In memory of my cousin Chris Conrad
A poem he wrote at age 12: Helping. Helping is freeing someone from struggle,/ Helping is also freeing yourself too,/ It makes you feel good,/ It makes the person you're helping know that someone cares,/ Helping is making a difference,/ It is changing the future,/ Helping is the meaning of life. Today, my cousin Chris Conrad, would have turned 33. But on May 19, 2018, he died by suicide. As with everything that happened in 2018, both the good and the bad, I didn’t feel I had the proper time to process and grieve and wrestle with it and try to understand it. I wanted to write a blog piece about it to 1) honor my cousin and his memory, and 2) contribute to the push for people to talk openly about mental health. Chris was three months older than me. He grew up in Elmhurst and me in Skokie. We saw each other at family gatherings and given we were the same age, we spent a lot of that time together. We were among the youngest grandchildren and were always seated at the “kids” table...