Posted by Dinah on June 16, 2008, at 11:35:14
In reply to Re: Suicide, posted by calamityjane on June 16, 2008, at 9:29:14
> Or, suicide is difficult for those who feel they SHOULD have been that persons REASON to live, such as in my situation.
>I know this sort of feeling is probably not something that bends easily with logic. But let me say this.
I have a wonderful son. He is a joy to me, not only as a son, but as a young person. My husband and I would go to parenting classes, and the other parents would be angry with us for having such bizarre parenting concerns. "My son is perhaps too thoughtful." I have to keep my mouth shut around my son's friends' parents when they're talking about the challenges of raising a boy. He is in every way a delight.
Yet there is no way he could sustain being my reason to live. Not because he isn't good enough or wonderful enough. But because no one could, or should, be another person's reason to live. You could have been the apple of your father's eye, the joy of his heart. But you could never be his sole reason to live in the face of his other demons.
When parents say their kids are their reason to live, they don't mean it in the sense that their kids are too wonderful to leave. They say it because when you become a parent, you recognize that you have an obligation to put that little being first, in the larger sense of the phrase. Not in the eating chicken necks while they eat the breasts sort of way. Not for a while, or even while they're little, but forever.
When they say that they mean that they recognize that their death, and especially their suicide will bring untold pain to their children. And that they have a responsibility to their children not to make that choice and not to cause that pain. And they have the strength to live up to that responsibility.
The focus of responsibility is on your father, not on you. Maybe his thinking was so clouded that he couldn't recognize how much pain it would cause him. Maybe his sense of responsibility wasn't strong enough to make that pain enough to counterbalance his own. Or maybe he wasn't strong enough to live up to that responsibility.
Whatever the truth on his side, the truth on your side is that you could never have been enough, no matter how wonderful you were, to be his sole reason *to* live. And that you were completely enough to be his reason *for* living, had he allowed anyone to be his tie to this life through love and obligation.
I'm really sorry for your loss.
poster:Dinah
thread:833136
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/grief/20070414/msgs/834879.html