WHEN DO YOU GIVE UP?

When I was about 18 months old, my father decided that life was just too hard.  Financial pressures were mounting, and he worried about the impact on my family of a potential prison term due to inappropriate activities that he was allegedly a part of at the small-town bank where he was vice president.  He waited until a Sunday morning when my mother had taken me and my 3 siblings to church, took a shotgun into the garage, and shot himself.  He had given up.

Now I’m grown up and have my own family.  Ironically, I’ve gone through some very difficult financial times myself.  However, no matter how bad anything has been, I can’t imagine ever giving up.  It may come from the fact that I’m not a religious person, so I know that this is the only life I have.

I’ve always been bitter at my father for willingly taking his own life and leaving us but, perhaps by doing so, he taught us how rediculous, shallow, and self-serving it is to give up.