Jerry A. Goodson

I wasn't even a teenager when my uncle Jack told "Suicide is Painless" was the name of the theme song to the M*A*S*H television show. I would catch an episode here and there when he or my parents would watch it, although I didn't understand most of the humor in the show at such a young age.

My second experience in a funeral home was the visitation for a family member of sorts when I was in the first grade. I was six years old. I didn't know him, and to this day, don't know or understand why I was even there. My only previous experience with death was at the visitation of this man's mother not too long before. I heard people talking about him shooting himself, and how he didn't "die" immediately. He shot himself in the head, and was kept on life support for a bit afterwards. In his semi-vegetative state, he would bring his hand to his head as if he were holding a gun and trying to shoot himself, again. Of course, it wasn't done consciously, because all consciousness was gone. I didn't know the man. He was nothing to me. Barring a few of my immediate relatives, I didn't know anybody else there. I was on the outside looking in.

After School Specials

The '80s was a great decade in which to grow up. My daily routine typically consisted of getting off the bus and watching cartoons until the after-school specials signaled cartoons were over. I remembered two of the specials that addressed suicide. I haven't even reached double digits in age when I saw them, so the details were more than fuzzy when I tried to write about them over thirty years later. Enter YouTube.

The first one I watched addressing suicide was "Hear Me Cry". Before re-watching it on YouTube, I only remembered there was a lot of arguing, the main character smoking as a teenager (I didn't even know what marijuana was, and was shocked a kid was smoking a cigarette), and the red sports car.

A few years later, at the much more mature age of nine, I watched another special, "A Desperate Exit". So many of the comments made about suicide seems so "cliché" these days, and I can't help but wonder if they were back then, or if that's where it started. In any case, it was that show that gave me the true correlation between the word "suicide" and somebody killing them self. Before that, I thought a "suicide" was getting a little bit of every drink from a self-serve soda fountain.

I was in my late teens before I saw M*A*S*H the movie and learned that theme song had words. Since my uncle told me the name of the song, I would involuntarily visualize the opening them to the show and hear the theme song play out in my head every time I heard the word "suicide".

The first couple of decades of my life seemed pretty void of any real personal connection to suicide. I attended a high school in the Houston suburbs with over five thousand students, and even with that large of a student population, I can't recall any of my fellow students killing themselves. I do remember a couple of students getting killed in drive-by shootings. I can only recall suicide being addressed one time as part of any curriculum in high school in Health class. I was "talking" (never dating) to a girl in a neighboring school, Kempner High School, which had gained notoriety as "Suicide High" after they had a few students kill themselves in the early '90s. I was pretty disconnected from suicide as nothing more than something that happened somewhere else to someone else.

The New Millennium

Shortly before the turn of the century, I was barely in my twenties when I had my first personal connection to suicide. It wasn't someone I heard of, or some stranger, he was a dear friend to my youngest brother. He wasn't my friend, but to my youngest brother, he was family. The young man shot himself with a rifle in his girlfriend's driveway. It seemed pretty senseless to me, and I found myself having the same feelings of the ridiculousness of it all as I did when my uncle (of sorts) did it when I was a small child. I also had the same feelings of being the outsider looking in, because after all, I knew the man but I wasn't really close to him. He wasn't my friend, he was my kid brother's friend.

I transferred into the Texas National Guard unit of my hometown. It was a different type of unit that I came from which meant I would have to attend additional training. Another man came to the unit from being active duty US Navy shortly after me. Our training started out in Austin, Texas (Camp Mabry), which was a very long drive. The new soldier and I rode together. He was pretty closed off, but he did talk about missing his daughter and hating his daughter's mother. Beyond that, I didn't really know much about him. One month, I was preparing to leave out for Austin and was told I would be traveling alone because that new soldier committed suicide. By this time, I had been in the Army Reserves/Texas National Guard for about six years. Every year (usually around Christmas), we would have our annual "mandatory briefings". Up to this point, I may have sat through a briefing on suicide prevention two or three times. The terrorists attacks on September 11, 2001 changed that in a very drastic way.

Post 9/11

Books could be written about how training weekends for the Reserves/National Guard were completely different after our country was attacked. I will stay on topic, but I feel it's important to include the ramping up and stretching out of our nation's military, both active and reserve, to fight the Global War on Terrorism. Personally, I joined the Army Reserves during peace time. I was still awarded a National Defense Service Medal for joining during the tail end of the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm Era, but those conflicts were over and done by the time I was old enough to join. When I joined, there were a few Gulf War veterans, but there were more soldiers running around without a combat patch than there were who had one. If I served with anybody who was part of the Panama invasion (Operation Just Cause), they didn't tell me about it. I did miss a peace-keeping deployment with my unit to Bosnia because I was still in my initial entry training, but it wasn't "war".

Now that our country was at war with terrorists, things were different. A lot of soldiers who joined around the time I did never thought they would be actually going to war. There were a lot more briefings on a lot more topics... and as the war progressed, more and more emphasis was put on suicide prevention. The Department of Defense has spent millions of dollars on campaigns towards reducing the number of soldiers committing suicide.

I, along with almost every other adult who has ever lived, have suffered from mental stresses and crises throughout my life. However, even at my worst and lowest, I've never considered taking my own life. I did find myself pondering suicide more and more, as the Army had commands plaster posters everywhere, have us carrying cards, and having us sit through the dry briefings several times each year.

It wasn't until after I returned from my second deployment to Iraq in 2009 before I started feeling the personal connections to suicide. I would, on rare occasion, hear of a soldier committing suicide, but it wasn't often and nobody I knew. My only recent personal connection to suicide was one of the first sergeants in my battalion was re-deployed home early after receiving a "Dear John" letter and attempting or threatening suicide. I don't know any of the details beyond that, primarily because he wasn't in my company and our command kept it as "hush-hush" as possible. It did drive home to all of us that even senior leadership is not immune.

Second Decade Recovery

The war started winding down towards the end of the first decade of the new millennium. I made the transition from war-fighting soldier to instructor, and made the transition from soldier to police officer. I spent my last four years in the Army Reserves training military police and medics. In the civilian world, I started working as a cop.

Army medics are trained in recognizing and treating combat stress and combat fatigue on the battlefield. Upon re-deployment, the Army and the Veterans Affairs (VA) have made an amazing plethora of psychological services available to combat veterans.

Even in a small town working for a small police department, I dealt with real-life mental health consumers almost immediately. I was an officer for about two years before I had the opportunity to obtain certification as a Mental Health Peace Officer. I have thousands of hours of specialized law enforcement training, but none of the training I've received was as profound as the Mental Health Peace Officer course. I was further blessed that I was able to take it from one of the premier agencies in the world that teach the course... the Houston Police Department. This isn't about mental health, though; it's about suicide.

I've written a couple of articles about suicide in the past. As of this writing, they're still unfinished and unpublished. Although my military career had concluded, and I was no longer subject to the barrage of mandatory briefings on suicide prevention, the fact is suicides continued. Soldiers I served with, as well as police officers I worked with were killing themselves, and it kept the subject fresh in my thoughts.

The suicides became more than just people I barely knew, or didn't know at all. They were now my friends and brothers-in-arms. It's people I have in my cellphone and are "friends" on my social media accounts.

Now, Christmas 2023 is over, and while I enjoyed the time I got to spend with my wife and kids, I now sit here remembering--and missing--those friends and family who are no longer with us. It's heartbreaking that I've lost more to suicide than anything else.

I will commit to finishing the other two articles I started addressing different aspects of suicide, and I will update this when I have completed them.

I still hear the MASH theme song (without words) every time I hear "suicide", and I still hear my late Uncle Jack telling me the name of the song... but suicide is most definitely not painless.