Between Life and Death

I’m preparing to facilitate my next Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST) workshop and catch myself thinking about what a journey it has been.

For those who are not familiar with it, ASIST is a two-day workshop that features audio-visuals, discussions and practice simulations to teach skills for suicide intervention. For those unfamiliar with me, I am neither fond of getting up in front of people and speaking (much less performing) nor a behavioral health professional. (Even though I have worked in the behavioral health field as an administrative professional for over fifteen years now, I’m no therapist or psychiatrist.)

But ASIST isn’t just for behavioral health “professionals.”

The workshop is designed so that just about anyone can learn the material and give life-saving first aid to someone with thoughts of suicide. It teaches us to walk alongside the person with thoughts of suicide, listen to their story, and help them to understand there is another way between life and death—staying safe for right now. It cultivates curiosity, compassion and empathy—not just for individuals with thoughts of suicide but for others in general.

Yet I would never have opted to be a trainer in a million years.

In my last journal entry, I mentioned something about my limited thinking. While for most of life I experienced it as an attention to safety, I’ve come to realize recently that safety, like most things human, is a matter of perception. And it is often an illusion.

For instance, I hear talk lately of the emergence of two Americas--one for the wealthy, and one for everyone else--each with its own rules of law, worth and experience. But you experience this emergence only if your privilege has largely kept you sheltered (and somewhat safe) from this simple truth: There are as many Americas as there are people in its states and territories, each within borders equal to the dimensions of cages of our minds, each with its own rules of law, worth and experience. And for those of us who have been excised and disenfranchised from the many washed and revised versions of the American Dream, it has always been this way.

The blood of my people—indigenous Susquehannock, indentured Irish, and enslaved African—tell me so.

The bars of my cage led me to believe that in order to remain safe, I needed to be as invisible and inaudible as possible. The song they sang was that I should not exist.

But this is not how humans are designed. Humans are made in the Image of God. And God is infinite. You can no more put infinity in a box than you can contain the light of a lamp under a bushel basket. Light seeps through the cracks. The basket may even catch fire. If it cannot work through the goodness of the world, divinity will work through the world’s madness.

So when my boss at work had the idea of me becoming an ASIST trainer, I thought she had lost all of her mind. (We work in behavioral health, which is convenient should one lapse into insanity.) But home girl was serious.

I’m still not quite sure why such an idea occurred to her. But I do recognize inspiration (however mad it may be) when I see it. So, I was like, “What the hell, sure. I’ll show up and be curious.”

Mind you, I had never attended an ASIST workshop before as a participant.

And when I did as part of becoming a trainer, my immediate reaction was, “What the hell?!”

Then panic ensued. Panic that gripped me the whole first day of the workshop. As I mentioned earlier, I work in behavioral health but am no professional. Others in attendance at this workshop included crisis prevention personnel, crisis line workers, community support workers, managers, and directors… At my place of employment, I am an executive assistant. As in, I assist my boss with doing things. I manage her calendar, make the coffee, take minutes… And my boss wanted me to be a trainer? Who trains other people? In this?

By the end of the first day, I was about to call her and say, “Ma’am, what is this? I am going home.”

Thankfully, my husband was there to talk me off the ledge. (Well, actually, he was there because he was on spring break and the hotel where the workshop took place had a pool.) He convinced me to stay and show up for the next day of the workshop. And to remain curious.

By the morning of the second day, something in me clicked. My understanding of the content deepened when my weirdly-wired brain related the Pathway for Assisting Life model that ASIST uses to three-act story structure. And when the facilitators, Carla and Chris, announced at the end of the second day that we had completed the workshop as participants and asked if we were all ready and willing to become facilitators, I answered, “Hell yes.”

That was the summer of 2022. I became a fully-registered trainer, and have been training staff at the community mental health center where I work ever since.

While it can be exhausting at times, it’s more rewarding than I ever imagined (in part, because I, left to my own devices, would have never imagined).

Much of the reason I work in behavioral health distills to the same reason behind most of what I do: Story. Working in behavioral health has enhanced my ability to understand and tell my story, as well as to understand and hear the stories of those around me. It helps me to understand and tell the stories of those who no longer walk with me in breath and body but who are still with me in spirit.

There are two stories behind my work as an ASIST facilitator. One is the story of a woman named Mel. She was a nurse but also more than that. At the community mental health center where I work, she worked in Administration and was the Director of Nursing for the inpatient unit for a number of years. During the pandemic, Mel’s direction helped to keep many of the most vulnerable people in our city—the people our organization serves—alive. She also helped us to translate the safety protocols of the hospital that our organization is part of and adapt them for behavioral health clientele during the worst of that time.

Just as we were starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel, though, we lost Mel. To suicide.

We didn’t see it coming at the time, but, thanks to ASIST, in retrospect, I see that there were signs. If I had been trained in ASIST, I would have known to speak up, to be more persistent.

The other story belongs to a little kid named Todd. Todd didn’t have the vocabulary to be able to tell his story, but I do. He grew up in the Eighties, the gayest brown boy scraping by on Reaganomics, running from whack-ass crack, and knee-deep in the AIDS epidemic. His family was Jehovah’s Witnesses at the time. The family also had some Baptists, Methodists, and born-again Christians. From these various angles, Todd perceived a single, potent message: You’re a brown queer boy, and not even God wants you.

While he had no trouble with his existence, it felt as though everyone else did.

Talk about the Upside Down…

Todd didn’t want to die so much as he wanted to cease to exist. It just so happens that when you feel so alone and powerless (and when your scope of what it means to exist is so limited—he was, after all, just a child), the only way you can think of to cease to exist happens to equal death.

A train ran somewhere in the woods behind the housing development where Todd’s family lived. Todd heard it daily but never saw it. His plan was a mix of Looney Tunes and Eighties’ ingenuity: Find the train, drink some Dimetapp, and lay down on the tracks.

It was a simple plan but not easy.

Having never seen the train, Todd had to figure out where it was in proximity to where he lived. And he employed various experiments to try to do it and make good on his plan. To track his findings, hypotheses and results, Todd drew and wrote in notebooks.

Days turned into weeks. Weeks transformed into months. He started to write and draw not just about the Plan but about why he had to go through with it. This generated even more experiments—attempts to belong. Failures. He wrote them down. And in the process, something happened: He let out the things in his head that were threatening the life that spawned them. Crawling in the confines of line and page, cover and spine, they seemed smaller, less painful. And in letting them out, Todd learned to persevere. He learned he could be free in ways besides death.

He learned he could be me.

The effectiveness of ASIST rests in story, one of my superpowers. It allows me to honor Mel and Todd’s stories, to use them to shine lights on hope, empathy, curiosity, and all the life-sustaining magicks that make us human. And in doing so, I hope to spare others the road Mel and Todd walked. 

Between life and death, there is another way.