Trigger Warning: This blog concerns nightmares that plague me since Kody’s death. It contains information about his chosen method, a description of injured suicide survivors, and conversations we had about suicide prior to his death. The blog may be triggering for some suicide loss survivors.
I have absolutely never been what you’d call a good sleeper. Ever since I was little, I have slept little. I’m that person that exists on about six hours of sleep and wakes up at five am on the weekend. This seems to mean that I either have short vivid dreams or no dreams at all.
This morning I woke up from a dream about Kody. He came back from the woods alive this time. It was obvious he was very ashamed as he wouldn’t really talk much about it and refused to see me in person for a long time. He finally agreed to come and see me.
I realized immediately why he’d said he didn’t want me to see him. His face and head were horribly disfigured, with one of his eyes left frozen and dead. Lines of flesh sculpted into place and stretched tight to fit. He told me that even though he’d survived this attempt, he still planned on dying. I tried my best not to let my horror show, at seeing his face and at the way he still looked for death. This time I gave him my blessing, hugged him tight, and wished him luck.
When I awoke, I felt chilled to the bone. I wrapped myself tight in my blankets, but it took a long time to go back to sleep. The face I’d seen was my worst fears of how he might look if he had miraculously survived. It’s the face my overactive imagination has shown to me ever since I learned he’d purchased a shot gun.
The image in my mind came from one time that Kody and I sat together and looked at pictures of suicide survivors who had used shotguns. Each one was horrifying, faces reconstructed from complete ruin, miraculous and mortifying. Kody said that it looked like the pain they felt inside had finally made it to the surface.
He told me at the same time that if he ever did this he wouldn’t fail. “I’d do the research, so it’d be quick and painless,” he told me, “I’d never want to live like that.” At the time, I asked him if he’d ever consider that. He told me no. I took him at his word.
When Kody told me later, he’d spent hours in the garage with a shotgun to his head, I almost couldn’t believe him. It was hard for me to imagine Kody with a gun. He’d left the Navy since he couldn’t be around guns. He hated holding them. I’d never even seen him with one.
My dream reminds me of two things. First, that I don’t believe anything in the world could have saved Kody. From what I’ve seen of people with depression there are those that can be saved and those that can’t. Kody was an unsolvable case.
Second, that depression changes people. Kody spent hours researching methods and chose that one. I’ll never know exactly why, but I presume for the speed and completeness of it. He thought of guns as unjust tools for murder, so perhaps that felt like the correct tool for the job. I’ll never know.
The horror of dreams like these haunts me the way those dark conversations from our past do. I wish there were a better way for his pain to have ended. Instead, I live with the pain of his choice as do many who knew him.