Every time someone takes their life they leave in their wake questioning masses left to wonder why they hadn’t seen it coming. We rationalize ourselves ragged about what we could have done, what we might have seen, what we could have said and what possibly could have been done to prevent this tragedy because SURELY there was something we missed.
What’s particularly hard is that we the survivors are left to ponder where we failed them. We toil over insignificant innuendos, we puzzle over innocuous allusions that may have somehow tallied a fractional toll on the soul of the recently departed. We will spend countless hours trapped in the “what if” gauntlet to arrive battered and beleaguered at the gates of self-doubt. We grapple with malaise in our quest for understanding the significance of the suicide all awhile the absurdity of the act is further obfuscated by our own errant attempts at closure.
The truth is we may never know the mind of the misguided fellow traveler on this freeway of existence. Though we commute daily with him, share a carpool lane and occasionally commiserate over the frustrating gridlock just inches from our doors we never truly know what they are struggling with in the seemingly cozy confines of their cars. We fail to understand because from the placid plains of our perspective everything is sunshine and roses. They however, exist in a world where sunshine is cancerous and roses have thorns.
The failure we face every time we read or experience another human being doing the unthinkable and seemingly surrendering to weakness or “taking the easy way out”, is that we dare to presume dominion over reality when we are actually only partially engaged. We don’t have even the faintest idea of what they are going through or what short circuited wiring may be sending erroneous “kill” commands to their operating system. Somewhere in their source code there exists some poorly compiled instruction that doesn’t compensate for small environmental changes. Instead it dials up the abort code and you, me and everyone else, are left to stare blankly at the crash screen in idle frustration and wonder what button we pressed by mistake.
Mannino Acid 