I emceed the annual Out of the Darkness walk last Saturday for our local chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. This group is very special to me – not just because I have two suicide attempts in my past. It is because of their extraordinary devotion and perseverance to this cause in the face of overwhelming stigma. More and more we hear a celebrity, coworker, neighbor or friend talk about their depression or bipolar or even their struggle with drugs and alcohol. But discussing an actual suicide with the loved one left behind is still the ultimate taboo. You just don’t do it.

We want to hear the gory details, but we dare not ask. Instead, we rely on hearsay and gossip. We tell ourselves that we do this because we don’t want to inflict any more pain on the grieving loved ones. But we really do it because suicide scares the hell out of us and if it could happen to them, it could happen to someone I love.

After the walkers took off I hung out with several couples whose children had killed themselves. It had been many years since their children’s suicides and all of them now volunteer to help others deal with their grief. I asked if I could ask them some questions – not about details of their children’s suicide but about etiquette.

I have friends of friends who have killed themselves but no one close to me has committed suicide. I, too, am very uncomfortable discussing it with a grieving loved one. I don’t know how to start a conversation and I don’t know how to respond if they decide to talk about it.

So, I asked these parents: “What should I say?” “What questions can I ask and what questions should I not ask?” “Is it okay to ask why it happened?

One mother told me she thought I should break the silence by saying: “I hear you had a wonderful son/daughter/husband.”

“Don’t approach it from the perspective of loss,” she said. “This way they will focus on the good rather than the event.”

One of the fathers disagreed: “I think you …

I am on vacation in the Florida Keys. I had dinner tonight with a friend at a restaurant on the Gulf of Mexico. The sunset was postcard over-the-top stunning – pink, orange, lavender, yellow. After dinner we walked across the street and watched in the moon rise on the Atlantic ocean.

I started the day with my favorite breakfast: greasy hash browns, sausage, scrambled eggs and coffee. Then I spent a couple of hours on the bottom of the ocean with thousands of yellow tail snapper, psychadelic parrot fish, sharks, eels, lobster, conch, hog snapper and coral so intricate and delicate that I have no doubt there is a God.

I takes a day like this to make me grasp the depth of my depression. I watched moon silver waves on a black ocean and wondered, “How could I ever have wanted to leave this? How could I have ever wanted to kill myself?”

That is how strong depression is. So strong that no matter how much love and beauty are in our lives we want to die. Maybe not all of us. But I did want to die and even tried it a couple of times. There are so many people who love me deeply and so much natural beauty around me but all I wanted was out.

I am getting ready for bed. Tomorrow morning I will get up early, have another unhealthy breakfast, ride on the bow of a boat into the sunrise and dive to the bottom of the ocean again – and then again in the afternoon.

On Friday I will leave the Florida Keys with deep respect for nature, God and my mental illnesses. I have no doubt that my depression is real. Only a terribly ill woman would want to kill herself surrounded by this much love and beauty.

Good night.

Sometimes, when I have been feeling really good for awhile, I begin to think that maybe I have made up all this depression and bipolar stuff. Maybe I am faking it or making it a bigger deal than it is.

Those thoughts were rolling around in my noggin recently when I found the blue folder. I had been looking for something – I can’t remember what – and a saw a box on a shelf in my closet. I pulled it down and opened it. There were some photos, my old newspaper clippings, legal papers – the usual stuff you find in boxes on a shelf in the closet. Then I found the blue folder.

I recognized it right away. It held some of my teen writings. I journaled a lot when I was a teen. I found most of my teen journals several years ago. Reading them was so painful that I stopped and gave them to my therapist. I didn’t want them in my house. But I had forgotten about the blue folder.

I’m not whole. I have to do something for myself. I try to tell myself I am not tired. Try to convince myself. It used to work but now it is no use. I need one minute to think. Everything is going so fast…I am always alone yet never. My mind aches to be alone. Not to have anything to think. Wishes never come true. Die.

I was 19 when I wrote that. There is much, much more. I knew I was not a happy, well-adjusted teen. I drank. I took drugs. I wrote horrible poetry. I wanted to die and gave it a couple of lame attempts. I cried when I read what I had written so many decades ago. But I am glad I found these writings. Now I don’t have to wonder whether my depression and bipolar are real. They are real and they have been real for a very, very long time.

Yesterday was my anniversary. I am not married and I was not celebrating another year of sobriety.

April 27 is the anniversary of my last clinical depression. It was one of the worst days of my life. That was three years ago – April 27, 2006. I got up sometime between 4 and 5 am. I hadn’t slept much. I walked the dog to the park, sat on a picnic table and cried. I just wanted some relief. I slogged down to my gym, got on a stationery bike and rode until I foamed the mouth. Nothing. No endorphins. 

I got dressed and went to work. I walked in and felt that I was not in my body. I sat at my desk with my back to the newsroom. I was weary. I could not stitch my thoughts together. I was barely eating or sleeping and smothered by anxiety and desperation. I walked out.

I went home and sent a text to my boss. I couldn’t talk to her. I didn’t know what to say. I called a friend who has depression. She told me I must see a doctor immediately – or go to a hospital emergency room. I found a nurse practitioner who specializes in working with addicts and alcoholics. She saw me that afternoon – probably saving me from relapse. She started me on antidepressants and a mild anti-psychotic to help me sleep. 

After six weeks of hell and progress measured in little baby steps I returned to work. I gradually slid back into a new life – A.D. – After Depression. Nothing is the same. I can go weeks now – actually months – on terra firma. No crashes. No blasts offs. It is so amazing. I am still in awe of how stable my life is today – even when things around me fall apart. This is what it must feel like to have a healthy brain. 

I used to wonder how long this would last. I don’t anymore. This is my new life. If I get sick again I will know what to expect and what to do. There is a floor beneath me …

Alcohol is a depressant. I wished someone had told me this when I was 14, when my drinking career began. Although at that age it wouldn’t have meant anything to me. I was going to drink regardless of any warnings. 

I drank despite two car accidents and two suicide attempts. I drank to be a part of and I drank to be different.  I drank for any good or bad reason or none at all. I only learned three years ago that alcohol is to depression what gasoline is to fire. I am 50.

I knew early on that not-drinking made me calmer, more stable and balanced. I actually quit drinking for ten years, between ages 20-30. Of course I embarked upon a marijuana maintenance plan so I was not exactly clean and sober. I picked up drinking again when I was 30, right where I left off. I was back on the roller coaster. 

Ten years, two divorces and one child later, I threw in the towel. I had had enough. I have been sober now for over 10 years. Still, I did not make the connection between alcohol and depression until I was seven years sober. A major depression struck and I had no way to numb the pain. Alcohol was not an option. Asking for help was all I had left.

It worked. Therapy, medications and humility. Today I am healthy. I can look back over the decades and my life makes sense. I do not use my dual-diagnosis as an excuse for things I have done. I use it to stop beating myself up and start making amends. I use it to help me understand myself.

Drinking on my depression explains why, for so many years, I would wake up in the middle of the night and hear a voice in my head, saying to someone: “Oh, she killed herself. She put a gun in her mouth…” It explains why I reached for the drink in the first place – to give me some relief – even a few hours – from my depression. It explains why my hangovers lasted more than a day, because the …

Nicholas Hughes, 47, hanged himself last week. Forty-six years ago Hughes’ mother, poet Sylvia Plath, placed her head in an oven and turned the gas on while her 2-year-old daughter and 13-month-old son, Nicholas, slept. Six years later Nicholas’ stepmother killed herself the same way.

Plath’s book, The Bell Jar, had a profound affect on me. I had never before identified with a fictional character and I became enamored with Plath. In a sick way, she was my hero. I was 16. In hindsight I should not have read that book when I did. I was too young and too sick. Her depression made her feel as though she was trapped under a bell jar, unable to breathe. Finally, someone felt just like me.

Suicide is not hereditary – at least geneticists have not proved it. However, studies have shown that  children whose mothers committed suicide are 7 times more likely to attempt suicide than children whose mothers do not. That statistic is why I am alive. I was suicidal during my last depression. I had tried to kill myself twice before.

My therapist and nurse-practitioner told me that statistic. They asked me to remember it when I had suicidal thoughts. It worked. I could never do that to my daughter. Regardless of how I feel about my own life, I love my daughter more than I imagined I could ever love another person. I would never put her life at risk – ever. Today she is 17. She is happy. She just found a dress for her school’s Junior-Senior Dinner. We are looking at colleges. She framed a picture of us and gave it to me for Christmas. 

She is my anchor to life. I am so blessed to be alive. I have a life I never dreamed of and I am finally the mother I always wanted to be. Don’t quit before the miracle.