Karen Elizabeth

Three nights ago my dear sister committed suicide. The news came as no surprise. She had suffered from depression for most, if not all, of her life and had over the course of her years run the gamut from self prescribed remedies to MD written scripts for various doses of antidepressants. Nothing seemed to work for long. The agony of the disease was never far away. It mattered not that the wonders of science enabled psychiatrists to classify her as bipolar. For the naming of her affliction was not a cure. At best she was blessed through their prescriptions with short term relief from the symptoms. Such times were scattered islands of calm in a turbulent sea of grief.

From very early on my sister turned to substances as numbing cures for emotional pain and disquietude. One jovial night in our thirties as we shared war stories of folly in our youth my sister told me about one time when she was around age eleven and had done something that had upset our parents and subsequently caused herself pain. Intuitively she knew at that young age that the cure for her discomfort resided in the medicine chest. She consumed an entire bottle of God knows what with the only results being that her stool was tinted green for her next couple of dumps. Oh how we laughed that night with the telling of that anecdote.

In her teens with frequency she cried out for help through the slashing of her flesh. Her wrists from those years were a crisscross of scars.

By inches then yards she sank ever lower into a morass of liquor and drugs and she sought with ever increasing intake to plug that self sinking hole. But the substances rather than stopping up the hole only served to widen and deepen it and the sucking of that hole became the only sound until finally she was the very hole, a chasm as deep as a beaten down soul.

The subsequent years passed in a self eradicating void of turmoil, chaos, and despair.

Then she found her way into the rooms of AA. Over the next twenty years she adhered to the 12 Step way of life. She surmounted the physical cravings for liquor and drugs and slowly went about the work of rebuilding a self. She made restitution and amends and took to sharing with others what had been given so freely to her. In doing so she became a warmly regarded member of a world wide fellowship. And she knew a life rich with purpose.

Depression however continued to dog her. It was a disease that one doctor had warned her would only worsen with age. I wonder now how that statement contributed to her decision made in the grips of despair to end her life. Was she thinking it's only going to get worse when she swallowed that fatal dose of pills? I think now too how I might have gone about my last few conversations with her. Could I have said something, offered a shred of hope, that might have swayed her lethal hand? In the end I am left with my questions and the dashed hopes that I could have in some way rescued her from the jaws of depression. It was a child's wish I know, one not given to the facts. For no one has power over another's depression.

She was of course more than her afflictions. When she wasn't under the pounding hammer of depression her smile was genuine, warm, and inviting. Her wit was likened to a friendly jab that tickled and her compassion seemed to know no bounds. She was generous beyond her means and an avid and thoughtful listener. She was my most trusted confidant. My secrets I knew never went beyond her. Through her time in the rooms of AA her friends were legion. For she touched many lives with humility, warmth, and grace. Her death leaves a wide vacuum behind and I will miss her until the day I die.