In my twenty years plus of Psychiatry practice, I have lost at least fifty patients and fifteen of them have said that they are thankful for the efforts I took but found no meaning in prolonging their lives. I have called in for help, pleaded with them that their tomorrows would be a lot better than yesterday, that they were not a cause for someone's demise, that it was a natural process which took the life of their near and dear ones.
It resonated with me and a lot others who had a meaning to their lives. My excuses and reasoning and pleading. But it didn't make a den't on those who were resolved. Their reason for living was extinguished. How can it be. The people they cared about were gone. Everyone looked like a number. Their words didn't make any impression. It looked so hollow. They tried to understand that were well intended suggestions. But the vacuum was not felt in those who reasoned; it was hard to fathom the loss the one's who faced but determined.
It is hard to understand the emotional turmoil. It is difficult to put ourselves in their place. It might look silly to have made a life so cheap for a cause that didn't sound worth. But for a son whose mother stood by till she could muster her inner strength to protect from others who had disdain to her son's life, when the world rejected for not being able to become a part of, when the destitute, left behind by her off springs and the only person who didn't abandon left for heavenly abode, when the loner couldn't understand the reason for his failure to make a difference, when the lost soul cried within, begging to be understood but felt and believed that only lost souls surrounded the insane, when the ill and those who understood their life mistakes are a cause of, for their own unbecoming and their is nothing much to be accomplished but fade away and wither, it all sounds so dark and there is no sunlight.
Giving up is not easy to do but people around have found it easy to walk away from accepting the burden because it is not their own making. They are forced by the circumstances of fate. Anger, resentment and societal pressure becomes difficult to deal with and gets to interfere with their day to day life situations. Walking away is easier. Crying and feeling sorry is a day's event. I have met people who have being doing great and have traveled distances to attend the funeral. Having sat with the lost one's for years, listening to their hopelessness, their tragedies, their losses, their fight to exist, it becomes so hard to look at those who live than not to empathize with lost souls and grieve. I struggle even today between right and wrong and success and lost chances. Life is after all a life.
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