Life Matters

There's a section of Facebook that shows only videos, some professional and some amateur.  I tend to ignore the T.V. news articles because most of them are political and I'm totally fed up with politics right now.  I watched an amateur video today that was very interesting.  There was a notation on the top that said the man who made the video committed suicide soon after posting it and that caught my attention.

It happened to be a black man who looked to be in his late 30's and he was speaking from his car.  He first said it was his last day at work because he'd been laid off but he spoke in a quiet and calm voice.  I assumed his main topic would be how losing his job had affected him but he only mentioned that he loved his job.  His topic of conversation was much deeper than that.

You could tell he was speaking from the heart and that it was important for him to have people hear him out.  He said that it was a mistake for us to stress that "black lives" or "police lives" matter.  It was so much more important to understand that it was life that matters.  Now, in my mind, I'm wondering why he would say that and then take his own life but I wanted to hear what he needed to say.

He spoke for a while on how important life was and how we were missing the point when we shrunk it down to black "lives" or police "lives", etc..  I didn't watch to the end of the video because I was afraid he'd break my heart.  Just watching what I did of an intelligent, thoughtful human being who, in the end, found the life he'd been given was too much for him to bear made me stop the video.  I understand suicide.  It defies logic but I know that unbearable pain, mental or physical, can drive us to it.  It rarely solves anything unless it's done as an early escape when natural death is imminent.  Someone once told me that suicide was cowardly because she knew of someone who had committed murder and then committed suicide.  I don't believe that person killed himself to escape punishment for his crime but to escape the gut wrenching mental pain when the reality of what he'd done finally hit him.

At my age, I spend a lot of time wondering why I'm still here when much better people have passed on.  I regret the many ways I wasted the life I've been given and, like most people, sort of wish I'd done a lot of things differently.  I wonder why we treasure newborns, childhood, and young adults but tend to think seniors have lived too long and are only taking up space.  We're all experiencing the miracle of life from beginning to end and each phase should be relished.

And so, when I watched that video and carefully watched the facial expressions of the man as he spoke, I saw his pain and I wished he hadn't been alone.