Choosing to be alive

You might not want to think about life this way but this is how I always have thought about life.

Life is a choice you make every single day when you wake up. If you are dealing with a friend or friends who have voiced an interest in suicide this is what they deal with every morning they wake up.

Life is a choice you make every single day.

You can choose to live on.

Or you can choose to die.

But, if you don't choose life what is going to happen to your family and friends?

Will they too kill themselves or slowly self destruct because of your very selfish action?

You have some responsibility to everyone around you.

NO man or woman is an island.

Unless you are alone on a desert island and put there against your will maybe the only honorable choice is to stay alive for your friends and family.

This is the choice I made every day from age 21 to age 24 or 25.

I consciously decided to stay alive even when I wanted to be dead.

Do I regret not killing myself?

There are bad days in life when you wish you were dead still.

But, if you lived responsibly there are also many people whose lives you save or children you have raised who now depend upon you much as if you were a monarch of old.

So, do you have a responsibility to them to stay alive and set a good example for them?

Yes. If you make it through to 25 or 30 then usually you have to stay alive for others who depend upon you.

However, if you are dying of an incurable cancer I think people have to know this and let you end your life where it is legal to do so also. If there is no medical hope and you have prayed about this then people who love you need to know at some point about your choice.

However, if you aren't dying there really is no excuse if you kill yourself because of the harm you will do to all the people you love ongoing.

If you die how many of them will take their lives too?

And what havoc will that cause in the lives of everyone they know or are related to?

So, you have a responsibility not to create a cascade or waterfall of ongoing suicides on into the future.