Today my dad would have been 58. 🙁 I’m still so upset that he has already missed so much since the last time we spoke in November 2015, we’ll never reconcile, and he’ll miss out on so much more in the coming years than he should have. Wishing and hoping for things to be different won’t make it so.
However, I do want to remind everyone that if you’re unhappy in your life you CAN change it. You don’t have to live in misery. As much as people may disagree with me, at the end of the day YOU DO HAVE A CHOICE! We all do!
You can choose how you react to the cards your dealt. In some ways, you can even choose some of the cards. I wish my dad could have seen that he had so many choices, and I’m still devastated that he made the ultimate bad one by leaving this earth too soon nearly a year ago.
I know everyone has been telling me this year that he took his life because he saw no other way out. And, yes…I believe by the time he let that much darkness take over…he did believe that. But, I also know that there were so many times he could have chosen to step out of the darkness, but instead opted to shun the light.
Looking Back, We Did All We Could
Nothing I or my family could have said or done could have changed his choice to repeatedly choose the darkness. You can only show someone a different path so many times before letting go, and ultimately letting them decide which path they want to take. Looking back I see how many times we did try to intervene.
No, we never hospitalized him, but we did try everything we knew how to do to make him happy and show him how to be happy within himself. We did the best we could, and it was actually never our choice of how he would move forward after each intervention. There is a saying that you can’t save someone who doesn’t want to be saved, and I feel like at the end of the day, as much as it hurts, he didn’t want to be saved.
I forgive him for taking his own life, and am saddened at how much I understand now what he did and even why he did it. I just will never accept it was the right choice, or that he couldn’t have found another way. Happy birthday dad. I guess you finally found your peace, I’m just so sorry for you that you never found the light.
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Call 1-800-273-8255
