A thing to understand.
There was one day, years ago. I don’t even remember the name of the person I was talking to, but I remember the conversation.
She was hurting. We’d never met face to face, but she was dating a friend. At that point, in university, I spent a dozen hours a day in front of a computer. So I was usually pretty available.
A friend of hers had committed suicide.
And this girl, this deeply religious, incredibly sensitive girl, was wrestling with a problem I’d never considered before. She was figuring out how to talk to the small child left behind. How to explain to a child that her mother had killed herself.
We talked about illness. About society’s insistence that we treat mental illness as something somehow less real than physical illness. And I had to explain to this person, this girl I never met face to face, that there’s not often a rational, healthy person who decides to end their own life when not suffering or dying.
This went on for a few hours. Different approaches, explanations, scenarios.
That was the first time I had ever explained to someone that the brain was an organ the same as a kidney or a lung. And when attacked, it declared war on the entire body as a response, at times.
I can’t even remember her name. But I remember what I learned that day. That this is a thing to understand, that not enough people do.
Being human is more complicated than we’d like to admit.
