10 Years Later, A Pair Of Strangers Revisit What Might Have Been Lost - NPR news
Summary: 10 years after a man stood on the edge of Golden Gate Bridge, the officer who talked him down reconnects. The man considering suicide had an 11 month-old daughter in the hospital, born a month premature and their medical bills were $250k.
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I think maybe there is a lot more space for all of us acknowledging this in demographic terms. Not that one guy felt crushed by debt. But that there are a lot of people at various points in their lives who feel like life is really, incredibly hard. And too much. Just, beyond too much.
I feel like the conversation around suicide is so infused with arguments about morality, that sometimes we don't consider the immorality of minimizing other people's suffering.
I have to say, I don't think I would describe life as a bunch of rainbows and sunshine. I do look for unicorns, and I hope they are there. But I wouldn't count on it. And I don't even need to go into Sociology Land of talking about structural barriers to secure employment and a middle class lifestyle and a life without violence or abuse or rape or neglect or homelessness. I could, but I don't need to.
The longer I've practiced energy medicine the more I've realized... most people are struggling. If not now, then they did before. I think most people are walking around having had a rough patch or ten. And of course they vary in degree and timing and consequence. My point is that most people know in their gut, somewhere, that life is difficult. And I wish we talked about that more. That we talked about how hard it can be to live as a human and try to make sense of a life in this crazy world that is anything but fair and predictable.
More than once I've felt like life was a series of rabbit holes and nothing described it so well as Alice in Wonderland. The feeling of stumbling into something new, not understanding how things work, and trying desperately to get back to some kind of idealized before when things were easier and simpler. The desire to just go home. At least things made sense in some earlier time.
This has somehow become a children's story, a fantasy land, a Disney movie that is supposedly fanciful and fun and not ominous or terrifying. Falling down a freaking rabbit hole. Having your body change dramatically beyond your control. Having creatures threaten to cut off your head, or give you wrong directions, or simply mock you as you try to go home. A Disney movie. Really.
It is easily a metaphor for growing up. But do you know what Lewis Carroll said the book was really about?
Malice.
But I read this NPR story this morning, and I just thought "this poor man on a bridge would have been demonized forever for leaving his baby... and yet... and yet... can't we all wrap our heads around him feeling so crushed by all of it?" I think that is the space for humanity and compassion to enter. I think the fact that ten years later, he is grateful and happy and his daughter is well again is even greater proof that we needn't demonize or judge people in their darkest hours. Those hours may come and go, but they come and they go. This is human.
I have this sense that if we could all be more honest with each other about how hard it really gets sometimes, we wouldn't need to take moral high ground in our discussions of suicide. We could say "yeah, I get it. Sometimes it is too much. Way too much. Beyond way too much."
I don't say this as a suicide prevention program or as a social action initiative or psychological intervention. I don't really want to take a position on suicide as a good thing or a bad thing or any thing at all. There are other people doing that. I don't need to impose morals around it: regardless of my belief system, this thing, suicide, happens. Some of it seems to be preventable, or delay-able, and some of it, perhaps not. I just want to talk about this as a human who is not suicidal, but nonetheless has felt sometimes that life was an unbelievably brutal sport.
We bring babies into this world and we coo at them, and I think "do they know what you've signed them up for? Do you want all of this for them?" Babies are a miracle. But still. I read an article about Nicole Kidman (while waiting for one of Bandit's many vets to see him again), and the interviewer brought up rough patches in the experience of fame and being an actress. And Nicole said "No, in life. No one gets through life unscathed."
I think she is right.
We can try to make the best of it. I wish that for everyone. And some of it is really freaking, unbelievably great. But I think she is right too. Even international-mega-super-star of iconic beauty does not come through unscathed. I think what she said is brave; I don't think people say it enough. I think too many of us are pretending with ourselves and with other people.
I want to advocate for embracing the idea that Nicole Kidman (or someone like her) could intimately relate to this man on the bridge, in their mutual humanity. We don't have to turn this man into a creature we cannot understand, an "other" who considers the unthinkable. Do you remember the reaction to Robin Williams? I read through my nausea what people were thinking. How could he have gone from a human we loved and admired into becoming something so unthinkable? Selfish? A quitter?
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| Image from ScreenRant.http://screenrant.com/johnny-depp-alice-wonderland-2-sequel/ |
If I never say anything more about this, I just want to say this one thing born of my intimate vantage: maybe none of us get through unscathed. Maybe that is our one collective marker of fairness. But all the same, maybe the fairness ends there: it seems to me that within this lifetime -- maybe we don't all get to be Alice either. Maybe there are some places we leave, and we don't get to go back.
Namaste.
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