Tell Me Why...

"Sailing heart-ships
thru broken harbors
Out on the waves in the night
Still the searcher
must ride the dark horse
Racing alone in his fright.Tell me why, tell me why" ~ Neil Young



I'm all over the map on this one.  It's depressing news for many of us who know all to well the emotional toll the intense role of caregiving takes on families.  A mother ends her daughter's life and then takes her own.  It happened to my former boss and his wife ending their life  late in their 70s.   If you knew the wife, and I knew the wife very well, I couldn't imagine her  in a million years first ending her husband's  life  before ending her own.  There was  also a wonderful  father we knew, a few years ago, who committed suicide leaving his wife and daughter because he was depressed and overwhelmed by caring for his daughter's severe medical needs.

When these people  came to the end of their rope, what did they find? What do we hope we find?

We hope we find direct and concrete responses like a call or announcement that funding is available offering independence, quality, and purpose for our loved one's life.  We hope we find  that help is on the way. We hope that no matter what happens to us --  job loss, cancer, or whatever -- our loved one will enjoy independence, quality, and purposeful life.

We often find through our networking a broken system that continues to challenge us as parents.  A system that instead of helping our loved ones, creates a template under which all our children must fit to experience independence, purpose, and quality living.  A system that continues to create more barriers for our children then we ever dreamed would stand in their way.

We always hear how we can love someone more than life itself.   What happens when a person can no longer bear another day without adequate resources?  How does a person arrive on this journey through life where ending it is their only solution?


I have to say their names everyday -- the people I have lost to suicide -- because it helps me re-connect to the sensory and mobility magic of living each day with those people I love more than life.