4 June 2015
“Your train is delayed because someone couldn’t be bothered to live anymore”
by Lynda Goetz
Shocking, yes, but consider the other viewpoint.
On Friday May 22nd the 16.36 from Paddington to Plymouth was apparently delayed by a suicide. This is not as uncommon as many people would like to believe. Mostly, we, the rail-using public, do not get to know about these events. The language generally used by rail staff is ‘coded’ or simply non-informative. However, on Friday a member of First Great Western’s staff chose to impart this information to the travelling public in a peculiarly callous way, causing a number of passengers to ‘Tweet’ their complaints. This was clearly a tactless, offensive announcement which naturally caused passengers to react with shock at the apparently uncaring, insouciant attitude of the member of staff concerned. However, perhaps we should pause here for just a second and look at this ‘incident’ from the other side.
I remember a few years ago being given a lift home with my ‘dead’ car by a fairly chatty AA man. He told me how he used to be a train driver. A good job, a well-paid job, he explained. A job which, however, he had given up in favour of becoming an AA pick-up truck driver after one ‘jumper’ too many. “Jumper?” I remember enquiring naively, before realising what he was talking about. Amazingly, to those of us not yet bored with life, throwing yourself in front of a train is actually not an uncommon way to commit suicide. Leaving aside the question of how selfish the act of suicide is anyway, just consider how selfish it is to involve a complete stranger in that act. If you take an overdose, jump off a cliff or slash your wrists in a warm bath, you are at least only leaving other people to find your (hopefully) dead body. If you throw yourself in front of a train you are implicating a completely innocent stranger. Those innocent strangers can suffer terribly from the totally unthinking selfishness of others at the end of their tether. My friendly AA man elaborated, “Had a friend who lost everything: job; wife; kids; house. He couldn’t even bring himself to drive a car anymore. He just cracked up. Crumbled. His life was totally ruined by it. He had nightmares. Just couldn’t deal with it.”
That is the perspective of the train driver. Perhaps, to be fair to the lady who made the ‘callous’ announcement which shocked so many of those travelling on the First Great Western service to Plymouth last Friday evening, she had seen too many of her colleagues’ lives ruined by others who ‘couldn’t be bothered to live anymore’ and her comments were made from anger. Anger at the mental anguish she had seen, mental anguish caused by ‘fatalities’ that were not that simple.
Spare a thought not only for those driven to end their own lives, nor for those who have to deal with the immediate aftermath of that decision, but for those unwittingly involved in the actual event, which can cause long term mental trauma of its own.
