Same Story Different Verse

Does suicide haunt some families? Like a theif in the night, stealing the sanity of it’s victims. In 1975 my grandfather died by suicide. No warning, no goodbyes. That very day I told him I was going to give him his first great grandchild. He told me he wanted a 9 lb baby with the family dimple in the chin and he wanted a boy. He hung himself that night with his own belt in the downstairs shower. We were all devastated. I had that 9 lb baby, a boy, with the family dimple. I named him after my grandpa that I loved dearly. We named him Kevin. 12 years later I had my 5th child a girl, we named her Kelly. We NEVER told the kids that my grandfather had killed himself. That was a family secret that we buried with him. At the age of 17 yrs. old, Kelly also chose to die by suicide. She hung herself in her bedroom closet. 5 months later, my son Kevin also chose to die by suicide not handling the grief of his little sister well . He hung himself in the downstairs bathroom of his home with his belt after tucking his little boy into bed. Kevin told his son “goodbye” not “goodnight”, as his little boy remembered the next day and shared with us. He was 30 years old. Neither he nor Kelly said goodbye, as like their great grandfather before them, not a word was said. In a poem I wrote: “No goodbye words were spoken, no I love you’s were said, you left before dawns light broke through, now we spend our lives missing you.” God, I want to join them, but I am not willing to leave what I have here, to go there. So, I spend my life asking “why”? I do what I can to sway one of my other son’s from doing the same thing. I feel like I am losing that battle to. He, like his older brother before him, feels he could have done something to stop both Kevin and Kelly from their ultimate decision to die. He lives with the grief and doesn’t understand it. There is no understanding suicide.