Facts The Heart Can Feel

There was a suicide in the park this morning. I was sitting at my desk reading an article online when R returned suddenly from her morning walk in tears. My immediate thought was that the park department had chopped down the rhododendrons we’d been watering, lugging gallon jugs of water up the switchback trail in 90-degree August heat and letting it pour slowly into the stubborn, hydrophobic dirt. The region had been suffering drought conditions for several years, as well as shrouds of wildfire smoke from Canada to the north and the Cascades to the east. The park department refused to water the rhodies because the sprinkler system had been dismantled and removed. But that wasn’t it. She said there’d been a suicide on the upper tier of the park. The police stopped her as she was going up the trail. Had she not paused to redo the laces in her shoes she may have seen the body, if not the actual moment the man had taken out a gun and shot himself in the head.

A neighbor had seen the man. He’d been sitting on a bench on a viewpoint in the park overlooking the city and mountains and the boats and ships on Lake Union. He’d been sitting there a long time. His car was parked nearby. The neighbor hadn’t seen the man shoot himself, but she’d heard the gunshot. A number of houses cluster around the upper tier of the park. I wonder if anyone else had seen it. It must’ve happened quickly.

The man had driven to that spot. He knew what he was doing. What he was about to do. To be or not to be. He’d chosen the latter. And to do it in this particular spot. With sky as intermediary.  

Funny thing is I’d just quoted Albert Camus in a letter to a friend. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.”

Later in the afternoon, after a dental appointment, I walked home. I decided to go through the park, mostly out of curiosity, a rather creepy rubbernecking darkened with a tinge of dread. There were things I didn’t want to see. But felt compelled, nevertheless, to walk through the park. Suicide is no longer considered a crime in most states. But it felt like a crime scene.

I saw nothing. The park was pristine, green and brown in the golden light of the sun. No blood. No bullet. The man was gone from this place, so utterly gone it was hard to conceive of years of struggle and pain, of whatever it was that led that man to this place, and to leave it so abruptly, following what must be assumed had been a lingering meditative moment on a bench in the morning sun. A pleasure weighed, perhaps, with the darker purpose the man harbored of coming there to do what he had chosen to do. To not to be. That was his answer. And he had acted on it with sureness and resolve. With forethought. With purpose. And no one else around.