“With over 30,000 people dying by suicide each year in the United States, averaging 82 per day, there are almost twice as many suicides as homicides each year.” — stopasuicide.org
82 per day. Despite the fond memories the “Thompson” family will always have of Bob’s grandfather — whom we’ll call Grandpa — he is now logged as a suicide statistic:
- Suicide per minute
- Suicide per hour
- Suicide per day
- Suicide per year
- Suicide in the town
- Suicide in the state
- Suicide in the nation
- Suicide in the world
- Suicide by age (elderly)
- Suicide by gender
- Suicide by firearm
The list likely goes on.
Suicide is the purple elephant in the room that no one likes to talk about. It’s never a pleasant subject, especially when it’s by someone you know. The pain of losing someone by suicide seems to surpass the pain of all other kinds of death. There’s something about suicide in which we feel that the deceased had control.
- “It didn’t have to be that way.”
- “If he’d just gotten help.”