know anyone who has committed suicide ?. me too. i was younger at the time. a lot younger. and the young man who died was not a family member nor my closest friend. but we spent a lot of nights and weekends and holidays as part of a close-knit circle and when he died it changed everything.
death is an eventual fact for all of us. but at 19 it seems so remote as to be almost impossible. the decision of a young person to end a life that barely had time to get started is one that may people find incomprehensible. cowardly, even.
i had no real opinion of suicide until somebody i cared about died that way. as a result, my first impression of suicide has remained fixed as it was when his girlfriend called me at 7am that horrible morning 16 years ago ... he had laid down under a train the night before. near a bend so the driver would not have any time to brake. in a very dark spot.
i’ll never forget her voice. the doctor had given her some kind of tranquillizers and all she would say over and over was: ““it’s in the newspaper...they wrote that “the man was 19 and from sydney”...but they didn’t KNOW him and he wasn’t a man yet...he was just a beautiful boy””.
i remember my mother crying before i did. i just sat there.
shock reduces cognitive capacity in some areas. it has to. which may be why his death caused a mental rift in me that will never heal. i saw only the plain, simple truth right then: as i sat dry-eyed, i said to my mother “he’s afraid of the dark. what kind of horrible thing must have given him the courage to do that ?”.
my mother held me in the fierce way i now recognise as a combination of dread and relief: my baby is safe. but some other mothers’ child is not. i can still remember how quickly she may have mentally pegged me as “next” when she heard that news. what she called my “unpredictable emotional state” was never more of a real fear to her than at that time. and it shames me a little to admit that my wondering aloud how somebody could ever be brave enough to lie under a train and not GET UP when they heard it coming comforted her.
i guess she reasoned that at least the moody anti-social behaviour of her teenage daughter was just garden-variety teenage angst and not likely to end up with her offing herself. a parents’ worst fear is outliving their children for any reason. to endure the apparently voluntary death of the child you gave life to is the type of pain i can’t even pretend to understand. i have seen it first hand and i honestly know that if it were me, i would not survive.
the image of this young mans’ father, desperate with grief, insisting that there was “NO WAY” his son had “MEANT to do that” will be with me forever. i saw a broken man who had lost his son to a demon no father could fight with his love OR his fists. the shame associated with suicide forced this man to do the last thing he ever could for his son and try to remove the stigma of “mental illness” and “suicide” from his early death.
we wanted to believe him. but i think deep down he knew we never would. our friend was mentally ill. which is something we knew existed but didn’t know how to recognise as teenagers. we were all questioned fairly closely in some way or another after his death, and yes, we admitted, he did “crazy things” – jumped out of a moving car, stayed too long underwater and then said “i won’t drown myself today. the water is too cold”.
yes, we thought something was amiss. but only through painful life experience did i learn MY truth about worrying behaviour from those i care for: i’d rather risk offering unneeded help and suffer embarrassment at my misjudgement than have somebody pay with their life for it.
no, i don’t blame myself. even had i known what was wrong, i wouldn’t have known what to do. but if it happens again to somebody i love and i put my own comfort above their very life by choosing to remain silent, i will blame myself. because i know better. and now so should you.