My Suicide Survivor Story

When a family member commits suicide, the aftermath is not an easy one. The aftermath is actually a never ending one. The misery and heartache lives on forever. My father committed suicide when I was 18 years old, 15 years ago, and it still sometimes feels as if it was just yesterday. Suicide has changed my life forever and I can never go back to the person I was before May 22, 1992.

I will start from the beginning. My mother and father divorced when I was only about five years old. He had weekend visitation but didn't always show up. He had ridiculous excuses as to why he couldn't pick me up. One such excuse was that he had no pants to wear. Good one, right? Well I went many years of this type of on again off again visitation. My mother hated it but what could she do. She tried her hardest to make my life as normal as possible. She never bad mouthed my father in front of me. When I got old enough to understand things, she told me that she would never be the one to take him out of my life, he would do that on his own one day. She hated watching the mental abuse that he was dishing out.

When I was about 13 years old, my father married his second wife. The mental anguish didn't stop when he got together with her. She was only about 19 years old when they met. She is only about eight years older than I am. They planned a whole wedding with me in it just to elope and not tell me until I over heard it that Christmas. They went on to have two children, a year and a half apart. Around the time that their second child was born, my mother decided enough was enough. She felt it was time to move far away from all the family drama that my father and new stepmother provided as well as her family. We moved from NJ to Las Vegas, NV, where my uncle and aunt lived. It was time to start a new life. I was almost 16 years old at the time.