On June 11, 2003, my mom committed suicide. She dropped her suicide notes in the hallway leading out of our apartment building. They were later found by our neighbors.

She hopped into one of our two cars, a red Toyota Tercel, and drove to downtown Chicago, Illinois. We lived in the western suburbs of the city at the time. After parking the car near Buckingham Fountain, she sat down and took a seat on the sand on one of the nearby beaches and smoked a few last cigarettes. After her last smoke went out, she waded into Lack Michigan and drowned herself.

I was eleven years old at the time. Life went on...in excruciating pain.

Just over four years later from that night, I was beginning my sophomore year of high school. I had signed up for a gym class that focused on weight training. Up until that point, I don’t think I had ever lifted a dumbbell or barbell in my life. There was also a new weight training coach teaching the class that year, Mr. Gebhart, or Coach Geb as I would later call him. Coach Geb took me under his wing, and even though I was a pathetic excuse for a male and lacked muscle mass, athletic ability, and body hair, I put everything I had into that class.

Day after day, Coach Geb assisted me in doing things like dips and upright rows in our high school’s basement, which the students had fittingly nicknamed “the Dungeon.” The Dungeon's walls were colored with a gross, sweat yellow paint and the entire room reeked of blood and mold.

Initially, I didn't enjoy any results from my efforts in the gym. At that point in my life, I wasn’t even sure I was capable of looking strong and muscular. My weak abdominals and nonexistent pectoral muscles made my torso look like a roll of pasty white bread dough. Slowly though, my relentless spirit in the gym started to pay off. My biceps showed signs of life, and my chest began taking on some semblance of form.

While all the days throwing around barbells and dumbbells were teaching me that it was possible to improve my body, I was also learning that pushing myself physically improved my mental health. Since my mom died, I have carried around an inexplicable emptiness inside my chest. In those four years before I started training, I had dragged along a burdensome amount of baggage with me everywhere I went at all times of the day, baggage containing abandonment issues, anger, anxious energy, and questions. But weight training changed all that. It provided me with an outlet, an outlet to work myself to the bone, to push myself in a way that allowed me to expel all the emotional trauma that had welled up inside of me since my Mom had abandoned me.

At the risk of sounding too much like Henry Rollins, the iron couldn’t abandon me. No matter how weak I was, the iron yielded results equal to the effort I put forth. I loved that lifting was a completely self-reliant activity. No one could impede my progress or be blamed for my shortcomings when I failed except me. I was solely responsible for any success or failure that I had in the weight room.

Over many years, I've continued moving weights with relentless desire fueled by all my bottled-up emotion. I've lifted until it was all depleted. I don't think that there is a more positive and constructive outlet in the world for negative emotions than physically training the body. I believe that had I not taken that weight training class, consequently forming a strong bond with Coach Geb, I may very well have killed myself at some point during high school. At the very least, my quality of life would have suffered considerably. So just like many of you, lifting has, and always will, remain in a special place in my heart.

If any part of this article resonated with you, I'd like to let you know that my first book, Sons of Suicide, will be published on December 1, 2012. It's a memoir covering the entire story of my life, including the events mentioned above. I think that anyone who has been closely affected by the loss of a loved one, particularly through suicide, would find a great deal of value in the stories and insight that I have worked tirelessly to include in the book. If so inclined, you can find it available on Amazon as well as on iTunes, Nook, and Kobo.