Wonderful and Empty

One night some months back someone I knew swerved his car off the road and crashed into a tree and died on impact.  We later found out that that was exactly the way he wanted it and that he had planned it for months.  And his family found detailed lists and information of how he was going to do it and where and when and why.  Like he was doing research to buy a new house.

The only difference that I could see between his decision and someone who would have done something like that on impulse was the amount of information both had put into making a decision like that.

I always thought people did something like that in a particular defining moment in which they were probably also not in any state to make any decision that they would not regret later.  I thought such impulses would usually be triggered by an unhappy event.

But apparently it is possible to consider it in an as emotionally detached state as deciding whether or not to sell your car or buy a house.  And he went on as he would on an average day, working, movies, sports, as if suicide was as mundane as going home at the end of a long day to kick back on the couch and watch TV.

But what kept me awake at night was his list of why.  True he didn't have a perfect life.  But he had a great family and healthy loving parents.  He had supportive siblings (two brothers unfortunately one of whom had passed on from cancer which had affected him really badly).  He had a girlfriend (whom I didn't know much about) after some years of hard luck in the romantic context.  But no tragedy or unhappy event appeared on his list.

He said he couldn't find a reason to live.  He couldn't find something worthwhile for him to hold onto.  He actually wrote that life was wonderful and empty.

It was as if he had woken up one morning and was suddenly aware that there was nothing worth living for. 

And it kept me awake at night.  Being him.  Walking around in his shoes, thinking about his lists, going to work as if I were him, coming back from work to a great family as if I were him.  Driving his red car behind the steering wheel as if I were him, driving along that bend along that beautiful broad Australian highway under the blue summer sky deciding that this was where I was going to throw everything away. 

I obsess whenever my mind would wander, driving my car off the road over and over again in my mind, turning that steering wheel hard off the road, hitting that tree over and over and over again. 

And I wonder, what his last thoughts were? before I hit the tree again.   

I guess his family and girlfriend does the same thing.  Didn't he love us enough to stay?  Was it clinical depression?  Was it something that they didn't know about?  How can someone who has everything want to throw it all away?  How crazy is that if you think about all the people out there who can't even get enough to eat?

But as I drove along my imaginery highway in my non-existent red car, thinking about his reasons, there's a difference between a physical pain or craving that needs to be satisfied and something of a higher order that helps us to want to live to see another day. 

Whenever my mother was in pain, all she could think of was dealing with the pain, making it go away.  When the morphine had settled into her bloodstream, she would lie back and say that she wished that she would die.  On the same note, whenever I had been starving all day from running around taking care of one million things, the only thing I could think of was getting some food so that I could stem my gastric.  But as soon as I'd eaten and sat by her bedside, all I can see is a repetitive cycle of empty activity, waiting for the next round of pain to come.

In a different analogy, when I bounced from one unhappy relationship to another, I went from wanting to be happy to not wanting to be lonely in an endless pathetic cycle of self-torture.  And when I'd been spent with emotional fatigue, I wake up one morning and realise that everything is a cycle of pointless activity.

Despite all of that, I couldn't say that life wasn't wonderful.  There are a lot of things I enjoy in this life.  Diving, the endless blue and gold stretch of sky and sand, the endless wonders of Nature captured so easily in a camera lens. 

But driving in a red automobile with the top down and the sunlight on my face down a broad empty Australian highway, these beautiful myraid things are not enough to provide purpose.  Maybe he drove enough miles down enough empty highways and tolerated enough pointless cycles of activity to realise that there was nothing that the world could offer to make him stay.