we clearly need to organize and do something. there is no other way. people in the UK have to demand changes and be aggressive. I don't know...but something major has to be done here
With every year that passes, the ball of emotions that I feel whenever someone in this space commits suicide shifts more and more from horror and grief and heartbreak at the emptiness and brutality of vigorous and wonderful people suffering and dying alone and anger and bitterness at all the people that create and prop up the system to resignation and nihilism.
Mostly, I despair at the relentlessness and inflexibility of the system, and the coldness and inhumanity of the people that prop it up or are uninterested in challenging it, from the doctors who choose not to listen, the journalists who choose to write in other spaces, and the family members and friends who choose to forget. But, partly, whenever a patient commits suicide, I despair at us.
We should be throwing ourselves on the track, but, each time this happens, we, or at least I, become a little more inured to the normality of such cruel and desolate tragedy. When I was much sicker and more desparate and younger in this disease, I felt the fire and urgency and shortness of time, but less sick, less pressed, and older in this disease, I find the furious, righteous anger giving way to emptiness and nihilism. I find it easier each year to forgive myself as I become progressively less willing or able to encompass the suffering of others and less driven to fight against it.
There is blood on others' hands, but, I think, my hands are not so clean, our hands are not so clean. Where is the willingness to respond in ways that match the urgency? I didn't see it when I first got sick, in the years when I still had spirit, and I still don't. I judge my family and friends negatively who skate on in their own lives as mine becomes an increasingly distant footnote to theirs, but how am I different for prioritizing my own little life over those who suffer more? It is not right that each of us suffers, but it is also not right that we compartmentalize these tragedies and set them aside to get through our day, while the scale of suffering grows. Where is the risk of life and limb and health and security that could at least do justice to it?
Why hasn't there been a real hunger strike? Why haven't we chained ourselves to HHS or Congress (or NHS and Parliament)? Why haven't there been any real lie-ins? Why don't we graffiti HHS (NHS) and throw eggs? Are we all just too sick and too pressed or have we just become too used to this horrible normality? We are not the problem, we didn't create it and we don't own it, but I feel each year less of a need for absolution in how I choose to live my life and that crushes the part of me that still thinks suffering matters, that still thinks the cosmic weight is too great to continue waiting and hoping and putting energy into soft measures.