WE ARE ONLY AS SICK AS OUR SECRETS
Dizain of Suicide
Along with my essay on matters of life and death, including suicide, from the perspectives gained on my nearly 10-year-and-counting and never-ending spiritual journey
We Are Only As Sick As Our Secrets
Suicide provides no relief at all On ledge imagining end to my pain Pavement streaming toward me will not end fall Just before break solution becomes plain My penance to help others to refrain Thought my loved ones better off without me Truth’s too likely they’ll header into sea Had I known that death cannot be cheated Baring deep secrets would cure malady Death would not have left loved ones defeated
Companion Essay — Advocating for Suicide Prevention Through Awareness of Spiritual Implications for the Dead and the Living
Introduction
I had no idea on that day in June of 1991 that I had taken the first fateful step on my path towards advocating for suicide prevention. I had no concept of messages from the Universe and synchronicities. I have since learned much about those concepts, including the actual definition of a word that from what I can see, everyone that I have encountered on Medium who uses the word misunderstands it — to wit: coincidence.
Coincidence does not mean happenstance and far too many misunderstand and thus misapply the oft-used phrases, no mere coincidence and I don’t believe in coincidence. The 1968 edition of the Webster Universal Dictionary defines coincidence:
“Noteworthy event, circumstance, or series of such, which occurs in conjunction, or synchronously, with others, and is of such a character as to suggest a connection of cause and effect, although apparently no connection of the kind exists.”
Aware/awakened people often say the universe sends us signals all the time, which we could see if we only knew how and where to look.
How: just be open-minded.
Whence: Everywhere and Everyone
Carl Jung championed the somewhat circular-reasoning concept of synchronicities being meaningful coincidences.
Synchronicity is a word coined by Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung to describe seemingly coincidental, yet meaningful events in the external world that do not have an obvious cause.
Jung defined synchronicity as an “acausal connecting (togetherness) principle,” “meaningful coincidence”, “acausal parallelism” or “meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved.” — Carl G. Jung (1960), Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 44.
Jung believed that many occurrences labeled as “coincidences,” are not actually due to chance. Instead, he believed that these occurrences are directly related to the observer’s mind, and serve to provide powerful insight, direction and guidance.
Andrew’s and Greg’s Friendship — Synchronicities of It’s a Small World
On that fateful day, I walked into a conference room at the large New York City-based law firm, at which I had obtained summer employment between my second and third years of law school, to meet my fellow summer associates. Andrew and I became fast friends, immediately figuring out that I knew very well his best friend and Harvard College roommate, David, as David and of my best friends from U Penn, Evan, were best friends since grade school. Somehow neither numbskull thought to introduce us and Andrew and I had spent two full years at the NYU School of Law never having encountered each other. So the Universe stepped in and made sure we would meet.
Andrew’s and my friendship resulted initially from our having picked up on the synchronicities. While the signals were pretty obvious, not everyone picks the ripe fruit from the vine — Carpe Diem.
As Latin scholar Maria S. Marsilio points out, “carpe diem” is a horticultural metaphor that, particularly seen in the context of the poem, is more accurately translated as “plucking the day,” evoking the plucking and gathering of ripening fruits or flowers, enjoying a moment that is rooted in the sensory experience of nature.
A year and a half later I spent New Year’s Eve at Andrew and Kim’s wedding. A few weeks later, leaning back-to-the-wall, I slid to the floor in Andrew’s office next to mine as first-year associates at the firm when he told me with both shock and awe in his voice, eyes, and visage that Kim had gotten pregnant despite her uterine fibroid condition, with twins no less.
Love, much love too.
We Had Picked the Ripe Fruit and Cultivated our Shared Vinyard for Many Years to Follow
I had flamed out very quickly at the firm, while Andrew, a brilliant litigator, and adept office politician, made partner. We remained very close. Andrew and Kim attended both of my weddings and stood as one of my ridiculously large number of groomsmen at my first. He came through for me whenever I needed his friendship or legal advice and support in my later endeavors. We shared many warm dinners with Kim and my second wife Liz.
He was a true friend.
He is a true friend.
As I write this, I remember one such dinner at Strip House, a steak restaurant designed to evoke a high-end bordello, Liz, foretelling events to come, sensed darkness in Andrew that I never saw. Perhaps the setting played a synchronous role?
In March of 2020, Andrew was the first person to offer me condolences upon the death of my soul partner.
Andrew’s soul-baring openness with me in April of 2012 saved me from disaster in 2013.
Andrew — my dear friend since June 1991 — charming, brilliant, funny — name a movie and he could quote a line — always there for me…until…
In September 2006, I invited Andrew and the twins to the Jets’ home opener against the Patriots. I was so excited to see them and soak in together the energy of the crowd, show off my grilling skills, drink bourbon and Guinness with Andrew, and throw the football with him, Jake and Kyle.
We had a great time, but the moment they arrived at the tailgate, I could see the storm clouds thunder clapping in Andrew’s mind. The jovial, captivating, gregarious Andrew stood there, ashen, a mere shell of a man. His spirit had left his body.
All I could get out of him was that he felt burnt out and had taken a leave of absence from the firm.
Then a couple of weeks later I received the truth. Andrew, with a brilliant career as a litigator, his college sweetheart wife, and three great kids, couldn’t cope with the then-recent exposure of his double-life as a sex addict after being falsely accused of rape while on a business trip in Atlanta.
None of us had known of his secret life.
I felt tremendous guilt for not saving him — cognitively I knew this to lack rationality — but I felt it nonetheless. I had not yet learned the powerful message of acceptance found in the serenity prayer and of the Stoics, that we have no power to change another person or their feelings — that we only have power over our own attitudes and reactions. So I blamed myself for not seeing after his first attempt that he continued to fool us. After all, I knew that when someone facing difficulties says, “I’m fine,” that is often a deflection. There is a saying in therapeutic settings that “FINE” is an acronym for “f**ked up, insecure, neurotic and emotional.”
The former Hasty Pudding star had a talent for acting in his blood — born to play roles, mask himself — deceive. A perfectly deadly combination for a lawyer and husband having serial affairs in and outside the office, and with friends of his wife.
Yet, I blamed myself for not seeing the emptiness, a void, remaining in his eyes at the boys’ bar mitzvah a few weeks after that first attempt. I should have seen through his eyes a window to a dying soul. Alas I did not, and two weeks later, he left this world.
“Andrew’s openness with me in April of 2012 saved me from disaster in 2013.”
A beautiful spring day, rich blue sky, warm breeze, leaves on the trees, sitting against a tree trunk in Central Park I called my channeler, Anne, and we spoke to Andrew. The experience was incredibly moving and emotional. He knew this moment would arrive — that I would reach out. It wasn’t my fault he said — I could not have done anything to stop him. Tears streamed down my face then (I am crying now too after all these years — some pain pockets have infinite depth, the silver lining of which is that as they drain there remains infinite room to fill with Light). He had been hell-bent on suicide because he couldn’t see any way out. His family would be better off with him gone he thought. The insurance policy had fully vested.
I felt my ear tingling from energy surging through my cartilage. Anne then asked me if I felt any tingling sensation in my ear, as she saw Andrew sitting next to me touching my ear.
The connection to the spiritual dimension was very strong — it was unusually easy for Anne to translate. Andrew told me that what he had to live with forever, what all souls of suicides have to live with, is that the solution appears to them in the millisecond before their human life expires.
Suicide provides no relief at all On ledge imagining end to my pain Pavement streaming toward me will not end fall Just before break solution becomes plain
In April 2013 I became truly and deeply depressed. I suffered from withdrawal from the sudden deprivation of one of my drugs of choice — “R,” a woman. I had nothing to do with my days because of what she did to me.
The previous month I had finally, or so I thought, escaped her clutches. I confided in a dear friend whom I knew both within and well before AA, thus that confidence was sacrosanct — Bobby would never violate it. Yet, R deemed that I confided in Bobby a violation of her privacy and responded by using my Gmail address to send a picture that she had taken of my erect penis to a woman at work. Despite me being an innocent victim, so was the woman at the firm, and I had to be let go from the small office.
I thought of suicide daily. In the beginning, they were idle thoughts — just the passive ‘I could jump out the window’ type of thinking. On June 14th, R reached me by masking her phone number as someone else’s.
“Why did you cut me off without explanation?”
“R, you know why — you know what you did. I have forgiven you and I will always love you but our relationship is toxic.”
Neither one of us could hang up the phone. Two hours on the phone later we spent the next 36 hours together. I was high from the false connection. At the time I suffered from codependency upon a borderline — disaster waiting to happen.
The high didn’t last long. By early July, as I saw myself repeating behaviors that ate me up inside, psychological-conflict-driven anxiety overwhelmed me. I have written:
Meredith asked me why I thought I used substances abusively. I answered that I thought there was an irreconcilable conflict between my conscious and subconscious minds over things I had done, or not done, over the past few years, and I drank and drugged to run away from rather than resolve this conflict.
Meredith explained that the conflict was not between my conscious and subconscious, but between my mind and my soul.
It wasn’t long before I started self-medicating again with alcohol. I had been dry for a year.
July and August were tumultuous. The chaotic rollercoaster of a relationship with a borderline became unbearable. Plus I labored under heavyweight financial pressure. Drinking worsened the depression. The amplitude and frequency of suicidal thoughts increased. But they didn’t become ideations — I made no plan to carry it out. I kept thinking of my children— that I would not do this to them — and I kept thinking of what Andrew said. I held onto the thought that the solution would present itself. Andrew, with the help of Anne’s (Ane) genetic gift, saved me and my family from disaster.
The Solution
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes of successfully treated suicidal people:
“it turned out there was a solution to their problem, an answer to their question, a meaning to their life.”
Even if things only take such a good turn in one of a thousand cases, who can guarantee that in your case it will not happen one day, sooner or later? But in the first place, you have to live to see the day on which it may happen, so you have to survive in order to see that day dawn, and from now on the responsibility for survival does not leave you.
In those moments I had thought that the solution Andrew talked of was a tangible plan to change the circumstances, the facts, of the problem. Several months later with the clarity of having survived, I saw the solution simply requires a change in attitude needed to find meaning in life whether or not the circumstantial causes of the depression are removed. As Frankl writes earlier in the book:
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility [emphasis added] to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
I often exaggerate to make a point. In this case, I shall over-simplify to make this point: a suicide attempt can be prevented if that person’s prayer for serenity is answered. As I recently wrote in The Serenity Prayer, Repurposed for Stoicism, many interpret this prayer to mean that I do not have any control over events and serenity ensues from letting go and letting God. That’s not an incorrect interpretation, but it misses the mark, as I first missed the import of Andrew’s statement.
The deeper meaning of the prayer is that while I cannot change another person or events that I find upsetting, I can change my attitudes and reactions. That is what I accomplished to avert disaster, with a little help from my friends, who received confessions without judgment.
My General Views on Death and Suicide — Let’s Take Another Look at and Deeper into the Dizain
Suicide provides no relief at all On ledge imagining end to my pain Pavement streaming toward me will not end fall Just before break solution becomes plain My penance to help others to refrain Thought my loved ones better off without me Truth’s too likely they’ll header into sea Had I known that death cannot be cheated Baring deep secrets would cure malady Death would not have left loved ones defeated
As I articulated (I hope) above, while one may believe that death by suicide will end one’s pain and suffering, that belief does not take into account the afterlife. In the afterlife, the soul of a death by suicide must deal with the massive karmic debt of that choice, and the searing mental anguish of the realization of the alternate solution revealing itself in the too-brief-to-reverse-course-moments before life expires. At least the penance of doing the soul work to help others not make the same mistake will pay down the debt and relieve the pain.
Suicide provides no relief at all On ledge imagining end to my pain Pavement streaming toward me will not end fall Just before break solution becomes plain My penance to help others to refrain
Just as I type this now, I am reminded of an experience in late January or early February of 1996. During my first and mostly forgotten foray into the 12-Stepverse, the rehab took us to a “meeting.” The speaker told the story of his suicidal ideation. He had terrible insomnia along with alcoholism. He would stay up nights, drinking in his basement, planning his family-annihilation-suicide. He spent many a night meticulously planning for and rigging the boiler to explode to take out himself, his wife, and his children as his loved ones slept. Then, the night he was ready to pull the switch — he fell asleep.
Listening to him tell that story was the first time I felt the follicle-exciting surge of energy pulsing through my body that announces the presence of entities from the “other side.” It was the first time I felt the presence of God in my life. A presence I later forgot about for too long, but God never forgot about me.
I realize now that it may very well have been the soul of a suicide doing its soul-work-penance that reached down with the hand of God to put that man to sleep that night.
The Illusion of Death for the Dead — The Realities of Death for the Living
Based upon my beliefs about the afterlife, and anyone and everyone’s potential for 1000’s of cycles of reincarnation, in different bodies each time, I believe that anyone’s death is really an illusion for that person, yet, all too real for the humans remaining alive in each reality cycle. Death is all too real for the friends and loved ones who viscerally grieve and feel the pain of death.
It is the sound of my soul crying out in pain from having its heart torn out and brain shattered suddenly, tragically, and with no warning. No, crying does not describe it; it is the sound of unrestrained grief, with no concern about the spectacle that I was for onlookers for an hour or more.
Imagine having open heart surgery performed with a jagged and rusted scalpel without a drop of anesthesia. Further imagine that it was at a frequency and wavelength that ripped a hole in space-time and was heard across all eleven or more dimensions of the universe, not just then, but at every point in time.
Here are two tanka poems I previously published on these thoughts about the dualistic nature of death as both an illusion and reality, the first employing the single 31-syllable-line variety rarely seen on Medium:
Exit-date illusion souls do not dissipate still leaving all-too-real for somnambulists yet waking won’t salve grieving hearts
Deaths’ facts differ still Will drives lives’ paths to deaths’ dates Love burns — searing pain Deepest loss most room for gain Endless pain, Light fills the drain
I explained the 5-line tanka thusly:
The first two lines of yesterday’s poem represent my belief in the predestination of the date of death, but that our paths to death, how we lead our lives, we do very much determine through the exercise of free will. The third line evokes the excruciating pain felt by the soulmate left behind. I almost ended there with that haiku. Yet, I did not want the poem to leave the reader with the dark feeling of hopelessness. So, I added a turn to Light — the last two lines paint a silver lining. While nary a day shall pass that I will not mourn the sudden and tragic loss of my 36.5-year-old lover, my infinitely large pain pockets will never empty, meaning as they drain, they contain space for an infinite amount of Light to shine.
Several months ago I wrote an essay connecting the dots between my understanding that the date of death is written in stone, but how we lead our lives and the manner of our deaths being very much subject to the exercise of free will, and the topic of suicide.
Had I known that death cannot be cheated Baring deep secrets would cure malady Death would not have left loved ones defeated
Regardless of whether one feels that suicide is selfish or justified relief, once one realizes that the date of death is predetermined, suicide becomes pointless. One’s agony will be relieved through a manner of death that does not destroy the lives of the loved ones left behind. Moreover, even a failed attempt could have disastrous consequences, both for the mental health of family members and the physical quality of life of the survivor — if it is not one’s day to die, the attempt will fail. According to Dr. Harris Stratyner, Ph.D. (champion of Carefrontation), as I learned from him in therapy, the adult children of suicides are 50% more likely to attempt suicide than members of the general population.
Truth’s too likely they’ll header into sea
We Are Only As Sick As Our Secrets
I will end my essay with an explanation of this title I chose for the dizain. “We are only as sick as our secrets,” possibly coined in AA, means that a secret kept in the dark grows and becomes more harmful, but once it is exposed to light or released, its power is lost. Andrew’s secrets ate him up inside and lead to the manner in which he died. My soul partner Sitara, whom I knew this life cycle as Lindsey, and loved with all my heart and soul, died of an accidental overdose caused by the secrets she kept from her family — and even one from me, despite her knowing that I never once had and never would have judged her.
Sometimes the person one must forgive above all others is themself.
Please, I implore anyone suffering who is reading this, to seek and you shall find someone with whom you can share your secrets without fear of judgment. I assure you, that person exists. Perhaps it’s a friend, spouse, lover, clergy, psychologist? Even a stranger.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to The POM for dedicating this month to this excruciatingly important topic (Christina M. Ward, Samantha Lazar, MDSHall, Julia Marsiglio). Thank you to Literary Impulse (Somsubhra Banerjee, Priyanka Srivastava, Elisabeth Khan, Nachi Keta) and The Bazaar of the Bizarre for challenging me to expand my poetry from tanka to other uncommon syllabic forms. Thank you to Dr Mehmet Yildiz for trusting me as an editor to publish many stories in ILLUMINATION from courageous writers not afraid to write on this topic, such as The POM’s frequent contributor Lady Foxx
and the irreverently funny Janice Arenofsky
Thank you, Lady Foxx and Janice, for graciously accepting my contributions to your stories in the form of the first paragraph of each.
Thank you, Holly Kellums for your many great contributions to the topic, including this essay and poem.
Thank you to Human Parts and Jennifer B. Calder for this tremendous and fabulously well-written story of the pain and havoc that a suicide wreaks upon the survivors:
I started the essay portion of this submission with a discussion of synchronicities. I read Jennifer’s story less than a month after joining Medium, and I left this comment, only the 14th I had made at the time:
I identified with so much of your personal essay. Your husband’s suicide brought me back to my friend’s 15 or so years ago, but what we really share is the sudden loss of a loved one without any warning: “The wailing on the street was a sound that I did not know I could, nor how to, produce. It has emanated from me one or two times since. I cannot purposely replicate it.” As I was reading your recitation of the drive, it brought me back to my drive to the police station and the walk from there to my lover’s home, and started to cry not with sadness but with shared pain, which, as you know is not a typical cry. The energy you imprinted into your words was easily read by me. Your description of the howl was all-too-perfectly understood by me.
I went on to include the description of my pain that I inserted above in the essay, and Jennifer graciously responded, “you are a beautiful writer.” Thank you Jennifer for providing me with the belief in my craft and propelling me on my journey, which now stands at 318 published stories.
In Rama I create, with soul energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
