Janice Granai

About me:

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.. ALTERING THIS CODE ABOVE WILL DISABLE YOUR LAYOUT www.pimpyours.com. .. Between 4:00 and 4:05 am on Saturday, April 8th 2000, my best friend and love Jack died. I was with him in his last few seconds. His death came at his own hand....suicide. We had been out earlier the night before (Friday) and he wanted to go home at 11pm which was unusual. He said he was just tired and wanted to get some rest so he could be ready for the big weekend we had planned. I knew he was depressed. I had expected this particular weekend to be really rough for him as one of his siblings was getting married and he was not going to be at the wedding.(not by his choice) I had intentionally planned lots of things for us to do to keep his mind occupied. I worried after I dropped him off so I tried to call him before going to bed at midnight to tell him I loved him but got a busy signal a few times. I assumed he was on the computer so drifted off to sleep, excited about spending the rest of the weekend with him because no matter how bad either of us were feeling we always made each other laugh and smile. At 3am my phone rang and it was Jack. He called me to talk of our plans for later that day. He said he wanted me to come over and fix him breakfast, and wake him up at 11am. I agreed and we hung up. Another call followed and he said not to wait until 11 but to come over as soon as I got up, (I am a very early riser), feed our puppy Mick, and the cat and then watch some tv or something, fix breakfast and then wake him up at 11. He kept stressing to me not to wait...to just come as soon as I got out of bed. Our call got disconnected and by now I was starting to worry. He didn't sound right. I called him back and we talked a few minutes and then hung up again. A third phone call from him followed just a few minutes later. He said the puppy had run away, he was crying and said that the puppy and I were all he cared about and now the pup had left him. I told him I was sure that Mick was there and probably just hiding under the porch. He reluctantly agreed and told me again to be there first thing in the morning and hung up. Within a few minutes the phone rang one more time. It would turn out to be my last phone call ever from him. He asked me to come to his side. ( I had half expected him to ask me to come over during one of the other calls because when Jack was hurting he wanted me with him.) He said he "needed" me, and of course I immediately went to him.

When I arrived, even his talk of intending to commit suicide the following day was not unexpected. Along with the missed wedding there were some other very unhappy things going on in his life. We had been through this several times and he was always fine after talking to me and ALWAYS refused professional help. Once again he calmed down after talking to me. He hugged me, told me he loved me and then talked again about the plans we had for that day. He seemed to be okay again and had put away the gun that he had in the waistband of his jeans when I arrived. (Again, this was not the first time I had gone through a similar scene with him but he always refused professional help and was always okay once he could talk to me about whatever was going on.) We sat at the dining room table for a few minutes and talked and laughed until he discovered we were both out of cigarettes. He asked me to go out and get some for us but refused to come along because he had had too much to drink. It wasn't going to be my first middle of the night run for us, I had no idea that it would be the last. He said when I got back I should come upstairs, crawl in bed with him and listen to a cd I had brought over before going to sleep. And so I left.

It was only about ten minutes later that I pulled back up to the house. I remember thinking when I got out of the car that he had the stereo up MUCH too loud and noticing that the music playing was not what he had told me it would be. Instead it was the song he told me he wanted played at his wake. Still..I was not worried, he loved to listen to that song when he was down. It seemed on one hand to make him more sad but on the other to bring comfort to him. I went upstairs and did not see him in the bed, looked in the other bedroom and did not see him there. I started back downstairs and had a funny feeling. I looked back in his room again and there sitting slumped over on the floor was Jack. At first I thought he had passed out and gotten sick and went to take care of him. He fell back into my arms and that was when I realized what had happened. He had put a .22 to his right temple and pulled the trigger, apparently just as I walked back into the house because he was still warm, and his color was normal and I felt one faint heartbeat when I first touched him. That changed rapidly though and he died in spite of my efforts to revive him.You can not imagine how frantic I was in those moments of trying to bring him back to this world. Jack lost his life and changed mine forever.

I had grieved before but never as I did for nearly two years after his death.Though the pain is mostrly a distant memory now and I have moved on with my life, I know that this is a wound that will never heal. I don't have the nagging question of "why?" to deal with as I knew intimately the things that caused his pain. We had talked about them time and time again. I had hoped my love would heal him and in a way it did. He told me often how much happiness I brought him and how much better the world was for him since we had met. There were also times he said he felt he hated me. Hated me for making him want to keep living. In the end that love was not enough. I suppose that is one of the "why's" I will always have.

For a time afterwards I had to live just second by second. More than that was too much. I could not imagine life without him in it. To never hear that loud laughter, the deep voice with the New York accent that I loved so much. To never feel him beside me at night or have him sing with me in the car. I could not imagine that I would never pick up the phone and hear "hey kiddo" again. Our relationship was not perfect by any means, in fact it was only recently that we had decided that we were more than best friends.

There are many more details to this story. Details of that night and of more trauma for me associated with his death. His family put me through a hell so real that to tell the story sounds like something out of a horrow movie. There was no way to avoid them or to avoid the memories of what I saw that night. I became a victim of Post Traumatic Stress; it rendered me unable to do even the simplest things in life for awhile.

Time has moved on and I have healed. Sure there are still scars and on the rare occassion, I still see the image of Jack's bleeding body as clearly in my mind as if it had happened today. But his death no longer occupies a place in the front of my mind. The grieving and mourning have finished and I have become a MUCH stronger woman for having gone through what I did. I have even been able to reach out to others who have recently lost a loved one to suicide, and to help them begin to see their way through to the other side. None of it has been easy, it's taken a lot of work on my part to get to where I am now but I have done it. The story of his death that you read above? That was written just two weeks and one day after his death. I copied it from a website that I built and had up for him for some time.

I am sure some will ask if I have truly healed when I am building yet another memorial to him. Yes, I have healed but I made a promise as Jack lay dying..that he would never be forgotten and that I would do all I could from that day forward to reach out to other survivors AND to those who might also be contemplating suicide and so my reasons for this page. I hope in days to come to provide links to places of healing, more of my own stories or survival, and a way to honor the memories of so many others that have chosen to end their lives.

If you are considering suicide PLEASE get help right away. It might seem to be embarassing to you right now but it is much much better than being dead. Call 911 or contact any of the suicide/crisis hotlines. If you can't do that, call someone who has been a friend, even if you don't feel right now that that person cares, just PLEASE get help. Suicide will not make you feel better and you will be leaving behind a permanent,lifelong nightmare for you family and thise who know you.