How Long Does This Continue?

I was not over 12 when my parents invited me to perform on the banjo which I played rather minimally for a family of synagogue friends.

I went straight to my best song, at that time “Where Have all the Flowers Gone,” by Peter, Paul and Mary.

The father of the family, who owned one of the largest Ford dealerships in the Boston area, lead his family in polite but to me, a little hesitant or reluctant applause.

My mother felt compelled to explain my “hippie nature.” How I could not and would not support university demonstrations against war.

She went on about how I was going to be a really caring doctor and “change the system from within.”

They all nodded, mom and dad and the two teenage kids followed the nodding.

This was around the time my mom started telling me I made little sense to her and seemed so strange and foreign sometime she could not believe she was related to me.

I believed then that the human race would and could improve itself and stop doing the dumb things it had done for thousands of years. Like going to war, or wasting being alive in any way, shape or form.

I was always near tears when I got to the lines of the song that ask,

“When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?”

Those exact words were my response to this piece of news.

When people kill themselves, they usually feel at the time it is a reasonable act.
I said “feel” and not think, which I think people rarely do.  Alcohol and/or antidepressants are in their blood 40% or so of the time.

Psychoanalytically, I was taught a while ago, that chronic alcoholism was a suicidal equivalent.

It does affect every organ in the body in one way or another. It can render unconscious quickly and easily enough.

Antidepressants? Well, I don’t think there’s anyone around anymore who is naive enough to believe they work all the time. They don’t. And nobody here is looking at what the forlorn subject tried before dying by their own hands.

Some people have side effects and some have even told me that antidepressants have made their depressions worse.

As for suicide — just don’t do it.

It is definitely my least favorite medication side-effect, if ever it is that.

I still persist in believing there are no unsolvable problems.