Senseless

I know that it is true that things can change in an instant.   Last night,  the mother of the young woman who looks after my MIL shot and killed herself.  J. and her fiance had just gotten home today from a week of much deserved vacation.  She got the call this evening about her mother's suicide.

I talked to J. a while ago about her dad's drinking.  Evidently, he had been sober for a couple of years but recently had begun drinking again.  J. told me that her mother really needed help because she was struggling with her husband's alcoholism.  And now this.  Alcoholism has claimed another victim.

C. and I cannot begin to imagine how difficult this must be for J.  She is an only child who has been planning her wedding to B. in February.  It's hard to make any sense of senseless deaths.  I don't have much else to say.  I'm just sorry for the misery that people have and the consequences of complete loss of hope.  It seems pointless to look for answers.  These words from David Foster Wallace who took his own life seem to help me somewhat understand:


"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."