Day 268

I'm having (or did have) a bit of rough afternoon. Dawn and I are in Wilmington (NC) visiting my aunt. Damian loved it here. My aunt Emily is a lot of fun to be around and there is a lot to do here, much of it revolving around the water. 

Today, the 3 of us headed south to Fort Fisher and caught the ferry to Southport. On the ferry ride back (to Fort Fisher) I became keenly aware of the hole in my soul. Damian should be here with us. It's wrong that he's not. For the last few hours, I haven't said much. I just withdrew myself from the conversation. If I had my druthers, I'd probably take it one step further and hide in the bedroom, or, better yet, snap my fingers and teleport back to our house. It's my safe zone, which is ironic since this is where Damian chose (?) to take his own life. 

Dawn and I were talking a few days ago about the stigma of suicide. I asked her if she thought people would treat us differently if Damian had been killed in an accident or died of natural causes (at an admittedly unnatural age). At first she said no -  "They still wouldn't know what to say," she added - but the more she thought about it, the less sure she was of her answer. While I agree with her that people may not feel any more comfortable dealing with the death of a child based on the way the person died, I do believe that suicide carries a stigma with it. I see evidence of this a couple of different ways. 

First, we have been reluctant to use the word "suicide" or even acknowledge on a broad scale that Damian "...took his own life". Instead, we told many people that Damian died from a "tragic accident". I think part of this was due to our own incomprehension of the situation – "How could this have happened?" – but I also believe that as time went on we were reluctant to acknowledge the specifics of his death to outsiders because we felt a combination of embarrassment and shame. At least I think I do (or did). I shouldn't speak for Dawn. 

I do believe that we were good parents. If anything, we were probably too lenient with Damian and  overindulged him and his whims. That said, what could have pushed him to make this choice? I don't know and will almost certainly never know, but I feel that his choice was, in a way, a statement regarding his life at home with us, an indictment of sorts. As if by saying out loud that Damian had chosen to take his life, the unspoken but implied follow up is that he did so because "we" or "I" had failed him. Kids raised in a healthy environment don't do things like this. Ergo the embarrassment and the shame. 

Second, I sense that I am being judged by those who know what happened. It may be all in my head – it's hard to say – but I feel it all around me. This sense that people have already decided that Damian must have had a terrible home life or that we, his parents, were oblivious to all the giant red flags that had to be waving over his head in the days (or weeks) leading up that fateful day. I've gone over and over it and I still can't find or see them. Even writing that is a bit of catch-22 as my brain automatically projects people dismissing what I say now as me being either "in denial" or "lacking the objectivity to see what had to be obvious to anyone else". It's easy to speculate and to judge. To jump to conclusions. I know because I've done plenty of it myself over the years. 

I also sense that some people may be unfavorably judging Damian or judging the decision he made. Thinking less of him for what he did. Again, this could just me projecting my fears onto others but it's hard for me to dismiss it as that. Part of me wants to not put any stock into what others think, but it's difficult to do considering that I and Dawn are now the sole (?) proprietors of Damian's legacy. Having lost everything else, I feel very committed to protecting his memory. 

Pulling this all together, it's for these reasons that I have been reluctant to share with people what happened. So why share it now? Because I want to acknowledge what happened as a way of saying that it really doesn't matter how Damian died. The fact is that he's gone and it sucks. By all appearances, he was a healthy 15 year-old living a good life with two parents who loved him unconditionally. I don't know what happened to trigger him to do what he did. All I can ask is that you not judge him or me (us) based on one terrible, tragic decision – to take his own life. To commit suicide.