What do you want to leave behind when you die?

What do you want to leave behind?

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
September 1, 2019

With all the talk about veterans committing suicide, there doesn't seem to be enough time to talk about reasons to not do it. 

Doing whatever I can to get to the day when the stigma of PTSD is dead and more of you are still alive. Lately I find myself losing hope that one day it will happen. 

I search the internet for hours, looking for that one glimmer of hope from the people in charge to finally come to the conclusion that what they are doing has done more harm than good.

I end up finding more stories about more veterans committing suicide in state after state and what they leave behind is a burden no family should ever have to carry. Especially a family who prayed for you to return to them and be safe.

What do you want to leave behind when you die?

"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." Pericles

Most of the time, survivors of attempted suicide say they did not want to be a burden to their families anymore. They were tired of seeing them so sad.

When all they heard about were other veterans giving up, they lost hope to find another way out of the misery they had been living with.

The thing is, when they lived to fight another day, they discovered that nothing was a hopeless as they thought it was.

What happens after you decide to leave, is something that you should think about.

Your body is found by someone. Most of the time it is a family member or friend. That image will never go away and you have changed them for the rest of their lives. The "burden" you thought you were going to spare them of, has just been put on them for a lifetime. The questions never end because you are not there to answer them.

Your body could be found by a Police Officer, firefighter or EMT. Again, that image never leaves them. Most of the time, that person, who would have done everything possible to save your life, including sacrificing their own, happen to also be a veteran. Yet again, your death just changed them for a lifetime as well.

People who knew you, or read about your death, will think about the thoughts they had about you before, and then wonder, if you gave up, maybe they should too.

If you doubt that one, suicide is actually contagious. Ask a survivor.

What if your attempt fails and you end up paralyzed, or your brain stops functioning? What you thought was a bad quality of life was bad enough, you just made it worse.

Flip that all around and then wonder what it would be like if you fought like hell to heal the same way you fought like hell to fight the enemy in combat. You are looking for an end to your misery in the wrong place.

The place you need to look at is within. All the qualities you had are still there. You just need help to heal PTSD and then you will stop being a burden to your family and start being a blessing to them.

When you give up on yourself, you just told all the people who care about you that you gave up on them too.

"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." Pericles

You wanted to stay alive back then...so why give up now?

#BreakTheSilence and #TakeBackYourLife