fix things, etc. I can tell you a little secret when the demons, voices in your head are speaking, if you are not saved they have a lot to gain if you end your life, so if you kill yourself chalk one up for Satan as your soul will go to hell! I too, at one point considered ending my life, I sat in my car with a box cutter to my wrist before I started my shift at my job as my then husband and I had separated and I felt my situation hopeless as I could find no answer to my problem in my marriage and I did not wish to continue it with him the way things were but just as I put the box cutter to my wrist I looked into the field before to see a beautiful red fox and it was though it had been sent by God as a messenger to me and I began to realize that I could not do what I was about to do as I had 3 children that needed me to be there to make sure their lives were right and I didn't ever think of suicide again. You that may be considering suicide on a daily basis because you also just want it all to end realize something, I feel we are all destined for something from the day we are born and if you end your life you will never know reach your full potential, you will never learn what the future holds for you. If you battle with not liking your own looks or your weight, realize all of that can be changed, a lot of what we go through in life requires courage to overcome great obstacles, consider yourself as a great explorer and you are on a quest to find a hidden treasure but the hidden treasure is you and unlocking the vault that will reveal what you are destined to become and this will not happen if you end your life. You are not being truly rational as if you think your family and friends or children for that matter would rather attend your funeral or visit a gravesite on a regular basis or feel a void in their lives because you are no longer there then you are being selfish. Consider yourself a warrior in life, when you get up everyday, if you are a Christian pray, if you are not you might want to become one as it can fill a void in your soul that has always been there but you never knew what or how to fill it, look in the mirror and say, "I am not weak, I am strong, I love myself for who I am, I will continually work to change that within me that is not right, I will continue to fulfill my destiny and unlock the key to my full potential, I will stop looking to others for validation or gratification and realize I am the only one who has control of my happiness, I will surround myself with only positive people and will avoid negative situations. A small side note becoming a Christian is easy and so is being saved, we have the easy part Jesus died on the cross a horrific and humiliating death so as we could be saved from our sins not to face eternal damnation in hell so please consider accepting Jesus into your life it is as easy as ABC, admit that you are a sinner, believe that Jesus was the son of God who died on the cross and rose again and finally confess your sins to God and ask forgiveness of them. John 14:6 Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the light and no man cometh unto the Father except through me." I am asking if anyone out there reads my blog and you are considering suicide please think not of yourself but of those will be left to mourn you and no matter who you are there will be someone you will leave behind that will suffer mental anguish at your loss till they die. You can e-mail me at ingali4@aol.com if you want to chat or call the National Suicide Prevention Life Line 1-800-273-Talk