The last time I posted was September 2016. Wow!
I'm happy to say that my Josh is doing very well. He and his girlfriend broke up shortly after that last post, but he found a young woman who is very well suited to him and she moved in with him about a year ago now.
The result of this is that he's visibly happier.
He's had some rough patches, especially in the winter...he gets into that deep depression and I talk, talk, talk to keep him from killing himself. But for the first time last winter, with his new girlfriend, he did not sink as deep and this winter he's been fine.
He continues to be off medications.
We had a tragedy in our family recently, my older son shot himself in the head on July 27th. I was out of town at the time and it took me 12 hours to get home. They told me immediately that his injuries were non-survivable. He was in the hospital 7 days and in hospice for 9. He was young and strong and in good health so it took his body a while to let go. The entire thing was, of course, horribly and I'm brokenhearted and struggle everyday with this loss.
All this time I've been so worried that Josh would kill himself, it's too unbelievable that my other son did.
He has struggled with addiction his entire adult life, but went into recovery about 18 months before he died. After his death I realized that he had been struggling for a few months with his sobriety and I think he was really, really unhappy with his girlfriend. They had been together for 13 years and had a true LOVE/HATE relationship. They fought all that week she said and then they fought that night, he left and went to the bar, came home drunk and killed himself. I imagine when he came home they fought more, but she's not admitting to that. Her story is he stopped on the way home to get soda, walked in and put them in the fridge and then shot himself. I call bullshit on that. If he intended to shoot himself all night, he wouldn't have stopped to get sodas, right? Like I said, I bet they continued to fight and then he'd had enough and was drunk. Guns and alcohol are not a good combination.
I honestly don't think he would have done this in a sober state of mind. We'd had many discussions about suicide because of Josh's situation and he had strong feelings about it. It's ironic, I always thought alcohol would kill him, but not like this. Not at his own hand.
Josh has handled this pretty well, I was afraid it would cause him to cycle, but he's been a rock for me. He struggles the most with the way his brother looked in the hospital, with his head so swollen and his eyes black and swollen. He is haunted by that.
I'm haunted by all of it. I talked to him on Monday, he called me, just to talk and we made plans to have breakfast, just he and I when I got back from my trip. That Friday night he shot himself. I'm glad we had connected that week and as always, we said "I love you" to each other.
Hold your babies close, even when they're 34, that's all I've got to say.
I continue to pray for everyone who struggles with mental illness or has a loved one who struggles.
