Baruch Dayan Emet, Again

Where are you going, my little one?

H died last week by his own hand. He jumped into the path of a fast moving train. He was 19. Sweet, gentle, kind, heartful H.

Mangled body parts were strewn everywhere, some hundreds of feet away.

Blood covered the tracks and platform and stairway. People had to walk past the blood.

A body part hit someone standing 10 feet from him. I had no idea trains did so much damage. I thought that they would just smack you and throw you elsewhere, but he went under....

A lot of people saw it, felt it; a lot of people were traumatised.

I can't imagine what the family is going through. L and I spent warm and lively Shabbat dinners with him and his family where we always felt welcomed, wanted and cherished, by not only the adults, but by him and his siblings. That they have a whole Jewish community supporting them is a testament to their passionate commitment to Judaism and the Jewish community- a purely golden thread in the communal cloth. So, this is good.

Baruch Dayan Emet....even though he took his own life....there is a Plan, yes.

Many hundreds at his memorial service.

Several hundred at the Hillel service.

And yet, he's dead, just like LARabbi™ z"l. There was not a single person either felt that he could talk to. I think that the fact that LARabbi™ was his rabbi, too, and an influence, is not coincidental.

Students at his college are talking about his being "picked on", bullied all year, which makes me so angry. The whole thing makes me angry; unlike Rabbi, who had much life and experience under his belt, H was a child, with few learned coping skills. He was also small, nerdish, had an adenoidal voice- things that would make him a target for bullies. But in an ocean of students, how did they find him? And perhaps, that is only part of the story.

Why did he mine so inside himself that there was no way to ask for help? Why do they never seem to ask for help?

It doesn't get any better: 1 suicide, 2 suicides. A bullet list. You might get used to death, but never to suicide. It's a special kind of tearing that is permanent. It rends the fabric of the world and that trauma and horror lives with you forever. And the grief...of so much possibility lost, an entire universe.

I can't help but muse, having entertained thoughts of suicide most of my life (though not for several years now, since I discovered a good therapist, and a contemplative Jewish practice), why did I never take that final step? How were they different from me?

Watching H growing up, he reminded me of myself- highly intelligent, sensitive and yet emotionally fragile- my "excitable boy". He was a young man of deep feeling, and passion, and conviction. Idealistic. He was kind and gentle, all qualities dismissed or derogated by our society, but which are worth their weight in divine diamonds.

Yet unlike me at that age, he wasn't so self-absorbed, or seemed withdrawn, or moody. Perhaps it would have helped if he could have gotten in touch with that side of himself, sorted out the darker side , seen it. And I can't help but wonder if religion can kill, sometimes, when you're a young idealist... to try to live up to an image that isn't balanced with an acknowledgment and acceptance of your human frailties. In one so young, that balance is not expected. It would have helped if he had had someone to talk to, where he felt safe, secure.

Perhaps perhaps perhaps. With suicide there is only "perhaps", only supposition. You never find an answer, you never find closure, it can never become integrated into the fabric of your life and made into whole cloth.

I read the official eulogies for him and I'm not impressed. It was all about achievement and how he eagerly drove himself, whether it was academically, religiously, politically, or as a human being, to be successful. In the midst of this rush, where was H? What happened to H? He truly was blessed with great gifts, and given the climate of super-achievement, he was, indeed, a hurried child.

In the only place where he rested and where it mattered, I remember him with a heart too big for this world. And so, it need be broken.

I can't believe I am pronouncing this again, under similar circumstances: Good night, sweet prince. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. You were too good for this world. And that's the truth.