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23 February 2011

Unfathomably Deep, Impenetrably Dark

Gratefulness to all who've expressed HumanKindness w/r/t my previous post. This will be a quick update of things in the personal space.

Young Wesdom and his circle are gradually easing back into the flow of their hyper-busy lives. And they are doing it as close or, if possible, even closer than before. I love them so.

Their school was as supportive as anyone could ever have expected. The community has drawn closer to the bereaved parents.

No precise causes. The young man, we all knew, had been troubled; this was not his first such attempt. But he seemed better lately. Professionals and parents and teachers and clergy and friends were all on the case. He himself knew how to cope (or at least seek help) when he felt what he must have been feeling. He just, in this instance, chose not to. And not to alert his vast network—near or far—of his decision. No one noticed anything unusually amiss. In fact, just the opposite: he fooled us all.

None of us fully understands, but we're all dealing with that. What we do know is that some chemical imbalance in his brain put him in a deep, dark place from which he felt there was no other exit: tragic for one so young. (Wisdoc, who has worked with schizophrenics and PTSD'ers and bi-polars all her professional life, says that sometimes she deals with patients whom she calls 'terminal'; meaning their mental illness, like an incurable cancer, can ultimately have only one outcome despite the best work of the world's best.)

He left a large hole in the lives of those who knew and loved him: a deep sadness. But a sadness that is neither as dark nor as deep as that—unfathomably deep, impenetrably dark—which drove him to take his own young life so abruptly and so violently.

We can't on; we'll go on.

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Be prepared: In the works is another serial post in my Ur-Story series [see Pages in the righthand column], this time on Elias Canetti's savage Auto-da-fé. Read if you must.

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