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The
book Suicide and Attempted Suicide by Erwin
Stengel was one that was sent into the prison to me
by a friend, Aine, in 1986. In an ironic twist which
caused both bafflement and considerable anguish, Aine
later took her own life and requested that her ashes
be spread over the grave of one of the 1981 hunger
strikers. A former prisoner made the journey and honoured
her wishes.
In
his book, Stengel noted that in several East African
tribes the tree on which a person had hanged himself
had to be felled and burnt. It was a thought that
crossed my mind two weeks ago when I discovered that
my journey through the Whiterock had been thwarted
by someone who, in the words of Brecht, ‘destroyed
a torturable body.’ When the PSNI stopped me
and told me that I could proceed no further, I didn’t
ask why. I thought it was a situation involving joyriders,
frequent enough in that part. Taking a diversion,
I met a former republican prisoner on the Whiterock
Road. He explained what had happened to cause the
diversion. A man had hanged himself. At that point
I half-wished we had missed each other if only to
avoid the involuntarily shudder that meandered its
way through my body.
Only
seven days earlier I had been in town when a street
trader whom I knew approached me and told me that
a certain man had died as a result of his own hand
in the graveyard. As it turned out he had been given
the wrong name although the similarity between it
and the name of the dead man was so pronounced that
it was easy to see how the mistake could have been
made. Despite not seeing eye to eye with the man whose
name had wrongly been conveyed to me as the victim,
I immediately felt for him and his family. Why it
had happened and what could have been done to prevent
it were the type of questions that raced through my
mind. It is those instances that we come to realise
that the dislikes, grudges and animosities we bear
are for the most part political and that no personal
expiation is required on the part of our opponents
to appease and neutralise them.
Upon
being told the reason behind the diversion I could
have turned back to visit the scene. Chancing my arm
I could perhaps have gained access to the restricted
area. I had a press card and with a bit of persistence
may just have got through. But I chose not to, telling
myself that it would be an intrusion on the dignity
of the person who had ended it all hanging from a
tree; that in some way by returning I would be violating
the last bit of personal space chosen so deliberately
by this man on which to bid the world adieu. The real
reason I refrained from going was entirely different.
I did not want to see the dead body hanging from a
tree. I did not want to experience the unease that
it would prompt within me. I chose not to share with
the victim a moment of my physical presence, even
as a gesture of sympathy, a mark of respect or a symbolic
act of companionship offered to one whose loneliness
ruptured the social safety net which can sometimes
prevent such things happening. Beyond our touch in
life, I hesitated to reach out and touch him, even
symbolically, in death.
On
my return journey, the path seemed clear of the PSNI
so I ventured up. Tentatively, I peered towards the
trees from beneath the peak of my baseball cap wondering
which one he had settled for upon which to draw his
final breath before the drop into nothingness. Children
playing noticed me and said ‘there’s his
rope mister’. A cyclist of about 11 wearing a
Leeds United football top was, in true Tom Sawyer
fashion, trying to entice other kids down the street
by telling them that the body was still there. They
told him he was spoofing. I pondered on what macabre
satisfaction children derive from such insouciance,
then checked myself. My own thoughts drifted back
to 1974 when a man in ‘A’ Wing of Crumlin
Road jail tried to hang himself on A3. He was moved
to the hospital wing and one of the screws asked would
I carry his belongings down to the office on A1. I
did, and then facetiously asked ‘what about his
rope?' The screw I offered it to seemed appalled,
appreciating the seriousness of the matter much more
than I did. At 17 these things have a different hue;
the pain is not appreciated, the mental turmoil seldom
understood. Who was I to judge children much younger?
They were only exercising their freedom and experimenting
with their world.
Suicide
is a problem plaguing West Belfast. Community workers
appear to be at their wits end trying to grapple with
the phenomenon. They do their utmost to find a social
solution that obviates the individual solution that
lonely depressed beings see as their only option.
And until our ‘why?’ becomes more compelling
than the ‘why not?' of those who succumb, the
hanging trees of West Belfast will continue to support
those most solitary in our midst.
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