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Suicide is painless
Or not
By: David K. Every
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May 16,2003
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 bviously, I didn't commit suicide, or that would make this article a lot more interesting. This are just a couple of the stories I tell are about finding bodies. I don't know if I'm just "lucky", but things happen around me.
            
The first body I found was in 10th grade. I was in Water Polo as an after school sport. I had always swam, and thought this was a good way to keep in shape; I had no idea. That was the most difficult sport I've ever done; and I made most improved player my first year. My Dad supported me by saying, "that's just because you sucked so bad to begin with". Anyways, the point is that I came in before school (0-period) and did workouts, had last period as P.E., and stayed after school to workout. I lived at the school it seemed.
The pool was out a ways from the Gym. In California you have outdoor pools; something that would probably perplex many in the mid-west. Not too far from the pool they also had a shed; that was for the football and track Equipment, as well as power for the stadium or back entry for tickets (we had the biggest local stadium shared by many schools in the area).
One day, I'm going to get ready for water polo, and I see a girl by the shed, staring at the wall of the shed. She looked a little freaked, so I called out to her. And she couldn't break eye contact with what she was looking at. Something wasn't right, so I went over there.
Sure enough, some guy had put a revolver under his chin, and made wall art all over the shed. This girl was freaked and totally catatonic; I think it was a form of mental shock. She could look at me when I said things to her, but wasn't really communicative. I started walking her back towards the gym, and some other people were coming up, interested in what was going on; since I'd called to her, and was now guiding her away and so on. I told someone to call the cops, and someone else to take her to the nurses office (which wasn't yet open), and I basically tried to keep people away from the body.
The whole thing to me, was not that big a deal. The cops came, and told everyone to get back, taped off the area, and asked a few questions; they didn't take me in or anything. I went back to practice and the rest of the day went on like normal.
I didn't think it was a big deal; but others really did and were more freaked out about than I was. I was more fascinated with other people's reactions to it; the detached professionalism of the cops, the total lack of understanding or morbid fascination by many of the students, a couple teachers that came on the scene but didn't know how to handle things and tried to get all the students away. And there were a few students who either just sort of mentally locked up or were nearly oblivious except for the crude comments. People react to the same situations quite differently.
        
Years went by. I occasionally saw the body by the side of the road (every few years or so); some fatal car accident, arriving immediately after an event and so on. Most of the time I didn't stop to help; as there were already many on the scene, and the last thing they need is another "helper". I'm not really a looky-loo or rubber necker; there's nothing much to see.
Then one day I'm working up at People's Republic of Santa Monica (California), pretty close to the pier and boardwalk; at a company called Third Point Systems. We were making a information collection and media management system for the Saudi Government; or MTV meets the CIA as I used to call it. My office had a window that looked over part of the boardwalk (promenade or whatever it is called) and a 6 story parking structure was immediately across the street.
There I was, working one day, when I see something falling outside my window (across the street). I glance up to see the body falling and hear a loud smack. The sound of a 150 lbs of meat, smacking the asphalt at terminal velocity, is amazingly loud. She hit in an alley, which only magnified the sound. Did I mention it was loud? Buckling metal of a car crunch kinda loud, though wetter sounding. While the body is pretty good at holding our insides, inside - it is less effective when you hit something (like the ground) with a lot of force. She didn't explode or anything, just a little collateral splatter.
People in the office around me were asking "what was that" and I mentioned that someone had just jumped off a building and landed in the alley. Again, it was interesting watching people try to register that another human had just died, and they had been witness (or heard) the event.
I took the elevator down, and walked across the street. I wasn't in any hurry, but in the few minutes, the police were already there. I was impressed. They have cops walking or biking the promenade, and we were basically only a couple short blocks from the Santa Monica pier; but that was fast. They were already covering things up, and trying to shoo the people back.
Many people came to see what the noise or commotion was, or just to see what the big deal was. Many stayed to try to ponder their own mortality or to just try to comprehend the mess that was in front of them. You could watch them processing, or trying to.
I mentioned to one of the cops what I'd witnessed. But they were very nonchalant about it. "Did you hear screaming on the way down?" Why, no I had not. "Suicide", they said. People that are pushed, scream; those that jump, don't. Brilliant observation. I had jumped to a conclusion (pun intended), and assumed it was a jumper and I hadn't witnessed a murder - but I didn't know idea why I thought that. They summed it up, and came to the same conclusion; but they had a reason. I liked that.
The jumper was a lady that I'd seen around. When I say Lady, I mean sort of a bag-lady and vagrant that had been around, begging for money and so on.
Santa Monica had a rash (literally) of homeless people. Beach communities are magnets because they are warm and arty, there is a place to sleep, and so on. The problem was aggravated when Martin Sheen had declared Santa Monica as a "homeless safe zone", meaning they should all come and live there without harassment. One of the neighboring mayors started a campaign to get busses together to ship all the homeless to Santa Monica to comply with Martin's calls for utopia, which was all very humorous and ironic. Humorous, not in a "ha ha" sort of way, but there was a bitter irony.
Those of us who have actually been around homeless (done social work, working in those areas, and so on) realize that there are a lot of different types of homeless. Very few are the "unlucky soles" that the media portrays. Many more are runaways, winos, druggies, a few fakers (there's good money in being homeless), and what seems most common of all is the mentally disturbed. The jumper had been one of the latter, or at least crossed a few of the types including the latter.
In a free society you can't just lock them up because you disagree with their lifestyle choices, or want to debate their sanity because they think different than you. So I see homelessness as a demonstration of freedom, or the costs of it. In Russia they threw them in Gulag's, in other places they are killed or driven off. In America, they live on the beaches of Santa Monica, and basically harass and guilt people into paying for their drug or alcohol habits. Such is life.
I'm not as insensitive as I sound. But I've dealt with the issues, and the issues are deeper than sound-bites, and with the amount of services that our society has for the homeless, most are homeless because they are choosing it; not because they just got unlucky and lost their jobs, as the whiney clueless limousine liberals and media often likes to portray.
The cops knew the homeless person. I'd seen her around, and been accosted by her, and given her some handouts a few times. She wasn't a sunny or particularly happy person; where are all the pleasant and happy hobos they have in movies? I met very few in Southern California, San Francisco (which isn't really part of California), or other cities I've been in.
The cops attitude seemed to be that this death wasn't as big a deal as if it had been a contributing member of society; and to a point I tend to agree. While life is valuable, we're deluding ourselves when we pretend that Jonas Salk and Adolph Hitler have the same value to society. The cops didn't ask me, or others around, to "go down to the station"; at least not that I know of. They just took notes, and filed another report. "Bag-Lady takes a leap off a parking structure in Santa Monica, goes out with a bang". This was hardly news. Far bigger news was a few weeks later when OJ Simpson was driving back to Santa Monica (Bundy Avenue which was a couple miles away, and I also had an apartment on).
For some reason running with a ball makes you more newsworthy than drinking out of a bag. I guess human lives do have relative weights. If you're an ex-athlete that nearly beheads your ex-girlfriend, that's much more newsworthy than if you're a vagrant that plays humpty-dumpty off a parking structure. I'm sure that says something about society; I'm just not sure what. I'm pretty sure it says that we're smarter than we would be if we wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating something that was so common sense. So while it may be callous, life and common sense is like that now and again. They just brought in the ambulance with spatulas, and got on their merry way. Things were cleaned up in a couple hours, max.
Now these things didn't just happen to me. Maybe it's our family? My Parents were living in England for years. They were kind of bigwigs in town; a combination between ugly Americans and foreign socialites - at least in their town. They are pretty "go, go" type-A people at times. And they used to have a lot of dinners.
After one private dinner between them and a neighbor who lived across the street, he went home, went into his garage, started his car, and left a body for his wife to find when she got home. Of course I asked my mom whether it was the food or conversation that finally put him over the edge; but she doesn't have quite the sense of humor that I do, and found it less than completely amusing. Alright, maybe that was a bit gauche.
Just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, my parents moved back "home" soon after that; coincidentally. They move back to their house in Orange, California. And the neighbor girl across the street hung herself in the Garage. I say girl, because I knew her growing up, and she's a few years younger than me - she was in her 30s when she took her own life. I refrained from letting my mouth run free with the insensitive jokes just to prove that sometimes I can be discrete; biting humor is sometimes how I deal, and I did think about making cracks about my parents proximity drives people to want to party with Elvis, but I refrained. The truth in this case was that she had many medical conditions and chronic pain, which caused depression, and just couldn't take it any more. She left a note, and was sorry; at least I could understand that.
 
Some people are fascinated with death; probably because of the sex like taboo that it has. Personally, I think more people should be exposed to cope with the gruesome realities to get over their morbid fascination. Though I'm thankful that other people are doctors, nurses, police, morticians, etc., that deal with it, so that I don't have to. Not that I think keeping it hidden is good; just that it is an uglier and more painful part of life, and I prefer not to wallow in the ugliness. So it isn't interesting to me to ponder death much, more interesting is watching how society or individuals react to it. To try to remember the good the person is, was, and did; and then go forward.
In the cases where I was one of the first on the scene, it was interesting how fast life returns to normal; for some anyways. Granted, I didn't have much vested in either victim; but even people I have known that have died haven't been that huge an impact. Humanity is so big, that we all pale. Thirty minutes, an hour out of our lives, and then we're back to normal. It can be a lot longer for those closer to the victims; still life goes on.
I've also known some other people that self-destructed. Either indirectly; drugs, alcohol, hanging out with the wrong people, doing the wrong things, and so on. Or more directly, as in my neighbor, or the case of a Mac Columnist and friend Rodney O. Lain who took his own life. Rodney wasn't a close friend; but we had exchanged emails quite a few times, chatted on the phone, and bumped into each other at trade shows. And he was close enough that he was missed. Tim Robertson has an excellent rant at the frustrations of survivors at http://www.mymac.com/robertson/6.17.02.shtml. But depression, mental illness, medical reasons or not, life goes on.
To me a lot of the drama is in the mind of the person who makes the drama (myself included); the person that is dead is dead. They are at peace. I think that's why we need to vent and rage. It is a narcissistic rant at our own insignificance, and self-pity at the loss of a playmate, companion or partner. We need to express that grief and rage, because we know that life will go on without them, as it will when we pass. Oh, they'll be remembered, they'll be missed, I wish they were around; normal emotions, pity, frustration, anger, hurt - but death is the final chapter in our lives. We live, we do things, we die; life goes on (for others). I think that death should just be a reminder to us all that we are still alive, and to remind us what we stand for, and reflect on how we are going to live in the time we have left; to get on with living our lives, rather than wasting a lot of time focused on dead history or past events. Live in the present and the future, and death is the past. Since it is something you don't have control of anyway, you just have to let it go.
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