So I Was There With Forman and Asher
This is going to be a short post, but I could probably write a book… except I am not an author. (Sometimes I forget that I am not an author and I write too much.)
Last week I attended an event where two best-selling authors, Gayle Forman and Jay Asher, promoted suicide awareness and I remembered that I am a survivor of suicide. It is not as though I had forgotten, but sometimes I become disconnected to that part of my life. It is easy to forget because I belong to many other families and I am involved with all of them. Besides, there are times when I forget that any of this is real. I listened to a couple fathers who lost daughters to suicide. That made it a little more real too.
One of my college friends recently posted an Abraham Lincoln quote (or maybe it was attributed to Mark Twain) that people too easily accept that which is posted on the internet. Of course it was a joke, but I could go further. I question that which I read in books and see in newspapers. I am not a mere doubter, I question everything now.
My sense of normal shifted when my dad committed suicide… and that wasn’t the strangest thing my dad did. The two years preceding his death were often stranger. Stranger things have happened in my life since my dad shot himself, not all bad.
Strange can be good, even if it is disorienting. Some people wonder how I wander into a new tribe. Last week was a good example. I (re) connected with another one of my communities that I did not realize I had missed.
So, I was home.