I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty inside, to the point of numbness. It's like there's something already dead inside. My whole being has been pulling back into that void for months. (81)

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.

Nature is the first tutor. No one remains untouched or unschooled by the earth, seasons, and heavens.

Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.

I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that's the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn't say that kept me alive; all the compassion and wamrth I felt from him that could not have been said; all the intelligence, competence, and time he put into it; and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living.

I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.