Do you really want your life defined by suicide?

Would You Save the Life of Someone Like You?
Combat PTSD Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
March 19, 2017

Do you really want your life defined by suicide? The lives you saved, the risks you took for the lives of others will become secondary to the fact you gave up on your own life.

You've thought of the reasons you have to end it all. You thought about how you'd do it. There is a question you seem to have forgotten to get the answer to. Would you save the life of someone like you? Isn't that the next question you should ask? 

How much do you value life? After all, you dedicated your life to putting others first. You wouldn't be suffering right now if you did not do your job in combat, as a police officer, as a firefighter or other first responder profession. Saving lives was your job. Saving your own life is your job too. Dragging around the tombstone, waiting to fill in the dash between the date you were born and the date you chose death is deciding life really doesn't matter that much after all.

If no one told you that you choosing to leave behind people who care about you instead of fighting to heal is a bad idea, here are two stories that should get you to think twice about how you want your life defined.


Increasing suicide rates among first responders spark concern
TribLive
WES VENTEICHER
Sunday, March 19, 2017

"My son is a classic case of 'I'm never going to tell anybody; if I tell them, they'll think I'm weak.' "

Paramedic George Redner III started to grow angry and distant after he failed to revive a 2-year-old who had drowned.

But not even his parents saw how deeply his work affected him until he took his life seven years later.

"My son was a classic case of 'I'm never going to tell anybody; if I tell them, they'll think I'm weak,'" said Redner's mother, Jacqui Redner, 48, of Levittown, outside Philadelphia.

Like many first responders dedicated to saving lives, Redner, who was 27, never talked about his struggles, she said.

Her son, who went by "Georgie," threw himself in front of an Amtrak Acela train the morning of Aug. 1, 2015, at a station near the family's home.

Suicides among first responders, often driven by emotional strain in a culture that long has discouraged showing weakness, are too common, according to organizations that track the deaths.

First-responder suicides are sometimes compared to those among military veterans, many of whom have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Military veterans deployed from 2001 to 2007 had a 41 percent higher suicide risk than the general population, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
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Donald Wendt came home as a double duty hero. He was a two tour combat veteran and he was a firefighter. It seems he was born to save lives, that is, other than his own because he was brainwashed into thinking asking for help meant he was weak.

Think about that for a second. Weak if he needed help? How could anyone get that notion into their heads after all the times he faced dying because someone else needed his help?


Bradenton firefighter shot and killed by police, was also a veteran

Wendt joined the Bradenton Fire Department in December 2003 after volunteering with Cedar Hammock-Southern Manatee while working at Ten-8 Fire Equipment.

A year later, he spent 13 months in Iraq with the United States Army Reserve. Wendt received a Bronze Star Medal for his efforts.

On May 13, 2005, as a recovery section sergeant with HHC Platoon, 1st Battalion, 103rd Armor and Task Force Liberty, Wendt “went to the aid of a fellow soldier who was injured and trapped under a burning vehicle during a Vehicle Born Improvised Explosives Device attack,” according to the U.S. War Office. He used tow chains to move the burning vehicle away from the injured soldier.

“It seems like every day you read about this, but when it hits home, it's different,” Gallo said.

I am posting this with an extremely heavy heart. This morning I woke up to news of this from his Mom. My prayers for my friend and his entire family as well as the firefighters and police officers involved with this tragedy.

He was a firefighter and volunteered to serve this country in combat.

When will we ever get to the point where being back home is less dangerous than combat for those we send?

His life was remembered in 2014. 

The military makes it harder for them to seek help especially when a General came out and said, Some of it is just personal make-up. Intestinal fortitude. Mental toughness that ensures that people are able to deal with stressful situations.

And then went on to say it had to do with not having a supportive family. I saw his supportive family yesterday and they included about 100 firefighters. I heard how much intestinal fortitude he had and he showed it in Bradenton as well as Iraq.

PTSD comes from the life you live and the risks you took to save others.

How about you choose to live long enough to prove all the idiots wrong about PTSD and why you have it? How about you face the fact that tomorrow is defined by you and you can fight for others to extend the dash on their own tombstones? Put down the tombstone. You got healing to do.