THIS LITTLE THING CALLED LIFE ISN'T SO little

   When your parents decided to bring you into this world, or for many like myself, adopt you, they made the courageous decision to one day allow you to make your own decisions based solely on the life lessons they taught you. That being said, you hopefully found your own path and if your parents did it right it wasn't the beaten one. It was one that you yourself decided to clear. Yes, sometime you had to veer off into the nearest little village along the way to re-evaluate your next move, but hopefully you picked up you machete and started clearing YOUR path again based on what you had learned on your little sabbatical.  Life isn't fair people. Life kicks you square in the button fly and leaves. Remember those. Button fly jeans. Remember how cool they were. You weren't cool if you didn't have button fly jeans. I was cool by the way. Just saying. Anyway recently life kicked me so hard I tried to give up and I am using this as some therapy for a moral booster to get me back on track. You see, about 9 years ago a cousin of mine, Nathan (Nate) committed suicide.  He and I were best friends growing up. We once left a yellow grape out in the sun on his grandmothers stone retaining wall and waited...and waited....and waited for what seemed to be 6 million years but what probably was 20 mins for that stupid thing to turn into a flipping raisin. Come to think of it, I wonder if it had turned into a raisin, who would have gotten to eat it? He was a great guy. The best. I remember being so angry with him after I found out he had ended his own life. Didn't he know how bad that would hurt the rest of us that cared about him. I thought he was the most selfish person in the world. How dare he. He had a mother and father that loved him.

Two brothers that cared and a grandfather that would have done anything for him. The thing that irritated me the most about the whole deal was that his Uncle Gary, my father opened his heart, his house and gave him anything and everything he could to hang out with him. Nathan would make several trips from California to Idaho to go hunting and fishing with my dad. You see at the time, I was quite flighty as I was a Lance Corporal in the United States Marine Corps, married and divorced twice and felt like I didn't have time for my father. I sat right there at the dinner table one day and told my hero that I didn't like hunting. His favorite thing in the world. He, my hero, played several hours with me either in the back yard or on the ball field trying to make me the best ball player I could be. Now Nate was getting all of his attention. Or so I thought. At the time at least. Nathan was a great man and he made my dad, my hero, my best friend happy. He made him smile. He made him laugh. Then that selfish man made my dad sad. How dare he! What a jerk! Or so I thought. I expressed several years later to my father that I was actually wishing..still, that I made him as proud of me as he was of Nate. I told him I wanted their relationship to be ours. He explained to me that Nathan and I were two totally different people and that I was his son. He loved me and always have. What he and Nathan had was a Uncle/Nephew relationship. We talked it out for a few more minutes and then I made my dad, my hero laugh. I saw him smile. Our relationship has grown since that little life talk. I enrolled in college and am doing well. I have a steady job, and if you ask anyone, that in itself is a big deal for me. I am married to my new best friend and have UN-officially adopted her two wonderful kids. My little life was going pretty well. Then it happened. Lisa, my wife, and I had a very bad thing happen and my little thing called life came crashing down. In one instant. I tried to tell myself that it was going to be okay. Funny thing is, it didn't. Lisa and I kinda quit talking for a few days and work went to hell. I hated myself. I hated my life. HATED IT! All of a sudden Nathan might have had a point.....




 November 5th 2013 11:30 p.m. I made the decision to take my own life. How doesn't matter. I wrote out my Last Will and Testament and emailed it to Lisa's work email that way when she left for work in the morning she would just think I was sleeping and not try to wake me. I didn't want her to wake up and find me and start her day off badly. By 10:00 the next morning she was back home and rushing me to the hospital. I do not remember anything from the time I laid down to die until 3 days later. My point is not explain everything in between, not only because I cant remember it, but because it's not the point of this story. The point is this. Life gets hard. Life will test you and your strength and sometimes it's okay to rely on someones strength to help you weather the storm. Talk to people before you do what I did. Sometime the strongest man is the one who cries his heart and soul out to a loved one who understands him the best. Strength is not measured by how much you can bench, or how far you can hit a ball or how many people climb on your back before they tackle you. Real strength is measured on the field of this huge thing called life. Life has a new meaning to me these days and with the strength of my family and friends, I will pick myself up, dust off, and learn how to be strong again, but never again will I allow one bad decision define who I was. I will never again be so selfish as to decide that my friends and family are better off without me. Never again will I believe that I am not strong enough to deal with things. The worst thing of it all to me is that I made my wife, my dad, my mom, and my sister sad. If you every get to feeling that way. Take a deep breath. Count to 10. Then pick up the phone and call someone you love. If you can't think of anyone or maybe there really isn't anyone, you can call me. Anytime. 402 686-0639. Your life is worth living because it isn't little.

http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/gethelp/loss.aspx
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