Welcome to my blog which today begins with a little irritation because I prepared a piece for here which has now disappeared somewhere in the bowels of my laptop. About a week ago, I noticed on my email a notification from facebook that Bill Forrest had updated his facebook status. Facebook is new to me and I only went on it because I thought I should do something about my web presence. It has been mostly a pointless activity because I have limited my readership to friends and family and we don't need to communicate in this way.
Bill's message read something like: 'Have taken all my pills, am slipping away. Goodbye world, I'm sorry I was shit.'
I did groan audibly when I read the message and my partner called out to me, 'What's up?' I told her, 'Bill is killing himself.' She said, 'What are you going to do?' and I said 'Nothing'.
Bill told me some told ago that there is part of him that is determined to kill him and would, inevitably, one day succeed so when I read the message I thought, 'Yep, he was right.' Now Bill isn't a close friend of mine. Quite honestly he is too difficult and too depressed to be a friend. I'm not saying depression and difficulty make friendship with me impossible (you would only have to know my friend Phil to know that some combinations of depressed and difficult are manageable) but if you add in 'insatiable neediness' it is, for me, problematic because all I want from these people is to get away from them. If I can't cheer them up in an hour I become frustrated and bored. It isn't overly compassionate, I know, but it is how I am.
So I wasn't personally upset at the thought of Bill killing himself and knew that even if I had known where he was at that moment, I wouldn't have wanted to go to him. I did assume that he wouldn't answer his phone and also that there wasn't any point in replying to the message because if you were trying to kill yourself why would you answer messages from people trying to save you?
After 17 minutes, friends of his began to put messages on the facebook page asking Bill where he was and telling him not to do it because he had so many friends that cared for him. After about 30 minutes, one of his friend's posted; 'Wherever he is, I'm going to find him.' But he didn't know where he was and that only became clearer 20 minutes later when another friend declared that Bill was in his boat in Wiltshire, maybe 90 minutes and to 2 hours away from here but the friend who was looking for him had already set off and didn't receive this information.
After an hour, I found out the name of the boat from looking at Bill’s photos and I thought of what it would be like for a friend of his finding him. It is an experience I have had, finding the body of a dead friend and it isn’t one I would want to repeat and in the end you still have to phone the police and ambulance to sort things out. For that reason I did telephone the police and tell them what was happening. I’m not sure they were over urgent but on the other hand the information I was giving them was quite vague. They did find him though, alive, and they took him to the hospital for assessment. I don’t actually think his attempt had been heading for success so it wasn’t a matter of having ‘saved’ him. His friends were grateful to me and Bill himself said thank you for caring but really I don’t think I did care much or if I did care, it was for anyone finding him. In the same text that Bill thanked me for caring he said the police were thugs, to which I replied that I hadn’t expected them to find him alive. Since then Bill has put up other messages asking for help and gentleness and I find I don’t want to respond at all.
Suicide is a tough subject for most people to deal with. According to Stanislav Grof suicide is a misunderstanding and what is really being sought is transcendence or the death of the psycho-spiritual ego, In town last week, a lad of 20 years threw himself out of a window and smashed himself to death in the courtyard of a small block of flats. Horrendous for all concerned. The trouble is, I suppose, that we can’t know that what we are seeking is a spiritual transformation, especially in a culture that doesn’t lay any conceptual groundwork for such an understanding.
When I was fifteen I tried overdosing. I must have been certain I wanted to do it because there was no attempt to forewarn anyone. Looking back, such decisiveness is quite unusual in my life. I know I was an emotional mess (girls!) and that seemed the source of my misery, though I had a bleak view of life anyway. It so happened that when I discovered I wasn’t going to die, I was quite pleased. It took a long long time for life to get better but what really put me off killing myself in the meantime was something I read about Thomas Hardy, that he believed that when you died you were left with the predominant emotional feel of your life without the knowledge of why you felt like that. The prospect of eternal depression without knowing the cause scared me more than anything.
As I get older suicide is back on the table, not because of misery but out of fear of pain, insanity and dependence. I know that I must resolve this issue in my mind sooner or later. Having argued that suicide probably doesn’t end anything, or end me, how can I then do it? I’m not concerned about morality, or what god might think, just the mechanics of it; i.e. what happens next.
This is what Sai Baba wrote – but I don’t get it.
In regard to every matter, my thoughts are always sublime and exemplary. You must note that Swami's life is in His own hands and not in those of anyone else. If I will it, I can live for as long as I please. I can also terminate it at will. It is my will that decides and not any other person. The reason is My purity, selflessness, and divinity. What other testimony is called for? The life of the pure hearted is in their own hands and not in those of others." Discourse, 3 July 1993
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