Hi Isak,

Oh, the loss of your friend is surely devastating. It is such a personal story and often hard to talk about with others especially if they would rather avoid it (because it's too painful) or they don’t know how to talk about the despair they might be feeling around the loss. It sounds like you have a community and so did your friend. And sadly, when someone makes the decision to end their life, no one can stop them. The driver is in place, and the brain has chosen death over life. And yes, the challenges to seeing someone clearly through a lens they may only want you to see and is carefully sculpted by them, makes assessing the signs of suicidality difficult at best, and impossible at its worst.

It sounds like your daughter works with kids who are deeply in pain and they are lucky to be in her care. Though, for a clinician to lose a child or anyone due to suicide takes its toll on the work and on the compassion and caring, sometimes leading to compassion fatigue. AS clinicians we need to do our own self-care and take time for family, friends and long breaks.

For some reason I missed your post from July, hence the late response. Thank you for bringing me into the story of the loss of a dear friend. Too often it seems people really don’t want to die, they want the internal pain to die. I love the poem. Thank you for sharing it with me and I will pass it along.