When suicide hits home

Saturday morning, I went to a gun show with my dad.  It was my first time going and I had a blast.  My dad let me pick out a gun that he is going to get me when I finish my class and get my permit.  I was having a pretty good day hanging with the old man.  I sent a picture of my gun to my uncle and my mom, thinking they would be pretty interested to see what I was going to get.  My uncle replied with approval, but there was no response from my mom.  Now my mom isn't against guns, she has a Springfield semi-automatic herself.

I tried calling my mom later that day, but her phone was going straight to voicemail.  Which was odd for her, but concluded that her battery must have died.  So I called my gramps, and talked to him for a while.  I needed to catch up with him a little bit, and I was also hoping to catch my mom is she was with him.  But she wasn't, and my gramps said he hadn't heard from her in a few days, that's when I got worried.  I sent my uncle a text, asking him if he was with her since I had been trying to get a hold of her, but he didn't reply.  A few hours later I get a call from my mom, she's in the hospital, on suicide watch.

My mom moved to Michigan a few years ago, and ever since she's been there, she's been extremely upset.  She can't find a yoga studio she likes (some of the yoga studios there play Eminem), it's always cloudy, and the people are grumpy.  Growing up there, I understand why she was so unhappy living here.  But I was hoping that she was finding a way to make it work since she wasn't talking about how much she disliked Michigan as much.  Until last summer, when she told me that her doctor increased her dosage on Prozac. I tried telling her she needed to find a way to make the yoga out there work, and try to work it into her life.  I even sent her a list of yoga studios in her area that she could try.  But since she was driving 4 hours every weekend to see her parents, she didn't really have time for a social life.

Now before you think it's unwarranted for her to drive 4 hours every weekend to visit her parents, for the past few years, my mom has been helping my grandparents make transitions for their lives.  My grandma has advanced Alzheimer's, and hasn't even recognized her own husband for a few years now.  And about a year and 3 months ago, my grandpa had a heart attack and had to have a triple bypass.  It was at that time, that my grandma had to move into a nursing home because my grandpa could no longer care for her.  So every weekend, my mom went to visit her parents, check on her dad and make sure he was doing okay living on his own, and recovering okay, and visiting her mom to make sure she was adjusting to the nursing home okay. And also make sure the nurses in the nursing home didn't accidentally kill her, because they actually almost did a couple times.

On top of all of that, my mom hasn't been happy with her job either.  There has just been a lot of dram happening that I don't really care to get into, but she hasn't been happy there either.  But it's a good career, and it's allowed her to help me through school.  

So when I found out my mom was in the hospital on suicide watch, I was actually devastated.  I knew she was unhappy in Michigan, and I knew she had been under a lot of stress, but I had no idea it had gotten to the point where she would want to end her own life.  

She was at her therapist Friday night, and just unloading everything, and basically she had reached a point where her world was just crashing down on her.  And at the end of her session, the therapist told her that she could voluntarily go to the hospital or she could call the cops and make her go, because she didn't trust her to go home and not kill herself.

And since I found out about all of this I've been so down.  It hurts me so much to know that my mom was hurting like that.  That things had gotten that bad and she didn't let anybody know.  I also felt awful because a few days before all of this, she had resolved a big fight that I was still brooding over.  I live 1500 miles away from my mom, and it kills me that I can't be there for her.  I can't hug her and see her and physically be there for her.  They took her cell phone, so I have to wait until night time to call her to talk.  And I'm just really freaked out by all of this.  

It's been just my mom and I since I was 6.  My brother went to live with my dad after my parents divorced, so my mom and I have been each others rock ever since.  And I can't imagine my world without her in it.  I understand that a day will come that my mom will pass on, that's just a fact of life.  But for my mom to be so unhappy with her life that she would kill herself hurts me in ways I didn't know was possible.  How do you even deal with that?  How do you process your mom wanting to take her own life, and you having absolutely no idea she was suffering so much?

And ever since all of this, I haven't been able to focus on my schoolwork at all.  I have due dates coming up and I can't hardly focus on reading a single sentence in my textbooks.  I've tried leaning on my friends but only a couple have actually been there for me.  Other's have been non-existent or they're starting to fallback more and more.  So I just feel like I'm alone in this.  I'm just grateful my mom's therapist saw the signs before anything bad really happened.  I just really miss my mom right now.  I'd give anything to see her and give her a big hug.