My Dogs Stopped Me from Killing Myself
A grave, a knife, and the night I said yes to the fight
*This post describes my own experience of suicidal thoughts.
A couple of months ago a large gathering of mourners stood in a tight circle around the open mouth of a grave. I could see the backs of the family seated underneath a red funeral tent, surrounded by grieving friends and relatives, all of them looked grim and stuck with pain. Funerals are always sad, but some are tragic.
I don't hang around cemeteries. It's where I work. I manage access gates and act as security for the sprawling grounds. I've been doing it for a few years now, and have come to know what the faces of the grieving tell me about who is being interred.
In this case, the faces were mostly young, attractive people in nice cars, affluent I guess. There was also a lot of them, which usually means one of two things: a young person has passed, or an influential elderly person like a doctor, business leader, famous people, or someone with a long life and a big family. But this funeral was a sign of tragedy, a life cut short.
Once the mourners were gone, I stopped by to look at the small plastic nameplate stuck in the soft mound of fresh dirt. It was a 49-year-old man, and judging by the faces of those who had been around what was now a mound of dirt, I knew there was something more, something else.
A quick search and I found the details. A man with a lovely big family, many children, photos easily found online showing a life of smiling faces, boats on Lake Minnetonka, travel, many friends. Everyone looks happy, and in nearly every image he's smiling. But looking further, there were the stories of business deals gone very wrong, bad choices, criminal deceit. Crimes that had the look of something that got out of control, something he may have hidden from even those closest to him. When the scam was exposed, he took his own life, as was reported in the news.
I can imagine the despair that would lead to such an end. To find oneself in a corner, blinded into believing there is nothing good ahead, the pain of getting there almost unfathomable.
I walk by the grave nearly every day. The plastic marker is gone. His was forty-nine years of life — growing up, school, friends, love, children, parents, dreams — and it all ended here, covered in snow.
There is something about this I recognize. Not the crimes, but to be in so much anxiety and pain that death seemed a reasonable option, a path of relief. I lived through nights when I fantasized about ending my life, and those thoughts weren't gory or particularly scary — they were lighter, with an odd sense of liberation. It was as if death was an off-ramp from the excruciating sense of suffocating under the weight of so much anxiety.
Most of my life has been lived with optimism and joy. The day I learned I was to be arrested, I got in my car and drove. Distraught and overwhelmed, I was going to go to the Renaissance Festival grounds, to the building where my accuser claimed I raped her, and hang myself. To relieve the anxiety, yes, but also to exact revenge on their cruelty. I could see it clearly, but I was turned back by an emotional plea from my wife to come home. And I did
It was after I was released from jail that the idea of killing myself became, oddly, seductive. One night when I was home alone, I grabbed a chef’s knife from the kitchen and was intent to cut my wrists. It seemed so obvious that this was the right thing to do. I could spare my wife and friends the shame of having to defend me (albeit for a crime that didn’t happen), and I could relieve myself of the throat-crushing anxieties I’d been experiencing for days, weeks. I could regain control of my future! How could it be so easy?
As I headed out the back door, my dogs Stan and Luka followed. Luka got in front of me first, and when I tried to open the door, both dogs circled around and got in my way for a moment. I opened the door and followed them out into the darkness. It was late October, I think. I went to the corner of the yard inside a small garden. Here, I thought, it will be out of the way, it will be over.
I stood quietly with the dogs nearby, and considered whether I had it in me to fight for myself and claw back from the jaws of deep despair. I don’t recall feeling certain about that fight, or if it was a temporary reprieve, but my dogs stood close by me, so returned indoors, sat at the dining room table, catatonic and ambivalent.
During those few weeks when the thoughts of suicidal relief were a fever, I learned to lean on good and kind, human and animal, and these things were louder and stronger than the despair, though on some days it was hard. The constant threats of going to prison, the drumbeat of ugly rhetoric on social media, and the numbingly biased news stories wouldn’t let go of me. But I chose to fight, a decision I made over and over to move forward.
I’m no better than the anguished man in the cold grave. His family loved him, and he certainly seemed to love his life. But we live in a world of complex emotional math, where the pressures and fears reorder the calculations, the sums of which can vex even the strongest mind. Anxiety is a moody denominator, it fluctuates on the inputs. It’s the rattlesnake in the grass, the one we sometimes hear but can’t see. The man’s calculations were off, the snake was closer than he thought. He killed himself for dark reasons, and that venom of shame blinded and broke him. It’s a snake I got away from.
I won't be shamed again.
My work is about more than what happened to me. It's about what happens when media bias goes unchecked, when mob certainty replaces evidence, when institutions abandon the principles that protect everyone. I was wrongfully accused and the machinery of outrage ran regardless of the truth. That machinery doesn't only destroy the innocent. It steals from real victims too, the ones with bruises and breaks, who carry their scars and are waiting for justice that gets harder to find the louder the noise gets.
The death of this stranger had reminded me of how tenuous life can be. When I think back on that night in the darkened yard, I remember my dogs standing nearby. They were waiting, maybe, they thought we were going to go for walk. What I think, is they were waiting for something to change in the wind, something they could sense or see in me. When I stepped out of the garden they both wagged their tails, and came closer. and we went inside. I think, in their way, they helped me to save my life that night, to fight back against the tensions, to live to see tomorrow. I’m grateful now.
A grave is in all of our futures, but that night I choose to grow old first. Stan and Luka went ahead of me, I stepped inside, and closed the door behind us. Outside, the snow kept coming down.
If you or someone you love in struggling with suicide and depression, call 988 on your cellphone to be connected to a friendly professional to get the help you want and need. Take care of your self, call or text 988.