right in my backyard

Mondays are crazy for me.  My list is always a mile long so my first stop is the gym.  I got there and picked my favorite treadmill right in front of the Today show only to find it wasn't the today show.  The local news was on and reporting live from a local high school where the students where under a shelter in place due to a shooting.

My heart sank, no it stopped for just a second.  Please God, I found myself pleading, not here, not now.  Please God, no more!

It turned out a young man tried to commit suicide.  I didn't listen to anymore TV.  A friend came in and we talked.  We talked about our hopes and fears for the young man, his family, for our own children.  We talked about how we had both considered suicide in high school at points because it had to better than going on.

When I left the gym I went to have coffee with a friend from college.  The conversation of course drifted to the young man and what was transpiring just miles away.  I was recounting my earlier conversation and how I had felt the same way in high school.  My friend gasped....is it that bad?  We moved on in conversation, but it made me wonder, Is suicide something some people never consider?

I sang a song from South Pacific for a college audition called The Cockeyed Optimist...

When the skies are brighter canary yellow
I forget ev'ry cloud I've ever seen,
So they called me a cockeyed optimist
Immature and incurably green.

I have heard people rant and rave and bellow
That we're done and we might as well be dead,
But I'm only a cockeyed optimist
And I can't get it into my head.

I hear the human race
Is fallin' on its face
And hasn't very far to go,
But ev'ry whippoorwill
Is sellin' me a bill,
And tellin' me it just ain't so.

I could say life is just a bowl of Jello
And appear more intelligent and smart,
But I'm stuck like a dope
With a thing called hope,
And I can't get it out of my heart!
Not this heart...

I didn't believe the song nor understand it at 21.  I was still immature and incurably green.  I let the rant and rave and bellow get so loud I couldn't hear the whipporwill.  I was the human race and I was falling on my face.....after too many Jello shots and dope.

But if I have learned anything at all from South Pacific, from life, and from my grandmother it was that "This too shall pass".  That the people you thought had it all in high school will come back to the 20th reunion bald, fat, and unemployed living in their parents basement.  (and that's just the homecoming queen!)

Police and media are Thankfully not releasing the name of the boy who shot himself on Monday.  To his family - I will hold you all in my prayers.