Hard to Understand

Its hard to understand, when a footballer dies. A footballer you watched play for your team for years. He was good too. His death frightens you. Because of the abruptness of it. He's dead, his life is over. He is no more. The finality of it.
A death like this shakes us all because we become accustomed to the idea that death is something that happens to other people. Old people, ill people, people die all the time, they take their own lives every day. But then when he takes his own life, when he was on TV the day before and was talking about football, and then he kills himself, just like that. You panic. if he can do it, fine one day and then the next, this, then anyone can. Including me. Terrifying.

I think that I am too much of a coward to take my own life. I am also too lazy by nature. To kill yourself is an enormous undertaking. That is what I think. But then I am probably wrong. You may have one drink too many one evening and decide in your drunken logic that there is nothing else to do but end it all. This must have happened to some people, they weren't thinking clearly and they made an awful decision. Maybe suicide can be as frivolous as any other drunken activity, like peeing against a tree or crying or fighting. It just happens. I don't understand death. But then I haven’t really ever understood life so far yet. And that keeps on going.

The reason I thought I should put this all down is my head is swimming with different thoughts after his death. I am a creature of rational thought, apparently. I need to decide on how I feel about this. That is part of the process. The absurd and shocking deaths, and this is surely one of them, leave you with many platitudes and prerogatives floating around in your brain, no order to put them in but the outcome is still the same as ever. He is gone. He was gone when you heard the news yesterday and he is gone today and when time passes by he will still be gone. Just because he was one of these people you didn't expect to be dead, doesn't change a thing.

About ten years ago now, I went through a period of what I think was depression. I never knew it was at the time but I remember thinking I was going mad. Like loony bin mad. I was having very dark thoughts, its hard to even write this now thinking about it but there you go. It took me a while, I gave up weed, that helped a lot. But I got back to normal, whatever normal is or was, I do remember thinking if this carried on I may have to top myself. That's when I knew I was a coward .I knew I couldn't do that. I get a little anxious in life from time to time even now but I have never went back to the state I was in for those couple of years. I hope that never happens to me again.

And there is the other thing about death. I hope its not me. That is essentially what I am writing here. Not a hymn to a dead former Newcastle player. I am using his suicide and the fallout from it as a barometer of my own mental health and my own fear of dying. This is awful. This is what we all do. There was a bit in that George Harrison biopic that came out recently, the one that Martin Scorsese made, where Tom Petty was talking about the phone call Harrison made to him immediately after Roy Orbison died. George said to Petty "aren't you glad it isn't you?" Now that may sound cold and cruel but its very true. I am glad it isn't me. I never want it to be me. One day it will be me but I hope I am looking the other way at the time and I don't notice it. Deep down, I know this won't be the case. Death and hope are two words that do not fit in the same sentence well together.

I read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying just after my period of bleakness, I don't want to call it depression really. It did give me a bit of hope. It is worth remembering that it was written by people who are not dead, or weren't dead when they wrote it. Or maybe I should say its worth forgetting that it was written by people who are not dead, or weren't dead when they wrote it. I can barley remember what it was about now. Lots of happy old monks who smile and say something profound whilst sitting under trees is what immediately jumps into my mind when I recall it. There were a couple of lines I remember, or misremember but have taken from it which comfort me when I think about death. One was that we should carry death around on our shoulder, aware of it in every waking moment of our lives, knowing it is coming. I like this because I am a simplistic oaf of a man and I like the idea of death sitting on my shoulder. Like a parrot would on a cartoon pirate. But it makes sense to accustom yourself to the idea of being dead. If you know it every day, the day it comes may not be such a shock to you. I say may not because what the fuck do I know? So I try and have death sitting on my shoulder every day. But when a footballer dies, I realise that I have been doing it all wrong. I need to start again.

The other thing that was in the Tibetan book was one of those smiling old monks, telling one of his wise old stories. I don't remember the actual story but I remember one line of it and it was in regards to your thoughts, the very things that will lead you to the desperate situation that results in the taking of one's own life, the little monk said thoughts are like a river flowing downstream, or maybe upstream. I liked that, just let them go, don't fixate on any of them, they pass through. All thoughts pass through. We have happy ones, dark ones, erotic ones, funny ones, any kind of thought we have is momentary and really has no bearing. We are free to change our minds. And we should, all the time. That's why I am writing this.

I probably won't agree with any of what I have written in about an hour. I will read this back and feel the flush of embarrassment tat anyone who writes gets when they see what they have actually committed to saying. I will think "I don't think that, do I? What a wanker I am" but I did. I wrote it. It doesn't really matter anyway. Maybe in the coming days we will find out why Gary Speed took his own life, then we quantify it, shrug our shoulders, say "that's why he did it" and get on with ignoring the inevitable. I am aware there is no answer at the end of all of this. But my barometer is reset now, I am as selfish as everyone else you know. I have come to terms with this. I have the parrot of death sitting on my shoulders and I shall carry on with finding things to do until I am no more.