The older brother of the journalist Alberto Gómez was a true reference for him: «He bought a lot of books and movies and music, he had good taste, he was handsome, charismatic, he played sports, he rode horses, he was a Royal Guard… He did many things that I liked. “I liked them and many of them annoyed me.” Even today, Alberto sometimes carries a pen that belonged to him. With her he signs some copies of his book ‘Against Silence’, in which he describes, from his own experience, what the grieving process is like for people who have lost a loved one to suicide. He took the worst trip of his life on a Monday. He was studying in Seville when he received a call from one of his two sisters: something had happened to his brother in Jerez and he had to go as soon as possible, because it seemed to be serious. “It was a very quick conversation, he told me that they would pick me up, I only had time to change.” He got into a car with two other relatives, immersed in one of those thick silences: “I asked them what they knew, they told me nothing and I didn’t want to pressure them, I didn’t ask anything else, I stayed silent in the back seat, at the right, staring out the window. Related News report If ‘Big Data’ and algorithms in a revolutionary Andalusian platform against suicide JJ Madueño The Malaga Provincial Council and the UMA have a program underway that applies Artificial Intelligence to analyze suicidal behavior and predict risks. They traveled the distance between the two cities. An hour that seemed eternal. But the worst trip was, in reality, a stretch of a few meters traveled in fractions of a second. They arrived in Jerez and went to pass the roundabout under the María Santísima de la Concepción bridge. Alberto thought they would turn right, towards the hospital, but they continued straight, on the way to his parents’ house. When the wheels of the vehicle took the unexpected direction, he knew that his brother had died: “There was no point in going to my parents’ house if my brother was seriously ill, so it was clear to me that we were late.” The memory remains intact more than two and a half decades later: “Whenever I pass by that point, I think that for me it was the end of my brother’s life, because until that moment, for me, he was alive.” What followed was “a journey of silence that lasted twenty-three years.” “A few weeks later, in my family we were no longer talking about my brother,” he explains. He himself told very few people. Why this silence against which he now fights? “This death raises questions, and you don’t want to be asked, because you don’t have answers, and you don’t want to be accused: ‘Couldn’t you have done something?'” To himself, he thinks: “I already feel guilty, no one needs to ask me if I didn’t see this coming.” When someone dies from a heart attack, or from cancer, or from an accident, we have an answer to most of the questions. questions: the heart failed, cellular reproduction failed, the car brakes failed. On the other hand, when it comes to a failure in our psyche… «It is bad to die like this; This death has some ingredients that make it uncomfortable to explain and make it uncomfortable to have it explained to you, to listen to it. I don’t ask him how his brother took his life. It doesn’t contribute anything. He tells me, however, that “if he had died any other way, I would miss him exactly the same.” I also don’t ask him why he did it. Those of us who have taken that path and fortunately have failed in the attempt know that there is no reason, but only a series of perceptions that lead us to believe that it makes no sense to continue. These perceptions seem very real to us even though they are completely wrong. No matter how much we have a good life and are surrounded by wonderful people, something prevents us from seeing it like this for days, months, perhaps years. This Saturday the entity After Suicide–Survivors Association (DSAS), to which Alberto Gómez belongs, celebrates World Suicide Survivors Day. The journalist fully shares its founding objective: To contribute to “making the story of the survivors visible and so that we can speak with a certain naturalness about our relatives.”
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