Stepping Back from the Ledge by Laura Trujillo

Author:Laura Trujillo [Trujillo, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2022-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Finding Hope

During these months, I looked for these moments of optimism and gratitude, and with it came a growing confidence in myself.

As I began to read more about suicide, I found another way to think and talk about it. I learned about the language around it, that when discussing how someone died, it’s important to use the right words, and that in fact saying “commit” is wrong. Psychologists and those who study suicide suggest that the acceptable way to say it is “died by suicide,” or “killed herself,” because the word commit conveys a feeling of crime or wrongdoing, which perhaps we don’t want to give.

I wish there was a phrase like there is in Spanish. I remember in my high school Spanish class, I learned a phrase, el vaso se rompio. There is no blame—“the vase broke itself.” I wondered if there was a way to say, she broke, my mom broke herself. And she did, mi mama se rompio. Or another phrase that my friend’s father used to use when a lightbulb burnt out: la luz se fue. It translates literally to “the light left,” which felt like what happened with my mom.

I knew I would then begin to change the way I talked about my mom. The shift in my language and description reflected a shift within myself. My mom did kill herself. She didn’t commit suicide. She was not a victim. I was not a survivor. She died by suicide, and I was starting to be OK with saying it, though not necessarily talking about it, two very different things. During the months before this shift in both how I talked about suicide or even thought about it, several things happened to help me find the gratitude in my own life.

John had had juvenile diabetes since he was a teenager. It had been thirty-five years of low and high blood sugar levels, and it began to put a strain on his arteries and heart, his kidneys and nerves. We decided that John should have a pancreas transplant to deal with his diabetes. He had always been good at controlling his blood sugar, so good that when I met him, we dated for months before I knew he was diabetic. We had managed his disease for years, him, mostly, but with me helping. Later he’d been able to use an insulin pump, a device the size of a pager. Instead of insulin injections through a syringe, he could tell the pump to deliver insulin. It helped him regulate his sugar much better, constantly delivering a drip, and then allowing him to push insulin to his body without shots.

Just before we moved to Cincinnati, his blood sugar was dropping or rising seemingly at random, no longer following a pattern, and his body no longer reacted to insulin in the same way. The pump no longer was working. It worried him, and I worried that the damage from the stress on his organs from the high or low sugars might cause a heart attack or stroke, or dangerous lows that would be difficult to catch.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.