Hi
I was bullied in early middle school.
My tormentor was calling, so he called her back
and he said, "stop spreading slanderous filth about my sister!"
And I just thought, he's so cool. No nobody's going to mess with me as long as I've got him in my corner.
And he was in my corner, always.
[Dad asking] Who's going to carry you?
No one.
You're gonna go by yourself?
No, I'm coming with her.
Kaitlyn, look at me.
Now, turn the page.
Jonathan had his own struggles and a lot of it was self esteem
He was constantly having to be helped at school
Those all fed into things that had him turn to medicating himself
with alcohol and cocaine and -
We talked to everybody. Just everybody didn't see that coming.
Not just, what did we miss. What did we all miss?
Mark told me that from the get go, from the first time we met
he really felt that this was going to be something
I was far more cautious and reticent. I hadn't been involved in a long term relationship before.
We enjoyed nature so much. Every weekend we went out to discovery park.
We could see the change of seasons and see the subtle changes of the leaves and the flowers and the seeds.
Rain or shine, we made that quick walk.
Mark developed huge anxiety as a result of what was happening at his business
and had to go to the emergency room.
Twice we called an ambulance and it never occurred to me that suicide was in the offing.
The people at the emergency room did not talk with me about any possibility of anxiety leading to suicide.
I would thank Mark for the 27 years of happiness we had together.
I would tell him that I love him deeply and I miss him horribly.
She was a very successful child.
She was good at everything she tried.
Before she could write, she would have little notebooks full of scribbles.
And she would sit there with facial expressions
and write and we would go, what is she writing?
and we'd look and it would be pages and pages of scribbles and storytelling that was somewhere in her head.
Life got harder for Brooke.
The things that she used to conquer easily were more challenging.
Like, the progression in three years of what I would identify now as depression
but didn't see it that way then
One night, I came home from wherever I was
and she showed me she had cuts on her wrist
and I asked her if she was trying to kill herself and she said
I was, I wanted to, and then I changed my mind.
And I said, thank God you changed your mind.
I wish I had asked sooner, because I feel like I got lucky.
I still have times where I'm sad, just like everyone
but I can handle it now
I've learned ways to deal with it so when it comes up it's not scary.
It's not a happy subject of course but it's really important to talk about it.
It's tragic, and places like Forefront recognize that
and know that there are ways we can treat it
or at least try and stop it
those telltale signs of things that we don't necessarily know are out there
We should learn them before it happens to somebody else.