I woke up this morning to a phone call and email informing me that one of my dearest friends has tried to commit suicide.

I thought this could wait but I realize now that I am going to address something I originally thought I would discuss sometime later in my blogging life; suicide and living a selfless life.

I was twenty-four years old when my father who at the age of 47 took his own life with a rope on a foggy night in September. I remember sleeping calmly through the night without interruption from my spirit guide or any of the other interruptions that so commonly take place during my sleep. I woke up to a beautiful morning but being a little sore from my Rheumatoid arthritis, I decided to go outside and sit in the hot-tub for a while to try and loosen up my stiff body. After one cycle the jets stopped and the water laid still. I opened up my eyes intending to push the start button again, except when I opened my eyes I found myself peering into the water. It took me about 3 seconds to make out what I was seeing, the flesh on the back of my hands was completely rotten. My hands resembled those of a corpse, dead for many years underground. I knew instantly that something was wrong, very wrong and I needed to figure out what was going on.

I immediately raised up out of the water, grabbed my towel and headed for the door. No more than having the door cracked open was the phone handed to me with a message that my step-mother was on the line and something was wrong with her. “Hello? Is everything alright? Hello?? Is anybody there?”  I only heard silence at first and then suddenly loud sobbing followed by the words: “it’s bad Jeremy, it’s very very bad.” I started reassuring her that whatever it was, we could get through it. I knew we would be fine. I also knew without anyone telling me that my father was dead.

What I saw in the water that morning was as blunt and hardcore a psychic sign as anyone could ever receive, death laid out right across your own body. People tell me I’m gifted, that I’m blessed, well… you tell me what kind of a blessing is it to have that kind of information shoved right down your throat? Trust me when I tell you, at times in my life and that was one of them, it feels more like a curse than a blessing. On top of that you feel like a failure as a psychic, not to mention as a son. I thought I should have known somehow, one way or another I should have been in-tune to what was going on in my fathers life. Instead, the night it happened I had friends over my house to watch movies and eat popcorn. The whole time my father was tying a rope around his neck and I knew nothing of it.

NOTE: I’m breaking up this post into several because I believe that I cant tell the story, explore the solutions, and explain my resolve in 500 words or less. So as I continue expanding on suicide and living a selfless life, (which I’ll get into deeply later), you can keep following this discussion by reading the next post titled “The Selfless Life  2″.