as Kim puts it. The aftermath of a suicide. And the prologue, sometimes.
Used to know a lady. Had met her when married to first wife, had seen her on and off over the years; we messed around in the SCA at the time, and that was her big recreation. She was a nurse, and married at the time.
Then she went through a somewhat messy divorce. Didn't see her for a while, but- this was after my wife had moved out- she called occasionally to talk. Second or third time she started asking me what I thought about the best way to commit suicide. Which freaked me out no small amount, because it was obvious she wasn't just curious, she was seriously thinking about it. I truly did not know I could dance like that, working my way around the subject and being as discouraging as possible.
Didn't hear from her for a while, then she called one night sounding like she was about to collapse. I wound up going over to her house and spent about two hours there. She really freaked me out, being at once mostly very calm about things but having that quivering edge showing through. But I thought she'd calmed down quite a bit, and I felt like I'd done something good there.
That lasted until she called about two months later. She'd moved to Norman in that time, and I'd heard nothing from or about her. That night she called about 0130, just after I'd got home from work, and the first thing she said was "Hi, this is -. If you had a .32 automatic, how would you kill yourself with it?"
I never knew my brain could both freeze up and run in circles so fast, either.
I spent about ten minutes trying to tell her "I wouldn't" while dressing it up in 'that might not work well' crap to both give myself time to think of what to do. I'd been a dispatcher for four years and handled all kinds of stuff but I'd never had a suicide call, and the agency I worked for had no training for such; we never got calls like that, they always went to the PD or the SO. So I was flying on my own there. That ten minutes ended when she- pissed I wouldn't give her solid suggestions("I will NOT help you kill yourself")- hung up. She'd sounded so firm on it that I, figuring they were likely to find the body, called the PD, told them what'd happened. Then I sat around for half an hour hoping they'd been able to cross-check the phone number- I didn't have her address- until they called back. Officer had found her home with a friend, with "no idea what you're talking about, officer" on the subect of the visit. He told his dispatcher he thought she was covering up so he'd swing by a few times over his shift. Quiet the rest of the night.
Next day I got hold of my ex and told her about it, as she knew some people in Norman who were friends with the lady and I thought someone close to her ought to know about it. Then, that night when I got home I had a message: "I don't appreciate you calling the police on me, and I don't appreciate you telling people about me. I'll make a deal with you: I won't call you anymore, and you won't send the police to my house, ok?"
Couple of days later ex called with the word: the friends in Norman knew about her suicide talk, this was just another incident, and they figured "Don't worry, as long as she's talking about it she won't do anything". Well, bullshit, I'd heard her voice and she wasn't just thinking, she was planning. But I couldn't think of anything else to do, and the fact was she was an adult and could do whatever she pleased.
It was about a month after that as I recall that the ex called and informed me that she'd done it. The note said that she'd decided that if she reached this birthday without being married and- preferably- being pregnant, she didn't want to go on living. So the night before she'd borrowed a gun from a friend to go target shooting(which she'd done before), and on the day she'd put on a nightgown, sat down on her bed and shot herself in the head.
Wasn't anywhere near the shock of Kim's friend Danny; we hadn't been that close, and she'd definitely made it clear what was coming. It was two things to me:
The first was saddening, because here was a lovely, intelligent, capable woman who'd taken her own life.
The second, I was pissed. I mentioned she was a nurse, so she had access to any kind of drug you can think of and could simply have taken a bottle. But no, couldn't do that. I can't remember if it was in the note or something she'd said before, she didn't like the idea of drugs because of the possibility of someone finding her before she was dead and a med team keeping her alive. I think that was bullshit. I think she wanted to leave a mess behind, so she did it in a way that would screw over the friend she borrowed the gun from and make a nice mess on the bed.
Kim wrote "But I think that when you throw your life away, you only get a free pass when you’re over the age of seventy, and living in circumstances of extreme physical pain. Before that time, and before you become old and have fulfilled all your obligations, you have a responsibility to others to keep on living. You are not entitled to become a coke addict at age thirty-five, or have sex with five thousand homosexual partners, or screw some poxy street tart on a business trip, or any of that bullshit." I'll throw something else in: if you decide to off yourself, you are not entitled to do it in a way guaranteed to cause grief to as many people as possible and to hurt a friend as much as possible.
And if you do that, screw you.
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