A Dark Day

A dark day...

January 18, 2005 - Robert Pringle, a father of three grown children, successful, married to a lovely and charming wife, wakes up in his suburban home in California. I imagine him walking to a bathroom, having a pee. He gets a cup of coffee, kisses the wife and takes a shower. Now dressed he goes out to his car -- nice day. He runs an errand or two. An average start to an average day in the life of an average person. Then Robert Pringle, "Bob" to his friends, does something I cannot get my mind around. He drives to a nearby trainstation and park his car. He walks a short distance up the tracks and, finding an appropriate spot to launch a plan he has been thinking about all morning, he hides in the bushes. He hears the CalTrain whistle blow. Checks his resolve one last time. And throws himself out of the bushes, into to path of the speeding train. Whistles blow and brakes screech on hardened steel but it's too late. He is struck by the train and killed instantly. Suicide presumed, say authorities.

Why? What imaginable force drags a person to such depths of emotional squalor, that this is the end of an otherwise model life lived with health and happiness? Second question: OK, suicide. Fine. Happens all the time. Why has this particular event worked itself into all of the crevasses of my consciousness, and smothered me like a wet blanket since I heard the news? Worse, does the fact that this resonates with me mean that I feel myself pulled toward a similar, inexorable fate? Why did it happen and why does it strike me so? I am once again overwhelmed with a sense that I have no ability to comprehend so much of what I see happening around me, and that I have no choice but to accept that incomprehensibility, and to find some comfort in telling myself that some things are too dark and horrible for the human mind to grasp.

Your wife and children being swept away in a mudslide while you buy popsicles.

A wave that kills 200,000 people.

In a world where we control so much, I am awestruck by the frailty and smallness of our collective existence.

I know this: I am going to church this week.