Don't F*cking Kill Yourself: A Memoir of Suicide, Survival, and Stories That Keep Us Alive by Jeff Romig

Author:Jeff Romig [Romig, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houndstooth Press
Published: 2021-11-02T06:00:00+00:00

October 15, 2015

I sat on the dusty, enclosed dock at Camp Twin Lakes among people I had only met hours before. All I could do was nervously grip, flip, and catch the Milwaukee Brewers-branded baseball I’d found in a box a couple of months earlier, after I’d moved to my new apartment in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward.

The get-to-know-you assignment for this leadership retreat was to bring a sentimental personal object that was illustrative of a key episode in our personal story. My divorce wouldn’t be final for two more weeks, and it hadn’t yet hit me how much my life would change after being married for the previous 13 years.

Now, even on a dock full of potential new friends, I felt more alone than I’d been since before Audrey and I started dating in July 2000, and I was about to open up to this group of strangers about the ground zero of my abandonment issues.

After we returned to Columbia on February 19, 1996, from my college visit to Tuscaloosa, Dad had gone on a business trip to Milwaukee. When he returned that Friday, his final full day on earth, he’d given me this blue and green baseball with Brewers branding embossed on its cowhide covering.

Maybe it was an attempt to connect, but it was probably just a final, parting gift in advance of the two-page, typed letter I would receive the next morning, which would chisel his final words into my terminally impacted psyche.

Other than the time that Audrey and I had witnessed a particularly embarrassing Braves loss at Miller Park in 2004 while we ate juicy bratwursts drenched in spicy mustard, I had zero connection to the Milwaukee Brewers, other than this ball. Baseball was such a part of my life, so a ball from his final trip made sense, and it was logical for me to share this item and tell my new friends the story of my dad’s suicide.

Additionally, I was navigating an emotional untethering from divorce as the paperwork that would officially end our 13-year union would be signed by a judge in the next two weeks. Audrey was a wonderful woman and partner in so many ways, but we’d been on divergent paths since we moved to Atlanta in 2006. While she’d become immersed in building a litigation career at one of the world’s largest law firms, I’d first been paralyzed for 18 months by my anxiety and depression, and then had been mostly absent as I invested all my time in finding a foothold in the dual Atlanta worlds of Democratic politics and young professional leadership networking and climbing.

Those two worlds had pushed my “prove myself” buttons and in no time, I’d been mainly concerned with winning campaigns, building my network, and achieving award-based recognition opportunities. This had all been great for my resume but had done very little to satisfy the craving for the approval that, in my mind, I never had been able to receive from my dad.

Audrey and I had

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