I have had the amazing good fortune to live here for around 5 years now.  I love my house with an extraordinary mix of fierce, unbelieving  possessiveness and calm delight.  With regard to the countryside around it, I tend to think of Tolkien,[i] and Bilbo’s ‘Shire’.  So, it’s odd when something happens which jolts the joy.  No, that’s not right.  My joy remains central to my being, still; it’s the ‘shock’ of finding that there are people who feel differently.  I know that’s absurd, on the face of it, but I find Kerlanguet so absolutely ‘right’, if you get my meaning, the quirky old place fitting me like a second skin, and the area so delightful that it’s hard to imagine other people here being unhappy.  But of course some are.

I was talking with the local pharmacist who I’m trying to persuade should introduce a fidelity card (carte de fidélité) for customers like me who in their declining years have shed-loads of drugs.  Since they’re all paid for by the ‘system’, I think a free coffee or such like every 5^th visit might be nice.  Anyway, I digress.  We got to talking about suicide[ii], literally the ‘slaying of oneself’, the reasons for why will become clear, and I was amazed to learn from him, since confirmed by ‘Google’, that the suicide rate in Brittany is high.

My further research taught me that suicide in France generally is high[iii], with 27 poor souls killing themselves each day, and Brittany sees the most suicides in proportion to the size of population.  I find this both terribly sad and absolutely astonishing.  The most popular methods, according to the pharmacist, are shooting oneself (generally the case in farming communities everywhere, where guns are easily accessible) hanging and, I found truly remarkable, drowning oneself in a local lake, and round here every commune appears to have one, generally beautifully kept and greatly underutilised, though not by me, and apparently not by people wishing to end it all.

Now, this conversation came up because a friend told me that a lady from my nearby my local village – my commune – had recently taken advantage of the beautiful lake to kill herself.  That, in itself, is appalling but somehow for me it was somewhat personal.  You see, that’s ‘my’ lake.  I have walked round it with the dogs, quite literally hundreds of times, generally with not another soul in sight, taking advantage of the well-spaced benches to sit observing the changing seasons trail their fingers across the grass, flowers, shrubs and trees.  It moves from incredibly verdant in the summer to, in winter, being a place surrounded by stick trees looking like they’ve been drawn by a child who couldn’t be bothered to give them leaves except in one section of conifers where they slid a green crayon sideways across the page.  

According to the season, there’s a plethora of plant and wildlife.  As the days warm and the sun brings forth the lakes’ bounty there are quite literally hundreds of tiny frogs, only about a centimetre long, which suddenly appear in the area where the frogspawn and tadpoles had proliferated, and one has to take care not to step on them, which truly aint easy, believe me, as they make their way across the path and beyond a line of trees to I know not where.  After a few days they’ve all gone; it’s such a contrast it’s like the event never happened! 

I have seen the lake frozen and also with the summer sun on it making it mirror-bright, with the glass broken from time to time by leaping fish.  There are water boatmen doing whatever water boatmen do, skating across the surface, and dragon flies, flashes of iridescent, straight from God, peacock colours scintillating in the sunlight, not as is a quite commonly held misconception, just for a day of glory but for their six or seven months[iv].  As the season warms the lake and its surroundings to an ever more burgeoning life of insects, the swifts and/or swallows (I never remember which ones have the long tail) start an extraordinary precision swooping and flying across the lakes’ surface, seeming often to be inevitably about to have a ducking but never doing so.  Both their eyesight and coordination are absolutely phenomenal!

The best air show I have ever attended, however, far better than anything I’ve ever seen from a human flyer or even a swift/swallow, also took place at the lake, but with an altogether different bird.  During our peregrination (charmingly referred to as a ‘balade’ in French) one day I had noticed a couple of seagulls, scouts as I’ve learned to recognise, checking out the situation, and then they disappeared for a while, returning, as is often the case, with a flock of around fifty. I had nearly completed the walk, the dogs were happy and as we neared the shelter of the old Rangy it suddenly turned to rain.  I noticed, though, that one of the gulls was not settling quietly with the flock but doing a most extraordinary aerobatic display, the like of which I’d never seen before and nor have I since. 

I couldn’t help myself, and the poor dogs must have thought me mad, but I had to sit down and watch.  It was truly breath-taking and I felt I was in the presence of a disciple of Jonathan Living Seagull.  (If you haven’t read it, go to the link[v] below, download the free PDF and read it.  It is a book of absolute wonder!)  I sat there for a good twenty minutes and got soaked, as did my poor canine companions, though they seemed not to care, but I really didn’t even notice.  I was both awe-inspired and somehow a little jealous at this beautiful creature’s abilities, but mostly I was lost in its joy, for there can be no doubt that it was flying in the most glorious way because it loved it, and its joy and love was infectious, for me, at least.  Its dull flock just sat on the water.  Maybe they too were watching and awed, but somehow I doubt it.  I will never know, but I do know he/she was a truly magnificent dreamer making it happen.  JLS would have been proud!

Beside the lake I know, too, the little ‘runs’ which rabbits use, and the bank where badgers live, at the edge of the wood, their ‘tar’ filled toilets neatly dug twenty or thirty metres from their sett.  Nowadays I often sit and watch the coypu family who quite obviously love a swim.  Riley it was who first found their ‘runs’ from the lake, and by sitting quietly and patiently I’ve seen them glide through the waters, mostly submerged, and then disappear into their tunnels in the lakes’ bank or come ashore and flop on it, somewhat as otters do, reminding me too of the way my ferrets moved when excited, or climbing.

I could go on but I won’t.  I just want to convey properly how I feel about the place and why; I want you to have some sense of understanding my absurd conceit that this is ‘my’ lake, and when the occasional interloper appears I sometimes feel like going over to them and asking them what the hell they think they’re doing there and can they please just bugger off to some other lake and leave me and the dogs alone with mine.

And then a lady comes and kills herself in it and somehow she has become part of it.

I don’t want to weird or prurient in trying to understand her but somehow I feel somewhat duty bound to do so.  She is connected to me through the lake, ‘my’ lake, and her life and her tragedy cannot be dismissed.  She deserves my effort to understand what drove her, this fellow human being who saw what I see as beautiful as a way to end her life, possibly because she thought it beautiful too.  She saw it and it was the last thing she saw.  Somehow that’s significant to me.  It must be.  It would be a callous dismissal of the importance of her life – of life, full stop - if it were not so.

The limited ‘facts’ (most slippery things, especially in situations such as this)  that I have are that she lived near to my local village, so probably in a fairly solitary spot like us.  She was ‘old’/ in her sixties, married, had grownup children who had left home and seemed perfectly normal.  The pharmacist had seen her, talked with her only the day before and all seemed to be well in her world.  Added to that, two friends have told me that she lived on her own.  Whether she was separated or a widow, I know not.  On the day she killed herself, extraordinarily she went to the local hairdressers and had her hair done.  She then walked to the lake, stripped off and got in the water leaving a pile of clothes and her handbag.  

It appears that everybody who knew her and had interacted with her recently, relative to her death, had seen no signs that this was even vaguely on the cards.  How can this be?  Were they blind or was she very good at hiding her unhappiness?   Or is somebody lying?  I don’t know, and quite possibly never will, and even the few ‘facts’ I do know could be wrong.  But I have to ‘honour’ her life and give it the ‘meaning’ that she obviously did not feel it had, by trying to see why she did what she did.

I have sat by the lake side and wondered; did she, too, sit a while and look at its calm surface?  When she acted on her decision and got in the water, did she dive or walk in?  I think probably the latter and wonder if she felt the shock of the sharp and cruel bite of the cold as she moved further in to the waters’ asphyxiating and ultimately extinguishing  embrace?  Did she at the end of her walk, stumble or make a positive choice to go under? 

I’ve Googled again[vi].  Apparently her lungs would have likely filled within forty seconds, plus or minus a few, and unconsciousness would have shortly followed, with Sergeant Death taking her soul into his most certain custody within two or three minutes after she had been in the cold water.  I wonder, if she stumbled; did she panic and then inhale the water or did she do it deliberately?  If so, what an effort of will!  One would need to be truly determined to be able to do that, too unbearably, heart and mindbreakingly unhappy.  Then at any point did she think perhaps she wouldn’t do it but find that it was too late?  I so desperately hope not.  That would have made the whole exercise and its fallout doubly tragic for her, in the great scheme of things, at least.

I know that Sir Winston Churchill suffered from depression and referred to it as, his ‘black dog’.   Apparently the expression goes back centuries and originally, and possibly for him also, meant a dark mood, down in the dumps with a vengeance, though it is said he suffered much more than that.  I recognise that since I’ve never suffered from true depression, though as with all people I have thought of myself as depressed from time to time, not using the word correctly, I will never understand, deo volente, the desperate black hole that people can fall into when they are truly, clinically depressed, and that it becomes so unutterably miserable, self-worth goes to hell in a handcart; they believe to the very depths of their soul that life is a pointless burden and feel that the only way to deal with it is to get out. 

I recognise, too, that this lady might not have been depressed.  It may be that something had occurred in her life which had made it pointless to stay alive, the pain being so great.  It is possible, too, that she went out there pissed, or on some kind of drugs, and didn’t know what she was doing, or was doing it as an ultimate emotionally blackmailing, ‘I told you so!’  I get the strong impression from what little I’ve learned of her that that was pretty unlikely, however.

Viktor Frankl, the eminent psychologist who developed the ‘philosophy’ which led to the psychological school of logotherapy (Well worth reading his marvellous, ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ which he wrote just 2 years after liberation.  You can get a free PDF at the link below[vii]) after experiencing the second world war incarcerated in Auschwitz and other camps, essentially posited that the human condition was one where we are motivated by a ‘will to meaning’.  He said, referring to his time in the camps, that, “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”  He should know!  And so, in all probability the lady in ‘my’ lake no longer had a ‘why’.  I hope, however, that, unlikely as it may seem, she actually did it as a positive thing, maybe hoping to hitch up again with somebody who had already died, her husband perhaps, and thus apparently illogically having her hair done, or decided that the next phase of the adventure of existence was calling so hard that she had to heed that siren song.  I recognise however, with an unfortunate metaphor, that I am clutching at straws.

So, I’ve sat looking at the cool, still waters and wondered what the fish and the coypu made of it all.  Not much, in all likelihood, only noticing perhaps the disturbance as her poor, oxygen starved body thrashed about a bit before she slipped away to ‘The Mystery’, and made them flee from possible danger … an irony, in that she was at her least dangerous ever, in physical terms, and yet her act was the most dangerous, almost certainly, in her life, reaching out from the cold and murky waters like a metaphorical scalpel slashing at the hearts of all who cared for her and who will live forever with the guilt of why they didn’t notice or didn’t act, topping, indeed, their natural sense of loss.  How desperately sad that from the black hole of her misery and sense of pointlessness she will have cast out ripples across both time and space of that very same misery, infecting those who cared – though possibly not enough - as she slid under the water after taking her last breath of sweet, life-giving air. 

What was her state of mind?  Was she calm, firm in her resolve?  Taking into account the visit to the hairdressers and her leaving her clothes at the side of the lake, it would appear so.  One can imagine her walking purposefully down the hill and into the lake, turning it, as she did so, into a killer.  Why did she not see another way?  If her life here was so unhappy, why not just leave?  If that doesn’t end up allowing one to be happy, even then it’s not a good reason to walk into a lake.  Why didn’t she call somebody, and if there was nobody, then the Samaritans?[viii]

Many things are possible but none should lead to the ghastly, overwhelming misery that would make suicide seem the right thing to do … hell, the only thing to do.  But I do not judge, please accept, for with the best will in the world, I do not truly even begin to understand, though I struggle to do so, as my humanity demands I should, the dark, cold hell she was living in.  I recognise, too, that suicide can sometimes be the right thing to do.  I have considered it, as most people have, especially when they get older.  Believe me, I am not having any ghastly thoughts, but if I were to have some extraordinarily painful decline which overcame palliative release and gaveno hope, or dementia, the ‘Bacon Slicer Man’, was taking my mind, then I would consider it, taking the easy route with all my drugs plus a bottle of Remy, after taking up the fags for a while!  I  don’t get the impression that she was there though, but hell, what do I know?

That said, it is an absurd wish, but a wish none-the-less, that my French was eloquent and I could have been walking round the lake at the time and sat down beside her on a bench and talked with her.  I would have listened first, if she would but tell me; I would have listened and not told her lies.  I would not have told her everything was going to be alright if it wasn’t.  I am not trained as a counsellor, though I have countless times listened to tragic stories of parents whose children have attended my schools, or from time to time, staff, and worst of all, now and again, pupils themselves who had witnessed sometimes the horrors of true nightmares.  A lesson I have learned is that the very act of talking to a sympathetic ear sometimes makes an extraordinary difference for suffering souls.  Would it have with this lady?  I don’t know.  Depression, if that’s what was the case, is a beast that is hard to persuade to let go once its teeth are in somebody.  I would have tried to pour my belief in her, into her, though, and my love and awe reserved for all miracles, that is all people.

All people have worth, I would do my damnedest to convince her, extraordinary worth.  All people are unique miracles, she amongst them, with almost endless and unlimited potential.  Our society which values a painting like the Mona Lisa at countless millions but allows people to starve in the world has got its priorities all wrong, and in their hearts the vast majority of people recognise that and where possible try to stand against it.  The vast majority of people are good, kind and loving, you see. I would have tried to open her eyes to what a miracle she was and what wild potential she had within her.  I would, most of all, have tried to find within her a chink where one could pour, little by little, light into the black hole that was consuming her.  That chink is often linked to a person, be it a child or grandchild, or children, or people generally, or possibly even a ‘dream’, and the light one can pour in is love. 

I would have fought to rekindle some love within her, because once there was love again, she could start to warm herself from within.   There would be no magic moment, I know.  I would not lie and say that love would sort all the crap out.  I would just work on replanting that seed of love firmly so that its light could show her, slowly and painfully though it would probably be, enough courage to see a way out of the black hole, enough love and light to rekindle that most wonderful of life rafts, hope, and from there to a meaningful ‘why’ for living.

I wish, and who knows if I’d have achieved anything anyway … but besides all, it didn’t happen so I end up sitting staring at the unbroken calm of the lake as I have often done, and thinking of the mystery which lies below its surface.  The outward calm is a deceiving blanket over a world of little peace and great, on-going, frenzied violence, as fish and other beasties pursue each other with the intent of turning their fellow denizens of the relative deep into their déjeuner.  Thus I have always recognised the paradox of the beauty and peace that surrounds the delightful, still waters which often times reflect most exquisitely the world above whilst concealing beneath a world of violence, fear, misery and death.

One must consider, too, what the unlucky soul who found the pile of clothes and handbag thought and felt.  Hopefully uncertainty as to the outcome.  Her body would have sunk (See vi below) quite quickly.  I guess they would have called our first responders, the Pompiers who would have, soon after arrival at the lake, called the Gendarmes and they, probably getting info from the handbag will have informed the family and perhaps, had to drag the lake, unpleasant experiences for everybody concerned.  They must have got on with it promptly as I saw no sign and I go nearly every day.   

I guess, then, as one has to accept her death, there is some sort of peculiar logic and appropriateness that the lady of the lake finally gave herself over to it.  Whatever the case, may she find peace, love and joy in the next adventure, and God bless her family and friends and help to salve their pain. 

And may all you who read this remember always that you are a totally unique miracle of immeasurable worth and that there is always, always, always love and light if you do but remain with open eyes and an open heart, no matter what crap life throws at you to assist you in interesting learning experiences!  Love to you all. 

N.B.  Friends, please do not share this.  I needed to write it down and share it because that’s what I do; equally her family and friends most certainly don’t need to read it, and there is not even an outside chance that they will if we keep it to ourselves.  My thanks, and again my love. 

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[i] https://www.lake.k12.fl.us/cms/lib/FL01000799/Centricity/Domain/4432/The%20Hobbit%20byJ%20%20RR%20Tolkien%20EBOOK.pdf

[ii] Latin suicidium "suicide," from Latin sui "of oneself" " and from caedere "to slay"

[iii] https://www.thelocal.fr/20160204/france-sees-27-deaths-a-day-from-suicide

[iv] https://www.dragonfly-site.com/how-long-dragonflies-live.html

[v] http://csermelyblog.tehetsegpont.hu/sites/default/files/angol%20sir%C3%A1ly.pdf

[vi] http://www.operationtakemehome.org/sar/Fire%20and%20Rescue%20Personnel/Biology%20of%20drowning.pdf

[vii] http://www.fablar.in/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Mans_Search_for_Meaning.78114942.pdf

[viii] http://www.counsellinginfrance.com/HELPLINES.htm