Dramatic Departures

It is apparently the season for sad or quirky stories about the need of notable numbers of people in different places to end it all in dramatic public fashion. A Time article I chanced upon in my dentist's office related the sad effect on all concerned of those British folks who throw themselves in front of trains every year.

There are plenty of ways to commit suicide, but few more public than turning a multiton moving train full of passengers into a bullet. Last year in the U.K., 194 people killed themselves on the tracks of mass-transit systems, with some 50 of those choosing the sooty tunnels of the Tube. New York City's subway averages 26 suicides a year. In Paris, 24 died on the tracks of the Métro last year. While it is a fallacy to imagine any suicide as a solitary act--even the tidiest affair leaves survivors stricken--death by train is a particularly declaratory form of killing oneself. It makes the act a form of theater--for the driver, watching it all from behind his windshield, and for the rest of us.

On May 16, I posted a short piece, NYC: The Mysteries of the Suicide Tourist, about the pilgrimage many people make each year to New York City to make the last desperate, dramatic gesture of their lives--most often from one of the city's impressive and convenient heights. If you must give fatal expression to despairing failure, depression or nihilism, if your definition of the meaning of life--or the need to announce its failed meaning--calls for such terminal public declarations, then I suppose you may as well do it in as splashy, attention-grabbing a manner as possible. And as if these were auditions for limited numbers of more satisfying roles in the hereafter, there seems a predictable yet unseen and unscripted queue constantly forming and moving these desperate folks to center stage locations in London, NYC, and many other places.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1827064,00.html