Publisher’s letter – February 2021
Too many people have endured tragedy over the past 11 months, and now my family has been affected. Last week, my beautiful cousin Nathan, only 30 years old, took his life. Nathan’s mom is my first cousin, my Dad’s sister’s child, one of four girls. We are all close, nearly the same age, and kindred spirits in our efforts to improve the world. Our children all around the same age, are also kindred spirits.
Nathan was smart, talented, compassionate, a beautiful writer and musician, who struggled with mental health issues his entire life. Heroin-addicted for years, he was proud when he turned his life around. He moved to Alaska and wrote home saying he had never been happier. He loved his work, friends, his beloved dog, and being outdoors. Then COVID hit. Suddenly, his work and social life evaporated. He was alone. As my cousin Debbie wrote in a tribute to Nathan, “He was isolated in all the ways the pandemic isolates. He went down. He started using again in December or so — he was like a warrior bested. A deeply moral person, he was in physical and moral pain and we think he decided he couldn’t bear falling into the monster-state (as he put it) of the addiction again. He did not overdose. He took his own life. One of the collateral deaths of Covid-19.”
COVID hasn’t just robbed people of their lives due to physical illness. It has wreaked havoc on their economic wellbeing, and their mental health. Now, more than ever, I am grateful to the mental health providers like Best-Self Behavioral Health (see our back cover), Spectrum Behavioral Services, Horizon Health, Karl Shallowhorn, and everyone else doing their best to catch people from falling. Reach out to them. Get the help you need. And stay connected socially even when physically distant.
Even when alone there is hope in knowing we are there for one another and that things will get better.
