The Story Changes

I spoke at the high school where Greg teaches at two health classes a week ago. It had been some years since I’d spoken at a high school and I worried about how to tell the story of Denise's suicide, now thirty years in my rearview, to students who are fourteen/fifteen, two lifetimes for them removed from it happening.

But as I began to speak and weave parts of her story leading up to her death as well as the immediate aftermath for us, something struck me– how much the story has changed in those thirty years.

I first spoke at schools about three years after she had died, maybe less than that. Comparing it to having thirty years of happenings to share, I wondered how I filled the time previously. But I spoke in more detail about the events leading up to her death and the immediate aftermath. Those are the very things that I now weave into the story, more sidebars to other parts of what I share.

When I was living back in Naperville after my divorce and not long before I moved back to Albuquerque, my high school health teacher, Mazz, asked me to speak at his advanced health classes (there were two). Even then (now more than ten years ago), I worried what I could say that might inspire them.

After I finished speaking, a girl came up to me and told me how much she appreciated my story because they were all seniors getting ready to graduate and hearing all that I had been through made them see, “That no matter what we go through, we’ll be okay.”

I had been so focused on working through my challenges that I didn’t see how they could help others. Now it’s time to share how I made it happen.

Be Present

Be present.

Seems impossible for many of us, doesn’t it?

How often do we find ourselves distracted from the moment, even a great one, by something else?

But being present is important, it’s a key to life in many ways, or at least to functioning in life. What we often don’t realize, however, is that not being present is the source of much of our pain. We’re always looking one way or another– in the rearview mirror at what we had– or looking forward to what we want but can’t seem to get. Then we find ourselves in a downward spiral of pain.

There is pain in the present, of course, but present moments don’t last forever. The sun always has to come up, light must return.

Whether we have lost someone to suicide and can’t stop looking back at what we didn’t do or what we will never have, or we’re contemplating ending our lives because we can’t bear to face a future, we need to stop walking one way or the other.

Stand still, be present, look around. What’s surrounding you? Life has pain, it’s a reality, Yet by stopping for a moment and just being, we’ll find our perspective changes. By being present.