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It is with the heaviest of hearts that my sister-in-law Dena and I must announce the death of my brother, Joe McDonald.

Joe fought valiantly against debilitating hip and back problems for most of the last year. He was as strong-willed as any person we have known, but despite his and Dena’s truly Herculean efforts and those of the many medical personnel who assisted him this past year, the struggle became too much for him to bear. Sunday morning, he took his own life.

We feel it is important to acknowledge this, as raw and personal as it is. While we are devastated, we want to try and apply some purpose to this loss, and so we ask all of you to use this moment to reach out to those you might be estranged from, or to anyone at all if you need help. There is nothing more important in this life than each other.

We are working to arrange and schedule Joe’s services, and will provide updates here when we have them. Thank you.

https://988lifeline.org by @jackburgerking

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2 years ago

This cute dog and I still have about 65 squares left for the Famous Football Game In Nine Days! Text me or message me here if you’d like to get in on the action. $5/square, limit of five (for now). Payouts every time the score changes, new numbers each quarter! by @jackburgerking

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2 years ago

This ad is for a suicide prevention event here in Chicago on October 3rd. I will probably walk in it. If any of you would care to join me, I would welcome the support.

It is also a fundraiser, but I do not intend on donating, nor asking anyone to. If money cured people of mental struggles, there is no question my brother would be alive. I have donated to suicide prevention before, and I am very touched that friends of mine have also done so, but that’s just not where my head is today.

I feel that Joe died mainly because he could not bring himself to admit how much he was struggling, and it costs nothing to do that. So I will be walking to encourage people to find that strength within themselves.

If you would care to join me, please let me know. ❤️ by @jackburgerking

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8 days ago

This year's WNBR is just a week away! Come join in, if you dare....(I am not in this photo, LOL) by @jackburgerking

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22 days ago

April 21-30: Got ‘em all, six on first guess. 96-120: by @jackburgerking

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2 months ago

April 21-30. Got ‘em all, six in one guess. 96-120. Missing a photo. by @jackburgerking

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2 months ago

April 11-20: Got ‘em all, seven in one guess. 90-110 on first guesses. by @jackburgerking

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2 months ago

We lost Mom 10 years ago today. You’ll notice in the obituary that the funeral home director gave my uncle Don the wrong last name. The visit with him was one of the most unintentionally funny things I’ve ever seen. The guy had to have been pushing 80, and while he was well-meaning, he simply could not get *any* details correct, and peppered our visit with cheerfully horrible comments about the Japanese, sex, and whatever else came to mind. He even *looked* cartoonish, and within a minute or two of sitting down with him, I was actively doing anything I could to avoid eye contact with him or Kate, who was also an inch away from bursting out laughing. Joe, who was correctly focusing on the details we needed to firm up, didn’t get wrapped up in the hilarity the way we did, and thank God - if he had, there is no WAY we could’ve completed the meeting. That meeting was also 10 years ago today. What a day. by @jackburgerking

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2 months ago

We always smiled. So much laughter. I really had it good. by @jackburgerking

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2 months ago

A very real thing that I have found about losing Joe to suicide is that, quite noticeably, nobody asks me anything about him - even the good stuff. It’s almost certain that there is an entirely undrstandable reason for this, which is that people are afraid that it will harm me somehow. Most of you, thankfully, have not experienced anything like this, and it makes total sense if you are afraid to broach the topic, or simply don’t know what to say. I’m very thankful that you are all in my life. But it is a lonely path, and only a few people are really on it with me, and I don’t think any of us want to wear out the others. Something pushed me to join a grief therapy group almost at once when he died, and that was a really good decision, but it got way too religious for me, even though I feel nothing but appreciation for everybody and everything that went on there. But without doing that again, and with not wanting to wear out the other three people on the inside of this, I’ve been feeling a little bit of a self-imposed marooning. So today I went to the library, and checked out these two books that are certainly going to serve as hot, boiling oil on my nervous system. But this is the only path I can think of to really test myself to see how much healing has happened, and certainly reading other people‘s accounts of their own horror will make me feel less alone, like that grief therapy group did. We’ll see how this goes.

As always, as you are reading this, please know that the reason I am posting it is simply to show what the reality of life is when someone close to you dies by suicide. It does not end. If anyone in your life is at risk, please show them the things I have posted, so that perhaps they will see what the devastation actually is that they will leave behind, and find a way to work to stay here. I have reason to believe that Joe thought that the pain of his loss would be short-lived. He was very wrong about that. If anyone can see posts like this and really take it in that their loss will be as devastating as Joe’s is, maybe that might help save someone. And that’s the only reason I’m posting this. by @jackburgerking

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2 months ago

I just watched a large spider crawl into this lamp. Somebody That I Used To Know got this lamp from a high-end store she used to work at. I have no idea if she paid anything for it or not. It was one of a few items I took out of spite when I moved, knowing that it made for a mismatched set that she would feel compelled to replace. I may go sleep in the road tonight, because nothing I am trying is getting that fucker to come out of there. And it is 3 feet from my head as I sleep. Occurs to me that maybe I’m getting, karmically, exactly what I deserve. by @jackburgerking

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3 months ago

You want people to ask about him, but understand why they don’t. You don’t want to be Suicide Guy, but that’s forever inevitable when he comes up. You don’t want to feel that initial horror again, but you feel guilty that you don’t. The weight of it is overwhelming at times, and you need to talk to someone, but almost no one knows or can relate to the totality of it. You don’t want to burden those people with it and dredge up their horror again, but some things can only be understood by those who were there. Every smile about him comes with a stab. Every holiday comes with a hole. People forget and make suicide jokes in front of you, but they’re good people, so you say nothing. And then they realize what they did, and are appalled, and you have to carry the additional weight of reassuring them that it’s OK. This shit *never* *ends*. You want to help others, but you’ll re-traumatize yourself. You want all of this to go away, but the only way of doing that is what got you here in the first place. You finally are far enough past a divorce to consider something new, and then you picture, say, date number two: “Do you have any family in the area?” Almost any answer is a significant deception, but the truth is a nuclear bomb. And so you shut off that part of yourself too. And amongst all of this, you watch people care *so* much about gay hockey dramas, or fantasy baseball teams, or trivia questions about whether Greenland is a country or not - or the very real, terrible things happening all around the world that absolutely merit attention - and you realize that you’re trapped in a prison within your skull, and there is no key; there is no parole. There is only temporary distraction. A dog. A book. A song. And then that runs out, so you sit and stare until six in the morning and write all this in the hope that maybe, somehow, somewhere, a person at risk will see it and understand that suicide is not, as someone close to me said, a “short-term trauma.” It’s every day, forever. And maybe, just maybe, that person will find a way to stay. by @jackburgerking

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3 months ago