Table for One

While I heavily suspected it at the time two years ago, it was confirmed today that a colleague of mine who died suddenly, took his own life. He was around my age, with children around the same age as my own, and at least outwardly, seemed balanced, content, stable. He was also good at his job, skilled technically and as a people leader, well-liked, calm, and didn't seem to get emotionally stresses easily at all.

The outside, is not the inside.

The saying is that "no man is an island", but there is another saying that "each being is a universe". We might all be interconnected, we might share time and space in many ways, but our inner selves, lives in its own world, its own reality, and that reality doesn't necessarily reflect the physical world, or actual conditions. It is a unique world driven by thought and emotion, a perspective that feels correct, valid, justified, no matter how out of sync with reality it is.

Have you ever thought that when we sit down and share a meal with someone, no matter how well we know them, we can never truly know how the food tastes to them. We assume it is the same or similar, but like the taste of soap some people experience with eating cilantro, it might be quite different. So when we share an experience, the interpretation of that experience can be very different.

A table for one.

From the outside, we see the outer skin of a person and while it might indicate what is happening on the inside, it isn't necessarily so, nor does it mean that we are observing correctly. At times it might seem clear, but without feedback, we don't know if our judgements were correct. Almost twenty years ago a quite profound thing happened to me that highlights this in some way, where I didn't read the situation well. Or rather, I didn't read the situation well enough.

I was teaching business English and had a student in her late thirties start with me for fifteen sessions. As tended and still tends to be the case, while there is a framework of improving something like language, how we go about it is through a lot of varied discussion, and in one-to-one sessions, they can become quite personal at times. We went about the sessions, discussing this and that, talking about work, life, her children and occasionally some vocabulary, or grammar corrections.

Like normal.

However, in the last session she came in and her demeanor was a little different, pleasant, but nervous, almost embarrassed. We talked like normal, but it was clear she had more to say, so in the last half hour, I said how this will be the last session, and reviewed how she has improved and how much I have enjoyed the discussions we have had and then inquired, was it valuable for you?

After a short pause she said with some fear something like,

I don't know why I took this course with you, because I had already given up on life. I don't know what it has been, but I have been deeply unhappy for a long time and even though I love my children and my husband, I just couldn't ,go on. I had already decided to take my own life and was just waiting for the right time. But, as we talked each week, my thoughts changed, I started questioning my motivations in a different way, and as I progressed, the feelings that have weighed my down for so long, become insignificant. It is not that they aren't there, but their importance and power over me had fallen away. I don't know how, but I think you have saved my life, and because of that, my children and partner will never know how close I came to ending my suffering, despite loving them.

She cried a lot. I hugged her tightly. And then she walked out.

I haven't seen her since.

There is nothing magical in this story. Nothing I did that helped her, other than for perhaps for a couple hours a week for a few months, she felt like she wasn't dining alone. Maybe for those moments, she felt the sense of someone sharing her journey from outside of her world, a stranger, a visitor, someone she was comfortable to show around without judgement. Even though she never took me into her world explicitly, in her head space, maybe I was there with her as she held the conversations with her inner self.

I didn't fully appreciate how profound an effect good conversation could be on someone until that moment, and to this day, I see it as a gift. Suicide is quite common in Finland and I suspect with the way people are conditioned in the environments we have created, it is going to increase for some time to come. But I wonder, how many instances are inevitable, and how many could be avoided if only there was some good conversation involved.

I said this experience for me was a gift, a present. But perhaps the gift I was able to give to her through those sessions was my presence, so that even though we weren't talking directly about her struggles, she was able to feel safe to consider them from different perspectives, to question the universe, explore the island she felt she was upon, and realize that there is more dry land across the sea, and many more worlds to be a part of, including those of her husband and children.

They say "we all die alone", but maybe that is only true in the physical sense. Because, while we might die, the connections and impacts we have made on others live on through them, and across them too. We have become part of their universe, influenced the worlds they inhabit, like a weather system that waters their gardens, or leaves them bare deserts.

We can dine alone.

Or we can cook a good meal, set the table for many, and then taste the food together, discussing what it means to each other, even if we can never fully comprehend the differences we each hold.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]