Suicide (The Great Escape).

(As I promised in my latest blog entry, here is the piece I have translated regarding sexual abuse and suicide. It contains the Marillion song in full).

Sometimes I get surprised of the superficiality some talk about suicide and how some judge people who have committed suicide or have been about to do it. “Everyone gets what they deserve” or “Killing yourself is cowardice” are phrases I’ve had to hear more than once and I hope they are only a consequence of not reflecting or not knowing how to put oneself in the others’ shoes. And there are people who still think that killing yourself is equivalent to being an undefined number of years lost in the astral or facing some kind of trial in the other side for having committed an unforgivable sin.

It is likely that 90% of these people think I am insane, but I use to reply to them: “Do you remember having killed yourselves? Have you ever considered it some time? Have you fallen into such a deep depression you couldn’t see another way out? Because I do remember to have committed suicide. And I know many people who also did it. And not all of us remember what happened afterwards, between one life and the next, but obviously we came back and we didn’t burn in Hell, nor we were condemned to wander in the astral”.

Others think it is a matter of mental illness. Perhaps it is, or at least, there are electrochemical changes in the brain, that’s true. But I think circumstances are the most influential. No one can know in which circumstances a person was to decide to kill themselves. And therefore, no one, save ourselves, can judge.

The circumstances for which I decided to kill myself have to do with war, the death of a loved one, and also sexual abuse. No, it is not easy to say it. But it is much worse to live it. In a society where we are used to violence in distant countries, and bombs, shrapnel or executions of people guilty of rape accompany us while we’re having lunch, we don’t know what this really means. It is as unreal as the latest Disney animation movie. And however, it exists, it existed, and it will keep existing. And it is very likely many of us have been in similar situations and have made exactly the same decision which we are quick to judge now.

I always say it and I’ll never get tired of saying it: if we all recalled our past, the world would be very different. Because when we are talking of yourself or your relatives, then it is not so easy to speak lightly. And we’d be talking first-hand, not for what we are told by the different religions, philosophies or belief systems. 

Now I’ve got over it a bit more and it’s not so hard to talk about it, but when the feelings were burning in my inside and flooded in until they exploded, it was very useful for me to listen to a Marillion song called “The Great Escape”. This song is the culmination of a full album entitled “Brave”. This album begins with a scene which is based on a real piece of news published in the British press: a young woman standing on a bridge, about to throw herself into the space. When a police agent asked her name, the girl couldn’t even answer. Once I told a friend sometimes I had the same face that is displayed in the album cover.

A movie was filmed too, in case someone is interested.

THE GREAT ESCAPE

Heading for the great escape
Heading for the rave
Heading for the permanent holiday

Heading for the winter trip
Heading for the slide
Heading for the dignified walk away

Heading for the open road
Goodbye to all that
Heading for the automatic overload

Standing in the open boat
Standing in the swing
Waiting for the ringing and the bright light

Waiting to be recognized
Quiet applause will do
They shower you with flowers when they bury you

You're holding on, you're holding on ...

(i) the last of you
Just when I thought I'd seen the last of you
You come here scratchin' at my door
Your pain and anger's in the howling dark
Of every corridor I walk

So tell me more about the love that you rejected
Tell me more about the trust you disrespected
I still don't know, why did you hurt the very one
Why did you hurt the very one that you should have protected?

(ii) fallin' from the moon
Don't ask me why I'm doing this
You wouldn't understand
You're asking the wrong questions
You couldn't understand

A bridge is not a high place
The fifty-second floor
Icarus would know
A mountain isn't far to fall

When you've fallen from the moon

There's murder on the street
I'm ashes on the water now, somewhere far away

I have fallen, fallen from the moon

The lyrics seem to reveal the one who should protect her betrayed her trust and abused her. And the music and especially Steve Hogarth’s voice keep helping me get rid of the pain and the rage accumulated by something that should have never happened. Although, maybe, if it happens, it is down to some reason I haven’t got to understand yet.

The consequences, who knows how often, no doubt can affect you in the following lives, due to the deep emotional trauma that implies.

ADDITIONAL WORDS.

I believe three months passed since I decided to put an end to my life until I actually did it. The scene where I’m standing on an empty beach, a cloudy and windy day, though not too cold, comes back over and over again. I’m quite sure it was the day I woke up from the sedation and went out to take some fresh air. Johann was dead. And I was paralyzed. I just couldn’t talk, couldn’t cry, couldn’t shout. We had dreams. We often talked about our future together, “when the war is over”. Now I was utterly alone, hopeless, scared to death. Didn’t want to live in a world where I could get killed any moment, and not only by the enemies, but also by the hand of people who had invaded my dear Prague. I was nothing to them. They had forced me to join the Army. But I didn’t want to be there, shouldn’t be there, in a strange country where they looked at me the same way I had looked at the Germans in their tanks, with their rifles and their threats.  

I was just a shadow, a ghost. I was already dead, long before I was shot in the belly.