The Secret to a Long Life

The secret to a long life, Michelle Shock wrote, is knowing when it's time to go.

I was in high school when a well known and popular classmate took a shotgun and used it to take his own life. He had his entire life ahead of him and for reasons none of us ever understood, all he saw was darkness. His friends and family were devastated, classes were cancelled for the funeral, and a memorial service was held to try and help us make some sense of it and grieve. The principal quoted Elizabeth Kubler Ross, someone most of us had never heard of. We had the immortality of youth and couldn't even begin to imagine any harm coming to us never mind old age, sickness, the consequences of carelessness or as the saying went, the wages of sin. We just knew someone we had cared for was gone and we didn't know why.

Even now, my high school years feeling a hundred years ago, it's unimaginable to see only darkness. The light may be obscured or even only a dim flicker, but it's there, so maybe it's more than just being able to see it - maybe we have to want to see it and want it badly enough that we can overcome the seductive side of suicide. I wonder what went though his mind, what thoughts could possibly have brought him to see only one option. What could have been so intolerable, so powerful, that it blinded him to the facts that even the worst situations change, that no state of mind is forever.

Death, my daddy used to tell me, is always harder on the ones left behind. I try to see it as part of the process,
an inevitable transition from one plane of existence to another. As with all things, we do the best we can and move on. I am incredibly grateful for my life so far - it has been a wild combination of highs and lows, happiness and sadness, accomplishments and failures, love and loss. Life is a good plan.