At the local station all services were delayed because of a person hit by a train, so the train indicator advised. I had to get a bus, and while I was waiting at the bus stop I thought about the tragedy of suicide.
Train companies will always minimise this unfortunate activity, but it is sadly a regular occurrence. One cannot fully understand the agonising decision to jump in front of a fast moving train - even at low speed, like approaching a station to stop, the weight of the train will quickly dismember or run over a limp body.
Think of the effect on the train driver, as the suicide victim takes his last look at another human seconds before he is smashed to death - like a hammer hitting a peach! Many drivers have to give up their job after the trauma of death is played out before them.
Emergency workers have to deal with the most horrible of sights, like gathering up bits of a body. Their professionalism is superb, but one wonders how they manage to go home to their families, and come back for work the next day, to do it all over again.
A suicide in a family has a devastating effect. A school friend of mine lost his older brother who jumped from the roof of a building, and died instantly. It is hard to imagine the mental torture of someone planning to jump, and the thoughts in their mind seconds before the fateful decision to go. Tom's parents divorced within a year of the death, and I am sorry to say Tom also took his own life some years later!
There have been moments in my own life, when I have considered committing suicide! I can remember once accelerating towards the support of a motorway over-bridge, but swerving away at the last moment. Many years after this, I was a Samaritan volunteer, and able to help others with whom I had shared the despair of life, and the hope of death.
