This is a question I am asked pretty regularly: “How do you do it?” Or a statement: “I don’t know how you do it…”
Either way, I always think to myself, “Is there really any other way?” I am not sure what I would or could do any differently.
Losing David was avoidable. I spend some time every day thinking about what we can do to help people in need. How could I NOT do anything? How is it that we lose a person who had every reason in the world to live and yet not have the tools available to help him see why he should have felt the same way?
When people ask me how I do it, I say to them and to myself, “What option do I have?” In fact, it’s not an option: It’s an obligation. It’s an obligation on my part to do anything I can do to share my story, to explain how… just HOW devastating it is to have to sit on the sidelines and watch somebody do something self-destructive and then have to bear the burden of regret and memory of all those amazing times.
When I close my eyes, I imagine David when he was very little, the pride of being an older brother. The adventures and the experiences we shared in our formative years. I think of him as he grew into a man and all the effort we all expended on one another to make it another day. I look at the picture above and think to myself: Here is a person who is sharing in my loss. The loss of Mom. Yet somehow on the day that picture above was taken, we were living. We made that day our day and enjoyed all the fruits of our labor and loss. We are very powerful creatures with the ability to endure and overcome.
And then I think about cleaning out his apartment and closing a chapter too soon. I thought about losing a person who had more right to life than maybe even I do, given the amount of people whose lives he impacted.
I wake up everyday and I think: What is worse… being the person who is suffering, or being the people left behind wondering what we could have done differently? What possibly could have made a difference? Being the surviving person to somebody who has taken their own life can be a cruel existence. And so when we were in Jeane’s backyard, when Nicole and high school friends suggested doing the foundation and even came up with the name, I knew at that exact moment what I was going to do.
I made a pact with myself in those next few days that I was going to do everything in my power with my loud mouth and my exceptional network of friends and my remaining family to do something that would potentially stop a person from doing something they will never fully understand or have the opportunity to regret.
When people look at me and ask me how I do it, I look at them and want to ask them the same question. “How do YOU do it? How did you all go out in the last few weeks and raise over $35,000 for this foundation?” I would argue you would probably tell me that you never thought about it that way— you just knew what you had to do and continue to do.
But you are. You are just doing it because, really, what other option is there?
