By Kenneth Braswell, CEO, Fathers Incorporated
I remember the first time the thought didn’t just pass through, but sat with me. It wasn’t loud. It was more like a whisper lying heavy on the chest: Maybe the world would be better without me.
I could list the reasons I believed it: loss stacked on loss, identity slipping through my fingers, and the ache of plans that didn’t survive contact with real life. But what I remember most is the smallness — the feeling of being reduced to a single, dim room in my own mind. I could hear people down the hall of my life — my children, community, and colleagues — calling my name, but the door felt jammed from the inside.
While you read this, somewhere a door is closing like that for someone else. Roughly three-quarters of a million people die by suicide each year — about one every 43 seconds.
And those numbers don’t hold all the near-misses, the “almosts,” the people who return from the edge with a shaky breath, or the ones who never told anyone they were even there. It doesn’t hold fathers who make lunches and deadlines by day but wrestle a private storm by night. It doesn’t hold mothers, sons, aunties, and friends who are left behind asking unanswerable questions: What did I miss? Why didn’t they call me? And on the worst days: Why didn’t I call them?
We like to imagine there’s a single cause, a switch that flips and can be fixed. In my life and in the lives I’ve sat with, it’s rarely one thing. Anxiety that won’t let you breathe. Stress that turns every hour into a test. Pain that never clocks out (sometimes the kind you can point to on a chart, sometimes the kind that looks fine in pictures). The end of a relationship you thought would anchor you. The weight of bills, illness, custody battles, business failures, exhaustion, and more.
Many men, especially fathers, are handed an additional script. Be strong. Fix it yourself. Don’t make a fuss. We become so skilled at masking that even we can’t tell where the mask ends and our own face begins.
The impact is not just in the moment of the loss; these deaths echo. I’ve sat in living rooms where an empty chair is louder than any argument that used to take place around it. I’ve seen kids lace their shoes for a game and scan the bleachers for a face that won’t arrive. I’ve answered calls from friends who are angry one minute, guilty the next, and numb after that, because grief rearranges the furniture of your heart without asking permission. And I’ve listened to men who “look fine” but tell me in a voice dry as dust that the best thing they can offer the world is an exit.
Years ago, I was one of those voices. I write about that season in my work because it stayed close; it asked to be told. It wasn’t a dramatic movie scene. It was a cold, cunning arithmetic that said, You are of no earthly good to anyone. The ledger is clear.
I am grateful — humbled, really — that God slid a lifeline across that desk. It arrived as a person who sat with me long enough for the room to expand. It arrived as a purpose I hadn’t believed I deserved anymore. It arrived as community (some old, some brand-new) that looked me in the eyes and insisted on my value when I could not.
That’s the axis I want to turn Suicide Prevention Month on: finding community and recognizing our own worth, even when it has gone quiet.
Community is not a crowd. Sometimes it’s two people you trust with the full truth. Sometimes it’s a support group, a faith circle, a barbershop where the real conversation begins after the jokes. Sometimes it’s a new tribe because the old one can’t hold your weight right now. Wherever it is, it must be a place where you can tell on the darkness while it’s still gathering, not just after it makes itself at home.
If you are reading this and the whisper has become a script, let me speak directly to you. You are not your worst day, your red numbers, your divorce decree, your diagnosis, your court date, or your secret. You are not the sum of your disappointments. You are a father, a mother, a child, a friend, a builder, a teacher, a maker of ordinary miracles. Your name is needed in rooms you haven’t walked into yet. Your breath is a vote for a future you can’t fully see from here.
Please, before you make any permanent decision about a temporary season, reach out. Reach for the person who will sit with you through the awkward silences. Reach for that counselor whose number you’ve saved and never called. Reach for the circle that doesn’t need you to be “on” to be welcomed.
And if you are the friend, partner, sibling, or coworker on the other side of the door, ask twice and stay longer. Make it normal to check on the strong one. Keep the numbers in your phone and the “How are you, really?” in your mouth. Offer rides, sit in waiting rooms, cover a shift, take the kids, deliver a meal. Do what you can to reduce the small frictions that feel, in dark seasons, like mountains. Don’t try to fix; try to stay. Presence is a medicine even when words fail.
Yes, the risk factors are real: untreated depression and anxiety, chronic pain, substance use, isolation, trauma, grief, financial crises, and more. And yes, access to timely care matters. But just as real — and far more powerful in my own life — are protective factors: a sense of purpose, faith, therapy, daily practices of care, people who see you, and the stubborn insistence that your life has weight. We can build those into each other. We can be the lifeline that interrupts the math.
There is also room here for forgiveness. If you have lost someone to suicide, please hear me. The darkness is a skilled liar, and it hides well. It tells the person in pain they are a burden, and it tells the rest of us we are too busy to press in. Neither is true. Forgive them for being overtaken by a storm you could not see; forgive yourself for not stopping the rain with your bare hands. Take your grief to people who can hold it, and let it teach you to notice in ways you didn’t before.
I’m still here because community found me and because I learned, slowly and stubbornly, to value myself even when my feelings argued otherwise. I don’t say that as a slogan but as a man who has stood at the edge and backed away because someone called my name like they meant it. If you need that today, this is me calling your name. And if you fear stepping into that role for someone, this is me commissioning you.
If you are in immediate crisis, call or text 988. If you can’t make the call, show this to someone and ask them to sit with you while you do. If you are safe but hurting, put three names in your phone under “lifeline” and tell them what that means. If you lead a program, create spaces where men and fathers can share their truths without compromising their dignity. If you are part of a faith community, say the words “suicide” and “therapy” in the same sentence and mean it.
The door in your mind is not jammed forever. Light still gets in through the narrowest cracks. Hold on. Reach out. And let us reach back. Your life is not a problem to solve. It’s a story still being written, with chapters ahead worth staying to read.
Kenneth Braswell is a nationally recognized leader in the responsible fatherhood movement, author of several acclaimed books, including When the Tear Won’t Fall, Strength of the Father, Kwesi and the Ogre, and Too Seasoned to Care. He is the CEO of Fathers Incorporated and host of the I Am Dad Podcast.
