I'm writing ten metres away from some of the remaining body parts of a young woman who jumped under a train of the East Cost Railine around 4pm yesterday. H. heard a "bang", went upstairs to look at what that was on about and saw half a female body on the railway.
The police had to clean it quick as they had to reopen the line. So they picked up the obvious parts, turned the stones where there was too much blood. Poured a liquid on it that i've no idea what it does. But the vegetation being quite dense, bits might still be around. The policemen were sitting shellshocked in their car when I turned up, trying to get to grips with it.
I was out charity-shopping in a nearby town, just about to get back, on the train. I was miffed that it was delayed and had to beg the taxi office to let me use their toilets, because I had hoped to use those on the train and then that train didn't arrive. But it was a beautiful sunny day, and I'd just picked a few great books, so actually I did not mind reading in the sun in that semi deserted station of a very small town, I was having a fantastic time.
I try not to write that kind of mis-lit on my blog ususally. I find it plain voyeuristic and on some disturbing level I'm afraid it might be a bit self-serving: look at what piece of gossip I've got now! But this is the place where I collect all the bits that make my heart beat, and I didn't want my blog to be without this. I wanted this to be part of it for years to come, somewhere in the archives.
So when they reopened the line my train arrived, and then six or seven minutes later I was at the front door and H. pulled me apart and told me the whole story. I immediately lept into my rational self, inwardly, so I could listen to H. I ruled immediately that there was nothing I could do about the young woman, that in all likelhood it had not hurt one bit, and that she was in a better place. I still cried a bit. But I kept it together. We sat in silence completely stunned.
A couple of years ago something similar happened. Not quite in my street but close enough. It prompted a massive questionning crisis. I wondered why God would let us pray as earnestly as all f**** to let us serve him and our neighbours while three streets away someone was killing themselves, and we didn't know. I know for a fact that this young woman died ten metres from the most caring and genuinely warm person in this town, because H. is that person. He can listen to someone for months. He loves every obnoxious drunk at the pub, every annoying old lady at church, and they all love him back.
So I suppose you could theorise. Capitalism. Individualism. The death of community. It makes us unaware of the young lady five metres from our front door. But what are you going to do? I'm not a mind-reader and I'm happy to repent her death but I don't even know how. And in the immediate sense, her death is not my of H.'s fault in any way that I can meaningfully think of.
As we sat watching the football like 80% of the population yesterday night, H. thought about the family, who might have just been starting to realise that their loved one had not come home. He hoped that she would be identified so the family would not have to go through the complete horror of their loved one simply going missing. We were both disturbed by how invisible it all was, an our after her death, you could not tell that anything had happened there.
So I said, let's get flowers. Let's make it known, visually, that young women in our street jump under trains and it's not all pretty in good old Durham. I wrote a card apologising for the culture we lived in. I wrote that I wished she had knocked on our door. But then what kind of an idea is that? I worried that it might just give other people ideas of how to be really succesful at getting yourself dead. I can't be that stupid, so I bought the flowers but I kept the card.
A little while after the football, we took out the flowers to that little stone wall that separates the street from the railway, at the place where the wall is no higher than 1.80 metres and thus easy to climb. They are chips in the paint where I would have put my feet if I had tried to climb that wall.
I brought that candle-in-a-red-jar thingy I bought in Vancouver. I loved it because it looked a bit like a sanctuary light, and so whenever I needed to be reminded that God was present I would sometime light it. The whole area felt horrible and scary. There was nowhere that candle-jar-that-looks-like-a-sanctuary-light was most needed. There were those flowers and that light in a sea of hostile green vegetation engulfed by the dark night. And no matter how dark it all felt, my God that candle-jar was needed.
Later in the night, H. suggested we get the candle-jar back. I suspect he liked it too. It being a Saturday night, the World Cup being on, and our little street being one of the main throughways between Durham city centre and the suburbs on the hill... It gets a bit rowdy with kids walking home drunk. They're destructive somehow and break all the flowers in the street on purpose, that kind of stuff. I said leave it, if it gets broken it gets broken.
H. had to finish his sermon while the cops were still around picking the body bits they could. I asked what the Gospel was. It's the woman dousing Jesus' feet with tears. I know what I would have preached...
And it says that we need to get into despair-management. The type that doesn't involve getting your beautiful, God-created lips and nose and body smashed by a train, but just maybe go and despair in the right place, bathing Jesus' feet with our tears.
But hey, even that's dangerous. Because I get a lot from prayer but not everybody does, and importantly, I did not always do so myself. I went trough hell for years. I was a slave in Egypt and there was no sign of it getting any better. And although I wish I could show someone else the way, that is one area in which I'm not confident at all. And it goes without saying that I do not advocate "prayer" as a replacement for speech-based therapies or medicines when these are called for.
At 3am a bunch of kids threw the candle-jar up the street and it smashed. I pretty much expected it. And although I treasured it and have plenty of other red candles in the house, I wanted it there. And when I heard the sound of it smash on the pavement, my heart smashed too. Everything around me in that moment was and felt broken.
And so now I'm drinking the tea made with the teabag that I wish I'd used at 3pm yesterday to brew a cuppa for the dead stranger in my street. While I drink it and cry, I listen to the birds pour some healing on my soul, the trains go by, and I hope the dead stranger in my street is praying for us. God, have mercy on your sad and confused servants.
