Brian

A collegue that I worked with for the past four years committed suicide on Sunday. My manager asked me to say something at his memorial and to relate an episode, an anecdote, a story. Where does one start though? It is like those competitions where you have to describe something intricate like love or hate in ten words or less. 

Brian was different, a shy soft spoken guy who were always willing to travel, always willing to assist, always smiling. The one photo on our notice board shows him at the Potjiekos competition, smiling and being happy. I will forever have that picture in my head.

Susan Cain wrote in her book “Quiet” that:

“Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology. Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.”

We wear our loudness as a badge of honour, our cynicism as a weapon, our outspokenness as a charm. It is understandable. Most of us have seen things in our lives that will haunt us forever. But in this culture of brash extrovert survival, we sometimes neglect to make a little space and time for those who are not like the rest: The quiet observers, the shy analysts.

People are quick to classify themselves as drivers. Those who get things do regardless of circumstances, regardless of the cost to people’s emotions and feelings. That is being said explicitly, but the inference is there. "I do not take no for an answer" "It is my way or the highway" "I am driver" "I will succeed".

And in all this Brian still stood out as an excellent investigator, someone who used his traits to obtain valuable information and to gain the trust of witnesses. He never destroyed a phone in anger, he never swore, he never became angry. He was empathetic and sympathetic. A rare soul in this world that we created, our fortress of noise which we build to hide away our emotions and true personalities, scared that our inner vulnerabilities and insecurities will be exposed and maligned.

And yet Brian always remained himself, steadfast in a barrage and deluge of noise.

I have been in a similar position as Brian. With just one little movement, one single breath separating one from this life and whatever it is people believe in. It is a dark, terrifying and very lonely place where phantoms and ghouls of one’s own creation dictate the way forward.

We will never know why he did what he did. Some will say that what he did was the coward’s way out. But in the end he was a very brave soul. He held out, he tried to keep going, he tried to live for such a long time, despite the excruciating almost debilitating pain which took over his whole being.

Almost with something akin to false Victorian bashfulness we skirt around terms like mental illness and depression. It is something that is a shame, a sign of weakness at best, a wallowing in selfish despair at worst. Both ends of the spectrum presuppose that a depressed individual has control over his or her moods and choices. But what people do not realise is that when you are in its clutches, you cannot choose. You cannot act. You cannot think.

In her book Night Falls Fast Dr Kay Redfield Jamison described this as follows:

“When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or non-existent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.”

So Brian was probably in excruciating emotional pain. And that pain cannot be eased by codeine or morphine or aspirin. How do you describe your emotional pain in terms that people can understand? You cannot point at a broken limb, a gushing wound or a badly discoloured bruise.

So please do not blame him or be angry with him. Let us rather be honest about this illness that claims more lives every year than the war in Afghanistan. Let us accept that we do not have the answers. As Dr Jamison said:

“Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of a life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete.”

Let us not define Brian’s life in terms of the way he died. Let us remember him as the sensitive, quiet soul with the beautiful smile, cigarette in hand, laughing in a knowing way at our complaints, curses and shouts.

And let us use this as a vehicle to understanding. Understanding that depression can strike anyone, that it is an illness. And that if it strike, it is not a shame but rather an illness that can and should be treated by professionals.

And above all, let us celebrate life.

3 December 2013

Women in War

A couple of weeks ago a friend invited me to a social paintball game. Now the previous time I played paintball I was 10 years younger and 30 kilos lighter. I also just want to take the opportunity to inform the  people who mistook my cries of pain every time a ball hit me that it was not an Amazonian or Pict war cry. It was just me screaming like a girl.

This time it was different. First off I had a mother of an automatic gun. Strange how you feel less vulnerable with a massive automatic in your hands. Which begs the question does size and caliber really matter? My answer is an unequivocal yes.

For the first two games I cowered in a bunker. And lo and behold, some sniper with a gun, or maker in paintball parlance, which if I would guess shot .68 cal boomerang balls, hit me in the shoulder.

Then something happened: During the last two games something in my mind changed and it changed from survival mode to attack like a madwoman mode. I ran out, sprayed my opponents with paint balls, dived very  graciously (as gracious as a 40 something overweight woman can be) for cover. And wow, what a rush.

In the end our team lost to a very experienced team of hard core paint ballers. Age should not matter. Ok, they were 9, 10 and 12 years old. Fierce little pre teens I tell you.

But it was as if something primal came out. Being in the moment, throwing caution to the wind, enjoying a little bit of peace and quiet in such a hectic world, where racing thoughts are the norm. Such a bunch of contradictions but hey, so be it. It was just a game.

But during my research into the role of women in war (that sounds profound but I was actually looking for a name for our new paintball team) I came across some fascinating facts. If one listens to the mostly American debates about the role of women in war, one would tend to think that women's only role in combat in the past was either as nurses or as prostitutes. Strange that, women are always depicted as either saintly or fiends from hell. Another debate.

During the Second World War the Soviets had women flying bombers, they had snipers and they had all women military units. The Night Witches flew sorties and bomb the Germans and the 1077th Anti Aircraft Regiment took on a whole German Panzer Division. The women of the 1077th was all very young, untrained and ill equipped but at the Siege of Stalingrad they turned their anti aircraft weapons on the advancing German army, not stopping until their whole Regiment was wiped out by the Germans.

So besides Boudicea, Joan of Arc (who was depicted as a raving lunatic in the Mila Jovovich movie) there are a lot of examples of women fighting in active combat: The Soviet Battalion of Death, the Cuban Shock Battalion etc.

Are women more fragile than men? That debate is still raging. Are women more at risk for atrocities committed against them when they are captured? Men are also at risk for inhumane torture and even rape.

But in the end, I believe the fighting spirit is the same. Most humans will fight with everything they have to protect that which is precious to them and what they believe is right.

My experience in martial arts taught me that women are much more fierce during competitions than their male counterparts. You should see them rumble. Maybe the same is true of war. Hopefully we will never have to find out though.