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 5th 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
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.
[i]
https://www.lake.k12.fl.us/cms/lib/FL01000799/Centricity/Domain/4432/The%20Hobbit%20byJ%20%20RR%20Tolkien%20EBOOK.pdf
[vi]
http://www.operationtakemehome.org/sar/Fire%20and%20Rescue%20Personnel/Biology%20of%20drowning.pdf
