Robin, Sweet Robin

Robin, if you can hear me, please tell me: did you have no one who could help you find your way in the dark yesterday?  I know what it is like to be treated meanly and unfairly by someone I love, to have a door I desperately needed at the worst time in my life shut in my face by someone I begged not to leave me alone in the dark, a person who shut that door anyways because they do not care about real suffering people around them in their lives, just themselves.

But you were loved, by millions: in those millions, was there not one person you could call, one person to hold your hand, or take you to a hospital where you could rest and sleep, and find love and strategies to help yourself?  After just a few days on the BHU, I was back on the side of life.  Did someone shame you for wanting to seek help in such a place, or did you feel a stigma over it, or think you would have been shamed in the media? Did you not think you needed such a place, where you could have been safe?

If I could have known somehow, I would have brought you to my humble little house and given you tea and homemade soup.  I would have told you to hold on and help you find people and resources to help you.  But no one knew, or you kept up a good front.  I cry to think of you all alone at the last, cutting your wrist and getting the belt ready, and facing the silence after all the JOY you brought to the world.  I would have held you, and thrown the belt and the knife out the window, and screamed out to your wife and got people all around you to tell you how much you were loved, and to hold on, that a brighter day WOULD come.

And how many, many times, I had to tell myself that because I had no one to tell me that, when a partner or friend abandoned me because they "couldn't handle it, man."  My problem is that I populate myself with such people, who want things in their life so much that they are like decorator crabs and you can barely walk through their house without tripping on all their things, whose hearts are wallets, who want only for themselves.

And frankly, to the people who deliberately leave others alone to face the darkness: your day will come, too, when you need someone, and you have treated others so nastily and cruelly and selfishly that there will be no one there to comfort you at all.  I guarantee it, because I have seen it.  Get your head out of your rear now, say you are sorry to the people you hurt, without qualification, and MEAN it, go volunteer with people less fortunate than you, go get trained and work a suicide prevention line, or donate a few hours of time a month at a food pantry or soup kitchen, and know that YOU are no different than anyone who suffers, and that any trick of fate or circumstance could lead YOU to the edge, too.   I speak to you harshly tonight because you SHOULD be spoken to in a way that gets your attention.

That's my rant for tonight, and I am sticking to it!!!