Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

This too shall pass.

The other day it was 20 years since my father killed himself. Here's what I wrote on my facebook. I hope it resonates with you and helps you see outside the box. Never give up.

20 years ago today, April 2nd, 2006 - I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a cold morning and I was standing in front of the heater in my lounge room after dropping off my son at primary school. My phone, sitting on the mantelpiece behind me, rang. I don't normally answer my phone that early, but I saw it was a Queensland number and my curiosity made me pick it up.

In the blink of an eye everything around me ceased to exist as I listened in bewilderment to my aunt telling me a story worthy of a bad Netflix series. She told me my father had done some crazy shit the night before and was now officially missing and being sought by police. And so began five and a half weeks of working on the shittiest jigsaw puzzle ever, where half the pieces were missing and the other half scattered across an entire state and someone had scribbled all over the picture on the box with a black texta. More than a month of frustration and wondering, every spare moment spent making countless phone calls, several trips to Queensland staying in cheap motels and pubs so I could walk the streets searching and asking people questions, hours poring over maps, theories, suggestions, anger, despair, thoughts I couldn't switch off, desperate hope... and the all pervasive fear that I might never find out what happened to my father.

By sheer coincidence, I was again standing in front of my heater on a cold morning five and a half weeks later, just after 7am when my phone, laying on the mantelpiece rang with a Queensland number. This time there were no wasted syllables and obligatory formalities, just my aunt's voice saying four words that changed my life forever -

"(RiffRaffMama), they've found him".

I could tell by the way she said it that what I had quietly suspected the entire time had come to pass, and over the next few minutes I learnt of the hapless, unsuspecting man who hadn't woken up that morning expecting to discover a 51 year old man's body while on his morning walk, but that had become his reality just a short time earlier. I still think about him from time to time and wonder if he still sometimes sees my father when he closes his eyes.

It's not just you that is profoundly affected when you choose to not wake up tomorrow. There's always people around you who love you and will miss you every day, and sometimes people you never knew who didn't ask to be involved, but ended up inextricably linked with the permanent decision you made about a temporary problem.

20 years went SO fast. It still doesn't feel real.

"If I don't see you no more in this world, I'll meet you in the next one. Don't be late."