Recently I found out a girl I was friends with in elementary school committed suicide.

We weren't best friends, but she did spend the night at my house at least once, and since we lived down the street from each other we hung out some.

I hadn't seen her since the eighth grade, so this isn't aobut how I wish I could have saved her.

I found her obituary and went to the website for the funeral home. There is a place there where you can leave condolences for the family. A lot of them referred to her "being released from her pain" and that she was "lost." Friends that I have talked to have said that she was bipolar. There are medications for bipolar disorder, but those who have this disease have an awful time staying on it. As excruciating as the downs are, the ups are so fantastic they seem worth the downs. It's really an incidious disease.

It breaks my heart that this beautiful young woman, with her dark bouncy curls and sparkling green eyes, was in so much pain that suicide seemed like the only viable answer. After you've been depressed long enough you know how to play at being "normal." My own therapist didn't even know how badly I was doing until I let it slip that I'd been getting home every evening and crawling into bed. I knew it was bad and I didn't want him to know everything. Was she play-acting up until her final days?

I'm better now. I don't just walk through the door and go straight for the bed. When I get home I go in the backyard and play with the dogs. I take the time to enjoy the feeling of the warm sun on my skin. I walk around the garden to see what's coming up. But, when things were bad I did find myself in a spiral of negative thinking, "Is this all there is? I just wake up, go to work, come home, go to bed and start it all over again. Day after day, after day . . . " But that's NOT all I do, it's just all that I could see then.

I just wish she had been able to stop the spiraling. I wish she'd been able to get off the ride without unclipping the safety harness.