Posted by mair on April 2, 2003, at 12:21:15
In reply to Re: Anyone want to talk about one year post suicide? » ~Alii~, posted by Dinah on April 2, 2003, at 8:05:30
I can only echo alot of what Dinah and Alii have said. Sar was a mass of contradictions. I thought she was a wonderful writer (uniquely good even on a forum filled with good writers) - and had that unique ability to be able to convey so much, - a mood, setting a scene, an atmosphere - all with very few well-chosen words. And I don't really recall a situation when she used her superior word skills to cut someone else down. So she had this huge talent going for her and she could be wonderfully kind and giving and able so well to cross generational lines on this Board. But she was also just so fragile and vulnerable and self-destructive and sometimes she disguised these things (particularly the self-destructive part) by, as Dinah says, making light of it - turning an awful episode into an amusing vignette. So while I paid alot of attention to sar, I wished I had paid more.
There were alot of things I wanted for her while she was still living. I wanted her to appreciate how truly talented she was. I wanted her not to drink as much as she did. I wanted her to have a better support system in place (she always seemed so alone to me), and I definitely wanted her to have access to better mental health care. I used to ponder, quite alot actually, how I could help her get some of these things, particularly the better helth care part. It was pretty absurd for me to be thinking about this - I never knew her real name until we started emailing one another a couple of months or so before she died; Austin is a big place; I didn't know the name of the place she worked - I had not a clue how to find her, and even if I could find her there wasn't much I could do for her anyway. But for reasons that I have never been able to adequately explain to myself, she affected me that way, cyber distance be damned. On the morning I found out she died, I woke up musing to myself how I would go about finding her if she just never responded to an email I had sent more than a week before, and if she just never resurfaced on the Board. I got on my computer right after I got out of bed mostly just to check to see if she had emailed me. What I found instead was a message from Dinah, sent the day before, inviting me to PB Chat if I wanted to talk about her death.
Aside from the unendurable pain I felt, what I remember about the aftermath of sar's death, was the feeling of helplessness I had on account of the limitations of internet relationships. There were people I wanted to reach out to afterwards but I couldn't because I didn't know how to reach them. I get very frustrated here when someone in crisis solicits the help of people on the Board and then just disappears, without ever letting us know how things turned out. I feel unsettled when people who've been pretty active just drift off without letting anyone know they won't be posting for awhile. I've come to feel that part of being a PB participant here is acknowledging a responsibility to the other people here because while it may not be as obviously displayed, we often care deeply about those we meet. It's hard for some of us to buy into the notion that we make a positive difference in anyone's life, or that our absence would be noticed or mourned, but I don't think we're always the best judge of the impact we have on others.
Mair
poster:mair
thread:215328
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20030401/msgs/215419.html