on a perfect blue day, think about dying.

[threeplusfire]

He lived through a steel mill explosion in 1973, when the furnace blew up. It burned the black man working beside him until the man’s skin was white. The explosion threw him from thirty feet up, and he broke his back in two places so now he uses a power chair. He lived through previous suicide attempts and hospitalizations. In 1986 he met a girl with a bubbly spirit, someone who was patient and kind and talked to him. He thought he could live through all that until this year when his wife had a stroke. Her children from a former marriage took her away and put her in a nursing home and wouldn’t tell him where she was. Now he’s alone, rattling around in that big empty house. He can’t take it anymore, he’s scared and hurting. He doesn’t know anyone in this town and it’s been a long time since he saw a doctor. It hurts so badly that he doesn’t know what else to do. He wants to die. So he goes down to the store and uses the payphone to make a call. There’s nowhere else he can go. He sobs into the phone, afraid and lonely. On the other end of the phone, a girl keeps asking him to hang on and asks him about the first time he met his wife, about his life, about what he’s done before and if he has hurt himself today, if he has a plan, if he has a weapon, how long he’s been thinking about suicide. She keeps telling him to hang on, that she will get someone to help him, she will send someone. He stays on the phone with her, weeping and talking until the officer can get there. She promises to pray for him before he goes, and the kind officer picks up the phone to tell me someone’s there.

Comments

[alainn-sorcha.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

It was really terribly sad. I want this day to be over.

[kythryne.livejournal.com]

This is an achingly beautiful piece of writing, and an incredibly sad story. You're very brave to do what you do.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I really wanted to write it, to remember. It was so strange and terrible. We don't get a lot of suicidal callers, but the ones we do are usually in more difficulties than most.

I really hope he is alright. Thirty minutes on the phone isn't so long to get to know someone, but I worry about him.

[mielikki.livejournal.com]

Oh- those are the hardest ones. (((hugs)))

[seitvonzu.livejournal.com]

jesus.... your job just seems *impossibly* hard sometimes.
*hug*