I discovered just now that someone I was speaking to committed suicide. She was so violently angry, her depression making her abusive. She said that my positivity was taunting her with something she could not have. When she said that she did nothing valuable with her life, I would encourage her to do something valuable, at which point she said she didnt care. It was only after her death that I learned her real name, when I spoke to her sister. This is a few months after another friend of mine attempted suicide and then blamed me for the attempt. Before she passed (Ill use the name Charlotte as a pseudonym), she asked me how long itd take for her body to be noticed. I told her that a rotting body will tend to be discovered, that someone would have to deal with her passing. I also tried to convince her that, even if no one would miss her, that would be as a result of having shut herself away from people. And I told her I would miss her and notice fairly quickly. In fact, it took some time for me to discover, but I had not stopped thinking of her. Suicide is one of the acts I find the most grotesquely selfish (outside of the context of extreme medical need). Every single part of it is vile. We all need each other. The world needs each and every one of us, exactly as we are. Each person who chooses to end their own life is one less person sallying forward into the trenches with me. But I am not angry. Each person I meet, including many of you on Facebook or wherever else, is a totally special person. I view myself as Mega Man, gaining a new ability from each person I meet. An upcoming post in Skillful Means will be about what I call the inner army. If we let it, if we open ourselves and take the risk and hurt that comes with it, we can let many people in who become an army that gives us strength and inspiration. Charlottes pain is over. The pain of her family has begun, of course, but that pain will too eventually pass, even if only from their leaving this world. Suicide threatens our sense of meaning. There seems to be nothing to say. It is utterly final. But so is losing a limb. So is each experience we have. They are all totally final, and they are all totally meaningful. There is nothing I can do to reverse Charlottes death, nor to reverse the pain she had prior to it. But I can choose how to react. I can shrink, letting her death make me weaker, less effective of a practitioner. Doing so is understandable and human. It also lets the darkness win. Or I can look at the lost soul that didnt find a path and remind myself that this is in fact more reason to fight. Charlotte is another promise for a future where no one goes unnoticed. My duty is clear. I cared enough about Charlotte, loved her as I strive to do all sentient beings (and not in a romantic and grasping way but simply with the absolute and unconditional love we are all capable of), to be happy that her pain is likely over, and to hope that wherever she has gone (even if it is to oblivion) there are no more challenges facing her. In the epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh failed to find immortality. Even with his divine power, he couldnt find the means to be immortal. He realized that it was the walls of Uruk that could give him immortality, the contributions he made. This has been the wisdom that we have found for millennia when it comes to death. And it is wisdom that applies whether or not there is a world after. My words can make sure that she is in her own way not forgotten. My actions can make sure that her coming into this world had a point. Her death is another reason for me to write Skillful Means, and Soul Surgeon, and Steam Saint, and Radical Empathy, and to do the work I do with changemakers and people lost in pain. She can no longer fight as I would have hoped she could, but if I am even 1% more effective as a result of meeting her, she is in an immensely and utterly real way still fighting alongside me. We dont have to be silent. We dont have to let suicide make our world meaningless. We dont ever have to regret the people we have met who have passed out of our lives, whether by death or any other form of entropy. Because it truly is the pain that is the illusion, and the joy and love that is a true pinion.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 03:50:02 +0000
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