The above quote was from a local youth pastor who said that he was “tired of going to the hospital on suicide calls.”
My co-worker informed me of a double-suicide that happened today. A husband and a wife shot each other. They left a note on the door saying what they were about to do.
It won’t be in the paper because it happened in the home.
I took the photo below on an unrelated assignment today. The event had been weighing on my mind all afternoon. It affected me and my photography.
“This town really is depressing,” I thought.
Last week I went to a suicide prevention seminar at one of the schools we cover. A few students were having trouble dealing with the death of a classmate who committed suicide in August and the school brought in the owner of a local funeral home to talk to the kids.
The sad thing is, these incidents are far from isolated. Another young man from a different school man committed suicide not long after the student I just mentioned. In June, a co-worker’s son committed suicide. He was the third in his family to do so, his father and older brother both took their own lives. I’ve heard of at least a dozen suicides in this town since I moved here, about four months ago. I sure there are some I haven’t heard of since most of them don’t make the paper and are not talked about in public.
“I’ve seen this town destroy people,” a man in a bar said to me when I first moved into town. “You won’t stay long, not if you’re smart.”
As far as I know, no one has ever written an in-depth story about the suicide rate here. It’s just something that goes on, silently.
