Night falls after the first thoroughly warming sunlit day here. When you get a day like this you begin to imagine your self in the Summer, the world expands around you. Not on this day though. Today life contracted, unsafe, hovering in sinister (summer) light between here and nowhere you can imagine, nothing you can touch, nowhere you can go.
In the morning I get a phone call to tell me that a young man I know, a boy really, has taken his own life. It was not entirely unexpected. He was afflicted, tormented with illness, devils whispering at his mind's borders made porous by mental illness, trying, clamoring without let up to get in. He was lovely. A sweet boy, desperate in the end for alleviation, for Doctors to reduce the crippling burden of his illness. The last time I saw him he was, simply, frightened, leaking pain, and something close to terror. So that you might at least say, at the end, well, all that suffering is over. It's done. Not Doctor's drugs or cleverality could alleviate what dying has.
And I listen to the Car Radio coming home under the vast empty blue about a woman, a carer of another woman terminally ill with MS, who is charged with Assisting a Suicide. The second woman took what she was not permitted to take, her own life, and incapable of certain arrangements was assisted by the first. That seems so to be the case against the living carer, who every day must make the journey from her house to the Central Criminal Court, accused. Television and Newspaper Cameras flash piercing jagged light around her as she walks, holding on to the hand of a man who walks with her. For dear life. The sufferer was not found, taken from the rope, the water. Her dying was organized, chosen by herself in light of her progressive suffering, the incremental loss of quality of life, dignity. That doesn't seem to be in dispute. She sought to protect the Carer from consequences. And she prevailed in dying despite some heavy handed policing of the Law. Now the Irish State is is busy, on the case, to criminalize the Carer. Busy, busy. An utterly pointless prosecution while all the while children, so many of them, harrow themselves into dropping off the edge of the world.
The boy and his sister come home from school and we sit watching an ambulance, a police car, moving up the road to a house just out of sight on the hill, through our living room window. On this most lovely day of early summer. The Boy and I speculate idly as to what that's about. After a time the Boss comes downstairs phone in hand, stricken. She is indignant as she asks me "do you know what that was, that was (a boy we know) up there, that's what that was, killed himself, he killed himself, dead, he killed himself and and he's dead, my friends messaged me, that's what that was" Oh. Decommission that Mother. Do.
"Aw no, aw no" is all you can find to say. And stupidly "not actually dead". Not that absurd, chirpy energetic boy, who is haunting the living room now. "It's true" the Boy says somberly, adamant. It's on Facebook now.
Later you tell the boy to get off the phone, night having fallen, the dark well established now. "Why?" he says, "why? we're just, I mean talking about it." "Stop talking about it ", you throw back. "Maybe thats what 's wrong with all this" he says, "not talking about it. "Oh maybe, Oh probably, darling boy. But enough, now. Enough, talking, going over and over it endlessly, what happened why happened how happened. Stop talking. Stop messaging. Posting. Stop talking. Now".
You snap off the WI FI, point him to the stairs, tell him to find his book, play his music, till he falls asleep at last. You tell your pale silenced girl to pray for them. It's all you've got. Pray for them all, for his good kind mother, for especially, her. In this pitch black hour.
Oh What have you Done, Dearest heart (Dearest heart))
In the morning I get a phone call to tell me that a young man I know, a boy really, has taken his own life. It was not entirely unexpected. He was afflicted, tormented with illness, devils whispering at his mind's borders made porous by mental illness, trying, clamoring without let up to get in. He was lovely. A sweet boy, desperate in the end for alleviation, for Doctors to reduce the crippling burden of his illness. The last time I saw him he was, simply, frightened, leaking pain, and something close to terror. So that you might at least say, at the end, well, all that suffering is over. It's done. Not Doctor's drugs or cleverality could alleviate what dying has.
And I listen to the Car Radio coming home under the vast empty blue about a woman, a carer of another woman terminally ill with MS, who is charged with Assisting a Suicide. The second woman took what she was not permitted to take, her own life, and incapable of certain arrangements was assisted by the first. That seems so to be the case against the living carer, who every day must make the journey from her house to the Central Criminal Court, accused. Television and Newspaper Cameras flash piercing jagged light around her as she walks, holding on to the hand of a man who walks with her. For dear life. The sufferer was not found, taken from the rope, the water. Her dying was organized, chosen by herself in light of her progressive suffering, the incremental loss of quality of life, dignity. That doesn't seem to be in dispute. She sought to protect the Carer from consequences. And she prevailed in dying despite some heavy handed policing of the Law. Now the Irish State is is busy, on the case, to criminalize the Carer. Busy, busy. An utterly pointless prosecution while all the while children, so many of them, harrow themselves into dropping off the edge of the world.
The boy and his sister come home from school and we sit watching an ambulance, a police car, moving up the road to a house just out of sight on the hill, through our living room window. On this most lovely day of early summer. The Boy and I speculate idly as to what that's about. After a time the Boss comes downstairs phone in hand, stricken. She is indignant as she asks me "do you know what that was, that was (a boy we know) up there, that's what that was, killed himself, he killed himself, dead, he killed himself and and he's dead, my friends messaged me, that's what that was" Oh. Decommission that Mother. Do.
"Aw no, aw no" is all you can find to say. And stupidly "not actually dead". Not that absurd, chirpy energetic boy, who is haunting the living room now. "It's true" the Boy says somberly, adamant. It's on Facebook now.
Later you tell the boy to get off the phone, night having fallen, the dark well established now. "Why?" he says, "why? we're just, I mean talking about it." "Stop talking about it ", you throw back. "Maybe thats what 's wrong with all this" he says, "not talking about it. "Oh maybe, Oh probably, darling boy. But enough, now. Enough, talking, going over and over it endlessly, what happened why happened how happened. Stop talking. Stop messaging. Posting. Stop talking. Now".
You snap off the WI FI, point him to the stairs, tell him to find his book, play his music, till he falls asleep at last. You tell your pale silenced girl to pray for them. It's all you've got. Pray for them all, for his good kind mother, for especially, her. In this pitch black hour.
Oh What have you Done, Dearest heart (Dearest heart))
Wind back, wind back clock
before he flew out of the world.
Leaving the rest to live with that.
Agonising that day and the next and the next
and every day ever after that.
Body splits to bring the child in,
heart staggers under the minutiae of effortful loving to sustain him here.
All hope, all future annihilated
on the twist of the rope, suffocation of water, the drugs.
Wind back, wind back clock
to the beginning, the minute before
the leap into nowhere,
we can follow.
We would tell him, we would say
it does not go on, the pain
comes and goes
magic sparks when you have given up on it.
We would tell him, grab him, fast
oh if only, clock wind back wind back.
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