On the same day that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett died, a friend of the family killed herself. She was just a young girl. I didn't even know her, but my mom and step-dad and all of my brothers and sisters knew who she was and were heartbroken. I feel for the parents. I mean, that is such a final ending! There are no words to take that pain away. There is nothing they can do. Even if they saw it coming, she had made her decision.

My father made the same decision. To be honest, in that situation, it was more of a relief than anything. He had beaten my mother for nineteen years. At 9, I had a near death experience after being held in the air by my throat. At 12, I had run away from home and spent a couple of months in Puerto Rico to escape his tirades. He was a Marine and very violent to all of us. I still have plastic in my leg from one beating in particular. One time, he was shooting at me with a pellet gun that had misaligned sights while I ran back and forth across the back yard. After I ran away a multitude of times and found myself married at 16, I was out of contact with my mother and siblings. I would get letters from time to time, with Mom painting the clouds with sunshine, like she always had, trying to cover up the bleakness that I knew was the real situation she was dealing with.

When she finally left him, after nineteen years of broken bones and suicide/murder threats, she narrowly escaped him with the children in tow in the car of a trusted employee. She came back to Florida from Ohio, and although we were relieved to be reunited, there was always the chance he would find her and kill her as he had threatened so many times. I was working at a local grocery store, and I was always looking over my shoulder out the sliding doors behind me, paranoid that he was lurking nearby. After all, we had been shopping in that very store since I was a small child.

My mother got a job as a manager in a print shop, as that had been the family business for years. I felt a little better at this job, because it was in another city, and I was a little relieved when my mom rented a house there instead of where I was living. My husband and I were having problems, and I ended up meeting someone else while working at the print shop. I was divorced at age 18.

Shortly after my divorce, I missed my husband, and we reunited. While I was there, my father called me. He was threatening suicide, telling me he had a gun and wanted to die because my mother had left him. I was freaking out, begging him not to do it when my husband took the phone from me and told him to just do it and stop tormenting me.

Shortly thereafter, my father hired a private detective to find my mother. He came to the house she had rented, but she had moved into an apartment the week before (synchronicity, anyone?). He checked into a hotel, ordered two Long Island iced teas, and shot himself with a 38 on my uncle's answering machine.

"Laura, Daddy killed himself tonight." Those words will ring in my head forever. In a way, it was a relief, no more looking over my shoulder. In my heart, it was an atom bomb. I wasn't allowed to tell my brother and sister. I had to go to the police station and collect his belongings. His jewelry, glasses and wallet were covered with blood. I had to clean them up, because I couldn't bring myself to throw them away. I still have his wallet.

Sitting here twenty years later, the memory still brings tears to my eyes. Even though it was a relief from the fear, it was a devastating blow. As I cleaned out the van he had been driving for years and went through the pictures he had in his possession and donated his clothes, I was numb.

Honestly, the first tears I shed were in anger. He had put us through so much. Now he had ended it, ending our fear of him in the process, and taking the coward's way out. It took me three years to even try to see his angle. Now, in bittersweet memory, I can relate a little better to his parenting motives, but his methods were unacceptable.

I will never forget the "dying cockroach," where he made me lay on the floor with my arms and legs in the air (as opposed to standing in the corner, which I also did, only to have my head pounded into the wall at his whim), the beatings my mother received in front of me, running out of the house and down the street and through the woods to get away from him, calling my first husband, begging him to rescue me. Well, I gotta hand it to him, at least he tried.

The pain his suicide caused in my family was horrendous, almost as horrendous as the beatings. And although I have battled depression, especially being married to a narcissist now, I would never consider suicide. I would never want to hurt my family that way.

I have learned a couple of things from this, though. If someone threatens suicide repeatedly, they probably will do it, eventually. If someone tried to commit suicide, they may succeed when and if they try again. If you try to prevent them, you may succeed. If you try and don't succeed, you could end up dead, too. Suicide is a choice those people make. It is no one's fault but their own. Although the family that is left behind may be filled with grief and guilt, thinking if only they had done this or if only they had done that, it would not have made any difference.

I have heard it all. "Only time will heal the pain," or "It was a permanent solution to a temporary problem," or "It wasn't your fault." Well, I know all of that. But there is no replacement for my children not having a grandfather, and me not having a father to talk to like everyone else I see.

So no matter what you think your family feels about you, know that if you commit suicide, you are hurting more than yourself. It is something you can never take back. And it will cause pain that spans their lifetimes. If you think they will get over you, think again. Get help. Don't do it.