A man runs out into the night. . .

 

A man runs out into the night, a cold night, a Toronto winter night – need I say more? He is full of pills and slightly drunk, and having just escaped from a psychiatric ward, a lot of planning  must have gone into his overdose and escape, or surely staff would have found his stash and stopped him. But no, he’s out in the night, the last night of his life, and the night is  cold, cold, COLD - but this is what he wants, for this man has had enough and has decided to end it. 

This man, once a distinguished journalist, a much-travelled man with a family and friends, has been diminished by mental illness for decades, almost devoured by it, his tall and once-stocky frame reduced to a wraithlike caricature. The police report issued after his escape from the hospital lists him as 6’2”, 150  pounds, with a “thin  build”, and  missing an upper front tooth. The photo which appears with the police report does not look like my friend, not at all, not even a distorted cartoon of him  – he is gaunt, glassy-eyed, with an eerie, gap-toothed half-smile.

He crashed out into the night, walked who knows how far, falling forward on his footsteps, through slush and through snow, then finally succumbing to the drugs and the beer, and collapsing beside the railroad tracks. He dies, as they say, “in his sleep”, a drugged sleep that is somehow merciful. But how merciful IS death, when it uses people  up, consumes them and spits them out into the frozen night?

I have written about this man a lot  lately, because I can’t get past this. He is real. This is not a story, and he was a real person and was actually my friend.  My own serious health problems may well be bringing mortality uncomfortably close, and perhaps that is why I revisit this macabre death and the misery and  struggle that preceded it. In my usual way, I have  tried to deal with impossible pain by writing about it, in an attempt to tame it or at least make it more bearable.

But no one, of course, is interested in reading any of  it. It’s just not FUN. Like all my Facebook  posts, they are glanced at and skipped. The one exception are the utterly trivial, even ridiculous things I throw up there, which somehow get a whole lot of chitter-chatter. THIS stuff, though, this stuff matters to me, and I thought it might matter to others - which means that,  to most people, it apparently doesn’t.

It proves what I’ve been saying and saying. All this delicate  tiptoeing   around the subject of  “mental health” and pretending to be sensitive and respectful means NOTHING when no one really wants to look at it, and every day, multiple times a day, I hear people describe things and people they don’t like as “insane”, actual human beings casually referred to  as “whack jobs”  and “nut bars”, and cite hilarious stories about  people being taken away by “men in white coats”.  

They claim to be respectful as hell about “mental health” (of course! What do you think I am?), but NO  ONE makes the connection. We can easily pretend to be enlightened and compassionate about pain and suffering, then in the next breath, slash and burn and cut the sufferers down, and stamp their  ashes into the  ground. 

This is real, this happened, my friend was real and was consumed, but I remember him and how it ended and the decades of  struggle  that preceeded that black night in December. People say to me, oh, but people don’t MEAN what they say,  “insane” doesn’t really mean what you think it does, it means something else (but what? I hear it at least ten times a day), and “whack job” and “nut bar” are just names, just WORDS, just a way to – what? Um, they’re not sure. Oh no, we don’t  say things like THAT!  But to me, it is a way to abuse and dismiss people by calling them the worst names for the “mentally ill”. And no one wants to really look at that. 

In spite of all the posturing and window-dressing that goes on in the name of  progressiveness, we  have apparently  not come too far at all from the whip-and-chair warehousing of the mentally ill in the collective imagination, an imagining which evokes as much loathing and contempt as it ever did in medieval times. If you’re going to spew such contempt, throw acid in random sufferers’ faces, PLEASE don’t try to convince  me you are enlightened  and compassionate about “mental  health”. 

Spit it out. You fear and loathe these people, and don't want to look.

This isn’t mere hypocrisy. We have to find a word that is infinitely worse than that. And I want to ask all those people  who so casually brand human beings as mere things, “nut bars”, “whack jobs”: can’t you do better? 

Apparently not – or is it just  that  nobody wants to bother?