When Darkness Falls

“. . . Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight – – Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.” – – Bruce Cockburn

What we do know is that the darkness does not discriminate. It can seep in and get the better of any one of us – the young and old; the rich and poor; the famous and unknown.

All of us touched in some way by suicide – someone we loved or knew well; someone we worked with or went to school with; someone we admired; someone we never even met.

It’s terrifying when self-made and on all accounts successful individuals – who on the outside appear put-together and confident – were ultimately unable to receive the help they so desperately required; unable to reach out and ask for comfort; unable to open up about their personal struggles; unable to save their very own lives.

If they failed – then what about the rest of us?

The overwhelmed and anxious teenagers? The stressed out and emotionally depleted parents? The men and women struggling to come to terms with a reality which isn’t always so great.

What about people like Mrs. Wilmington* and Will Jeffers*?

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Mrs. W. was a teacher at my high school. She had a months-old baby and had just returned back to teaching full-time when for reasons only known to her she went grocery shopping after work, returned home, parked her car in the garage, shut the garage door and left her car running.

That’s how she was found – the groceries still in the trunk.

While my entire high school reeled from the senseless loss – many teachers refused to discuss the obvious. That Mrs. W. had taken her own life. There was frenzied insistence all around that it was an awful accident; a misunderstanding; a tragic misstep on Mrs. W’s part.

Only a handful of teachers acknowledged the horrors that surrounded the truth. And were willing to discuss it with us – her students. Who talked openly with us teenagers – not as teacher to student but as equals – all grieving the sudden loss of someone in our midst.

It was a different time.

Will Jeffers* was a co-worker of mine back in the days of working part-time at a fast food restaurant. He was an acquaintance that never really broke through the barrier of polite discourse into full-fledged friendship. We were two teenagers that worked together for a brief period of time.

He was nice and quiet though not much of a conversationalist. He was a dependable employee who did his job well. Some days he would smile and string a few sentences together. Most others he would punch in for his shift, do what our manager asked and leave just as quietly as he had arrived.

We were a tight-knit core of kids that enjoyed working together – and also enjoyed clocking out together and heading to the movie theatre or to someone’s swimming pool or to the 24 hour diner. But not Will. Always invited, he rarely came. Although once or twice we did manage to coax him along.

It was during this time in my life that I happened to be flipping through my old high school yearbooks. I came across a photo of a small, bespectacled boy who was a couple of grades younger than me. I remembered him from my early childhood – back in the day when parents encouraged you to bike around the neighbourhood to meet other kids. Where heading to the local park meant finding kids dangling from the beehive monkey bars or making dandelion chains in the grass or scraping together a rag-tag team of baseball players.

I remembered this little kid because he was feisty – always calling the shots on the baseball diamond; yelling out insults at the sullen group perched on top of the beehive. He and his little brother were fixtures at the park and I assumed lived nearby. His name was Billy. And until I picked up this old yearbook – I had no idea what his last name was. But there it was in print right in front of me: Jeffers. Billy Jeffers.

I laughed and couldn’t wait for my next work shift with Will. I was eager to remind him about our shared past in the park. I’ll admit, it was difficult for me to reconcile this loud and mouthy kid wearing too-big coke-bottle glasses with Will – someone who seemed perfectly content not to utter any words than what was absolutely necessary during any given time.

During my next shift at the restaurant, I approached Will and laughingly told him about my serendipitous discovery – my old yearbook, his Grade 9 photo. I asked him if he remembered me from the park. I was not prepared for his reaction. And I certainly didn’t understand it.

Looking stricken – he denied it. He denied everything. It wasn’t him. He had never gone to my high school. he had never lived in my neighbourhood. He had never hung around at the local park. He didn’t wear thick glasses, he didn’t have a brother. He didn’t know me.

Even though it was. He had. He did.

It was probably the longest and most in-depth conversation we ever had.

I let it go. I chalked it up to another strange encounter with an eccentric individual. (Anyone who knows me knows that I have an awful lot of these.) Only as an adult, did I realize there’s more to Will’s story. Something he longed to put behind him and move away from.

The following year, Will didn’t turn up for his shift at work. This was highly unusual – he was always there, on time, ready to punch in, put in his time and punch out. But not on this day.

The next day, again Will was MIA at the restaurant. This time, the manager was concerned and called his home – only to be told that no one knew where Will was. His grandparents and his father hadn’t heard from him in a couple of days. His dad was frantically phoning his friends up – trying to find him (this was back before the days of cellphones).

At some point, there was an awful discovery made. Back in the forested area behind his home, Will had taken his own life. For reasons only known to him, he was unable to go on.

Mrs. Wilmington and Will Jeffers: two individuals in my life that I did not know well; whose lives intersected with mine in only the briefest of ways. From time to time, I think of them both. Only in adulthood, have I been able to grasp the magnitude of their respective losses – and understand the resounding tremors that their family and friends are still dealing with.

In two blinks of an eye – what could have been and should have been became what will never be.

Mrs. W never to know the child left behind – who is now all grown up. Will – forever young – never to marry and have children of his own.

“Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.”

It’s a different time.

Some of us won’t have the strength to kick at the darkness on our own. Some of us will need help; something stronger than our own two feet; we will need our family and friends to see and acknowledge our agonies; to stand alongside us or in front of us or even behind us; to grab whatever tools necessary to help us tear away at the darkness.

Until it bleeds daylight.

*Names have been changed.