Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: CROWD (07/06/17)
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TITLE: Living Casualty | Previous Challenge Entry
By Marlene Bonney
07/11/17 -
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The drama unfolds in diorama-like scenes before its audience. The unwilling actors play real life roles haunted by fear and guilt as we helplessly try to salvage any remaining remnants of our dignity. Our lives lay naked before the eagle-eyed gawkers who are jostling with smart-phones held high to capture minute details that might be missed by the paparazzi-type media.
I wonder why people are so intrusive, insensitive to the added havoc they bring to an already stressful catastrophe with their beady eyes and jaded hearts. They are the same crowds that gather at the scene of a gruesome car accident or at a building afire, clogging the way for the rescuers and making everything more chaotic than it already needs to be.
Here I am, the victim of my brother’s—hopefully, botched—suicide attempt, peeled and vulnerable in my grief as the paramedics work to restore life into his inert body. My brother, Carl, who survived three tours of duty overseas in war-torn countries, only to return home a mentally tormented zombie. I came today for a scheduled “wellness visit,” a psychiatrist-prescribed precaution to break Carl’s self-imposed seclusion. I had not expected this. I want to escape to the nearest exit and vanish from the stage in front of this unwanted audience.
I want to retaliate against these thrill-seeking bloodsuckers, some of whom had encouraged Carl to jump in their eagerness for drama in their own mundane lives. Even as I want to scream and lash out at them, I glimpse a group of prayer warriors standing in a circle a respectable distance from the yellow police-taped area, some in tears. Holding hands and reaching out to God and out to me and Carl’s friends with their compassionate concern. They are unobtrusive and welcome so that my anger dissipates like a deflating balloon and I allow myself to cry.
A medical examiner pulls a sheet over Carl’s inert body now, and I know his tormented soul is at rest. The crowd filters away from the tragic final scene of the movie, going back to usual daily routines. I am only dimly aware of hugs from friends and family, a wooden puppet with dangling arms in this surreal setting. My mind plays tricks on me, flashbacks of Carl as a child, a teen, a young man full of promising potential that will never be fulfilled. I realize I am the only one left to pick up the pieces of his broken life.
My faith in God will sustain me, as it has so many times in the past, I remember, even as the prayer group and its members cautiously approach me.
“We want you to know that we are here to help you through your journey to healing. . .”
“But I’m not the one who is sick,” I feeble protest as I watch the ambulance leave, “he was.”
“Each one of us is a survivor of a loved one’s suicide. We hope you will come to our group prayer and support meetings when you feel able,” pushing a brochure into my limp hand, “God will turn this tragedy into something positive,” an echoing lifeline to a drowning victim.
As I fill out forms and make funeral arrangements and sort through Carl’s sparse apartment, I hold on to that thought and pray for deliverance from the pain of losing my only sibling. Added to that, is the stigma attached to mental illness that surrounds me daily as I try to explain to well-wishing friends who only make it worse with their questions and empty platitudes.
Not far from my unfolding drama, another crowd is forming on our city street and I watch as it passes by. It is made up of former soldiers out to commemorate Veteran’s Day. Some of these comrades are saluting our nation’s flag carried proudly at the front of the parade. Others, like my dead brother, are struggling to fit back in to a society that has no real idea of the ordeals and permanent unseen mental scars they will forever carry.
As a member of Survivors of Suicide Victims, I have become an advocate for better psychiatric care for our returning soldiers of war. If I can just save one from the depths of despair in Carl’s memory, it will be as if I saved him, after all.
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My heart ached throughout this whole piece.
Blessings~