A Close Encounter

It was so early in the morning, around five. The whole neighborhood was awakened with the loud outburst of a familiar voice. Everybody got up and stood at their front doors when a lady just keep screaming, crying and asking for help. She wanted her husband to be rescued alive and that she found him down at the hill with his mouth full of saliva, unconscious. The whole neighborhood panicked. Although it was still a little dark, all the men rushed down the hill to help him.

He had with him a bottle of Polidol, a strong insecticide for the rice plants when she found him. She said, she just woke up in the middle of the night without her husband in bed. She was looking for him for over four hours. They never had a fight, she continued. She never imagined anything that would prompt him to commit suicide. Although she noticed he had been so restless for the past few weeks. He had some incidents of panic attack and depression. His younger brother had been mentally-ill for years and he was so scared it might as well happen to him.

The whole scenario puzzled me. I was 8 then. The lady is one of my Mom’s close relative. They have two young kids. I was even there when the neighbor doctor gave him the first aide and all the basic treatment for a poisoned patient. It was all too late. It was indeed heart-breaking. I heard his kids crying for help to save their father.

I admit, it left a great lesson and I carried that lesson in my heart all this time. Ending one’s life is a cowardice. Running away and suppressing the problems hoping it will just go away one day is a cowardice.
As what Dr. Scott Peck of “The Road Less Travelled” had mentioned:
“The illness exists long before the symptoms. Rather than the illness, the symptoms are the beginning of its cure. The fact that they are unwanted makes them all the more the phenomenon of grace- a gift of God, a message from the unconscious, if you will, to initiate self-examination and repair. Only those few who accept responsibility for their symptoms, who realize that their symptoms are a manifestation of disorder in their own soul, heed the message of their unconscious and accept its grace.”

At some point, we all go through tough times and yet; only few take it as an opportunity, a good opportunity. Somehow, the lady survived. I grow up and saw her struggled to meet the basic needs of her young kids. After 10 years, she remarried her high school boyfriend who happened to be still in love with her.