death

Captured cruelty towards a bus monitor reminds us being human is a tricky thing

June 22, 2012 by Jeff Moriarty 6 Comments

I’m fond of old cemeteries. They’re quiet.

Newer graves show off flowers or flags. There is someone still alive who cared about and remembers the person beneath the soil. A wife, a son, a grandchild, or a friend.

The older graves are barren. Dusty. Sometimes full of weeds. They get that way quickly. It takes just a few decades before everyone who once knew and loved that person is dead themselves. A few dozen years more and nobody will even remember their name.

Three graves together, nearly a century old: a child “Taken Too Soon“, a “Beloved Wife And Mother” dead the same year, and a year later the father “Resting With God and His Angels“. Was there an accident? A suicide borne from grief?

I doubt anyone alive knows more about them than me, a stranger walking by, reading the etched stone. Everything else they were is gone.

Meanwhile, the Living…

Karen Klein, a elderly bus monitor earning about $15,000 a year, was captured on video being harassed and bullied by the children on her school bus. The kids mocked her for her weight, her looks, her clothes, and even the deaths of her family members. Her son committed suicide ten years prior, and those comments reduced her to tears.

You can watch the video if you wish, but I don’t recommend it. I’ve been online a long time, and I’ve seen some amazingly bizarre, disgusting, horrible, vile, brutal, weird, and crazy things. With just words and insults, this video ranks as one of the worst of them.

People are raising money to give this poor woman a vacation. Their $5,000 goal was obliterated, and they are at $550,000 and climbing. It’s a nice gesture, and I’m happy for her, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about what happened.

Kids on a Bus

This woman still endured a horrible situation that nobody addressed until a video of it went viral. She had been bullied by these kids before, and nobody took action. These kids thought it was acceptable to threaten and mock this woman to tears. None of that has changed.

It’s easy to point fingers at the parents, or at the kids, or at the administrators, or… anybody. But the real anger is because stories like this make us doubt ourselves. How could one human just be so hurtful to another?

That’s why the donation is so high – what happened to Karen taps into our collective guilt over how poorly we can behave as human beings. We’re trying to apologize on behalf of humanity for every time we were cruel as children, mean to someone who didn’t deserve it, or stood by and didn’t defend someone who needed it.

We’re not apologizing to Karen, we’re apologizing to ourselves. To the universe. “I know we’re a mean little species sometimes, but we don’t want to be, and we can do much better than that… right?”

We know this part of us. We know it, and we hate it.

Taking Time

We can’t make it go away. We can do things like financing Karen’s retirement, and supporting anti-bullying organizations like the It Gets Better Project and Stand for the Silent, but the biggest thing we can do is always be on guard against that cold piece of ourselves. We’re too often focused on the race, the grind, the competition, and the acquisition. None of those things endure, but they often fuel the part of us the kids on the bus put on display.

I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.
~ Banksy

You’re not going to matter forever. In a hundred years someone may lovingly place flowers upon your grave. They might do it many times, but eventually they will stop coming and the flowers will give way to weeds.

The only time in which you matter is right now. Right where you are. To the people around you.

How you treat them, and the impact you have on their lives in this brief sliver of time together, is your real legacy.

Have a care with others. Never back down from defending someone who needs it.

Use these moments well. They’re all you really have.

Speaking of Death – What happens when you address a silent topic

April 12, 2012 by Jeff Moriarty Leave a Comment

Last August I gave a talk at Ignite Phoenix After Hours on why death is something we, as a society, need to discuss more openly. The talk, and what happened afterwards, hit me rather hard so I haven’t discussed it much since.

I believe there is nothing more precious or personal than our own lives, and we should have the ability to end our lives with dignity whenever we deem it is no longer worth living. We cannot have strong Right To Die or Assisted Suicide laws unless we discuss this openly.

I also believe that many people needlessly take their own lives in moments of depression or despair, when they think there is no one who can help them or understand. We can save lives if people feel more open about discussing thoughts of suicide with those they love.

I’ve spoken many times in front of crowds, but my talk at Ignite Phoenix After Hours was the toughest I’ve ever given. There is no video, but you can read the bulk of what I said on my earlier blog about choosing to die. The talk itself went well, but as I came off the stage I was not prepared for the reaction.

Nearly twenty people approached me that night. One woman worked in a Hospice. A man was caring for his terminally ill mother. Another woman had attempted suicide when she was younger and knew how hard it was to talk to people. People kept coming up to me with their stories until I left the venue and went home to collapse.

They talked to me about it the next day. The next week. Nine months later, I had someone come up to me out of the blue at a grocery store and thank me for my talk. I was overwhelmed.

It kind of spooked me from posting anything more about the topic, which is ironic given the message of my talk. I didn’t want to become “that guy who always talks about dying”. I also felt woefully unequipped to respond to some of the powerful things people were sharing with me. Even though I knew most people just wanted someone to listen to them who understood, it was still very difficult to do.

Which is part of the whole issue here, right?

There is nothing more intimately, mortally personal than our own experiences with death, and I stood up as someone willing to talk about it. It doesn’t mean the topic came easy to me. I carry around a lot of the same cultural baggage on this topic as everyone else. It just means I’m willing to try and work through it, and be willing to listen when others want to talk.

And I encourage you to do the same. If you make it clear to the people you care about that you are willing to talk about suicide, living wills, euthanasia, and end of life care, you may be surprised who you find in your life that really wants to have that conversation.

In my Ignite presentation I referenced the powerful BBC documentary, Choosing to Die, in which author Terry Pratchett grapples with his own thoughts on suicide in the face of advancing Alzheimers. The entire video is on Vimeo, and you can watch it below.

Terry Pratchett – Choosing to die from Lisette Leona on Vimeo.

In Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die, He explores the realities of medically assisted death. Having been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease in 2008, Terry considers how he might choose to end his life as his condition progresses. In a moving documentary he meets those who, like him, would like to control the way they die including a men suffering from degenerative conditions and he is with a British motor neurone sufferer as he carries out an assisted death at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

The Falling Man

September 13, 2008 by Jeff Moriarty Leave a Comment

Esquire has an amazing article about the story of one of the most famous photographs from the September 11th attacks in New York City… that of a single man falling through the air after having lept to his death.

One of the most fascinating things to me was how the family of the man presumed to be in the picture refused to believe it could be him.¬† They felt that his suicide would have been act of cowardice, and his love for them would have kept him working to return to them.

I cannot remotely assume to know what it was like to be in that situation, in those buildings, on that day. Most pictures of the jumpers were censored inside the United States, but some estimates place the total as high as 200 people.¬† They fell for 10 seconds. They reached speeds of 150 miles per hour.¬† They fled a hell of chaos, terror, and burning jet fuel.

How you exit this life is an important part of how you live it. Whether those people jumped out of fear or in act of defiance, they most assuredly were not cowards.