It was January 12th, 2011. My family was sitting down for dinner, as we did every night. All six of us were seated, food set in the middle of the table ready to dig in. My dad extended his hands out in the customary, "it's time to pray" gesture, but just as the circle was formed, the silence was broken by the ring of the telephone on the counter. Eye rolls all around, I offered to answer it.

When I picked up the phone, I feigned a cheerful "hello" to mask my annoyance. It was my uncle's partner, John. He spoke with an eerie calm uncharacteristic of the bubbly man I had come to know. He asked if my dad was available. I gave him my affirmation and passed the phone off before taking my spot back at the table. Sitting next to my dad, I could hear the tinny echo of the voice crack on the opposite end of the line as the world shattered.

"Eddy is dead."

The sound of his voice was already faint from a few feet away, but when those words hit my ears, it felt as though I had retreated into a space a thousand miles deep into my own mind. I didn't understand. I looked to my dad for guidance, but he was clearly thrown into a pit deeper than my own, reverting from the fatherly figure I had always recognized into a helpless and lonely little brother. His eyes were blank as he processed the information. Then, they broke. I didn't even realize until what felt like hours later that everyone else heard as well. My youngest sister went hysterical, screaming in wretched agony. My other sister turned inward and wept to herself silently. My dad moved, crooked and broken, into the other room, John still on the phone, as he melted into a state of pure disbelieving loss.

My little brother, at the time not even three months old, wailed as only a baby with no understanding of the situation could wail. He had only met his uncle once, briefly at a family Christmas not two weeks prior. The weight of the moment had failed to hit me so promptly. It would be several days before I faced such a breakdown. With a devastating calm, I guided my body from afar. I was a ventriloquist, accustomed to direct control of the vessel, forced to learn the intricacies of marionette strings on the fly.

Nobody in the house was capable of meaningful action, so I moved to comfort my brother. He screamed, confused and terrified at the sudden outburst by the people who have been nothing but comforting to him in his first months of life. We paced back and forth between my sisters beating their breasts in the kitchen, and my parents struggling to comfort each other through irrational emotion in the living room. Standing in the house full of my immediate family, I was alone with my brother.

If I was going for an excerpt from my as-of-yet unwritten memoir written for impact, I'd stop there. Fortunately for you and me, that's not entirely the point.

It wasn't until a couple days later, at a rest stop on our way to the funeral in New Jersey, that my dad confirmed what I knew to be true but didn't want to believe: Eddy had committed suicide. I told myself and friends, over and over, dozens of times up to that point that he wouldn't - couldn't have. He was too happy of a person, too loving. But I knew from the beginning there was no other way he could have gone. Naivete was no longer an option.

The point of this account is that, when someone you love commits suicide, it changes you - forever. It may take a few days to set in. None of it felt real until I was standing in the funeral home, looking at him, lying peacefully in the casket. I couldn't draw my eyes away from his neck, knowing full well what lay underneath the mortician's makeup. It had only been a few weeks since I had last seen him alive, starry eyed and rosy cheeked (from the home-brewed beer he was allergic to, but drank anyway). That was when the weight of it hit me. That was the moment the floodgates opened, the years of memories came crashing into the valley of my consciousness, and the moment I broke. I probably caused a delay in the service of the day because my sobbing was loud; it was ugly; it was the saddest and most pathetic thing I had ever done. Before, I stayed strong, kept it back when the rest of my family was clearly in worse straits, but that meant I was left vulnerable at a time when everyboy else had already loosed the worst of their grief.

Despite the fact that I didn't crack until the funeral, the initial shock of the situation is what stays with me. I can look back and laugh at how much of a blubbering idiot I was at the viewing, but I can only look back with the deepest seriousness on those first minutes. That was the moment my life changed. I had lost family members before, expectedly and tragically. I had been to funerals, felt the stiffness of a loved one's corpse. I had known of people who committed suicide. I had spoken with friends who had lost people, and comforted friends who were themselves suicidal, but nothing prepares you for the suicide of a loved one.

That needs to begin to change. In the matter of a day, 117 people in the United States will die because of suicide. If you don't know someone who has committed suicide in your lifetime, you should consider yourself a very lucky person. A huge part of the prevalence of suicide is the taboo surrounding the subject. It's such a stigmatized topic, that people are often left feeling like there's nothing they can do about it until they're driven to finally end their lives.

I have suffered from my own suicidal ideations for some time now, and I would be lying if I said that it doesn't frustrate me to no end that I can't just talk about it with people close to me. Suicide specifically isn't as simple a topic to discuss as social anxiety or depression. One can't just go to a close friend and say "hey, sometime I get these thoughts where I wish I could just hold a gun to my head or leap from a scyscraper," because before we can get to the part where we say "but I don't actually want to do anything like that. I just have these thoughts, and I could use a friend to talk it out with," the automatic response is full-blown panic (which is agitating and triggering) or "hey man, that's way too heavy" which, however unintentional, often leaves us feeling like we're no more than an inconvenient burden.

Of course, I understand as well as anyone that suicide is a heavy topic. It took a couple years before I was able to see and discuss suicide-related topics without being triggered and turning into a blubbering puddle all over again (more on triggering later). But once I came to be more comfortable with myself, I wanted to become an advocate for suicide prevention. I wanted to try to open up the conversation, because the first step toward helping people understand that it is OK to talk about their thoughts is to destigmatize the subject. When a person with suicidal ideations knows that it's nothing to be ashamed of and that there are people who will help them, they're more likely to actually seek help. For example, men often face greater stigma surrounding mental health and suicide and also make up more than 3x the number of suicides in relation to women.

As suicidal thoughts slowly became normalized in my mind, I found myself becoming frustrated by the fact that I couldn't talk to people about it as if it were an everyday thing, because to me it is. I wake up, and for no reason in particular, wish I could be dead. I stand in front of the mirror while I'm brushing my teeth at night and wonder to myself, were I to shoot myself in the head, would I witness it? Even for a second? Or would the world go black before I could watch the scarlet red spectacular? I would, again, be lying to myself if I said that the primary reason I don't act on my ideations is because I remember that January night. I would never ask to put my family through that again.

As someone who has normalized the thought of suicide, and warped my sense of humor and normalcy in general beyond repair in the process, I'm thankful that I can recognize when I'm stretching too thin. Earlier this summer, I found myself driving to work on the interstate, depressed for no particular reason, and trying with all my willpower not to swerve so as to lose control of my car. At that point, I recognized that I had to do something. I admitted myself into the psych ward of the local emergency room. From there, I was placed in the 5 day Crisis Residential program offered by Safe Harbor, a mental health facility in my hometown.

I had recognized that by holding it in, not being able to talk out my problems to the degree that I needed, I was putting undue stress on myself. The frustration that comes hand-in-hand with living with an issue that people consider too sensitive to talk about put me on a collision course with my own self-prophesied demise. Sure, I understand that there are hotlines that I can call (I'm going to list them at the end of this article). I have a psychologist that I talk to (I will never count out that speaking with a psychologist is helpful), but there is a crucial emotional element that is distinctly lacking from these kinds of exchanges that one can only get from talking to friends and family.

That is ultimately the point of this whole article. Be an advocate. Figure out how you can be there for someone who is suicidal. Help destigmatize the subject of suicide, because I guarantee someone you love suffers from consistent suicidal thoughts that they're afraid to talk about. Suicide leaves an impact like nothing else, making it all the more important that we need to be able to talk about it.

I'm not quite done yet. I said I would get back to the subject of trigger warnings. They've become quite the controversial topic lately. Well, I'm here to tell you that the reason they've become so controversial is that they've been wildly misinterpreted. In the article that I linked immediately above, one student poses the question "who would you be to say I'm not triggered by the color blue?" No. That's just silly. While it could technically be true that a certain shade of blue could trigger a panic attack by someone who was raped by a person wearing a shirt that was that specific color, it is a reach and that question is a classic case of a strawman fallacy.

No, the real purpose of trigger warnings are to forewarn students of sensitive and graphic material that could relate back to a source of trauma. I personally benefitted from trigger warnings a few times in high school. It was shortly after my uncle passed away. We were watching a movie related to a lesson in one of my classes when the teacher stopped the film a few minutes before a scene in which a person was hung. He forewarned us of what was to come, so that I could avert my eyes. I had a panic attack just at the thought of the scene, because the trauma of losing my uncle was still fresh in my mind.

Try to imagine what would have happened if he hadn't said anything, and I was thrown right back into that blubbering puddle of grief. Not only would I have absolutely embarrassed myself in front of the whole class, but I would have had a full-blown anxiety attack, likely would have been forced to miss the rest of the lesson, and been set back in my recovery by a significant amount.

When someone says "well what if I say that I'm offended by [insert random noun here]", don't listen to them. They are perverting the idea of a trigger warning. Trigger warnings are there to help people who are recovering from a serious trauma, not to shield people from something that they disagree with. Trigger warnings aren't to prevent people from being offended, they're to shield people from reliving a truly painful moment in their life. Believe me, we understand that we can't always avoid these things, but we don't need our education being derailed by them.

That's all I have to say about that.

If you or someone you love is currently struggling with depression and has been considering suicide, you can seek help by calling the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or through their online chat service available 24/7.