| Pain Of Coping With Suicide |
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Pain Of Coping With SuicidePHILADELPHIA (CBS 3) ―
"Everything turns black in an instant. It's almost like a tornado just ripped through our family." Even after 45 years, Carl David can trace the scar left by his brother's suicide. "It's like yesterday," David said. It's the kind of pain that reawakens with even the slightest trigger." For David, a third generation art dealer on South 18th Street near Rittenhouse Square, the trigger came last week with news reports of Gina Gentile, Vanessa Dorwart, their suicide pact and a high speed Acela train. He said, when you hear about this with other people, you feel terrible because you lived it. Carl was just 16 when his 22-year-old brother, Bruce, an Army reservist, learned his unit was to ship out to Vietnam. "My brother was a happy-go-lucky great guy. But with the media showing guys coming back in body bags, the wrath of war, he started to freak out ... and one night he didn't come home." Bruce had climbed three flights of narrow, winding stairs to a story room inside the family art gallery. That's where his father found his oldest son suspended from the rafters. "No note, no signs, no hint of anything except this fear of the war." A pain so unforgiving that Carl's father couldn't go back into the gallery for a long time. He died eight years after his son's death. Carl David writes about his family's journey about surviving suicide in a book he titled, "Bader Field." That's the airfield outside of Atlantic City where Carl last saw his father alive. "The suicide is always there," Carl says. "It's part of your psyche. It becomes an integral imprint in your soul. It was so intense, the blackness was ever so pervasive that you just wandered if you ever would get out of it." And that's the message this survivor of suicide wants troubled young people -- contemplating taking their lives -to hear. "Just don't do it. If you need help it's out there. It doesn't just affect you. You don't die alone. Don't take your life because you take your family with you." (© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.) |
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