You’d think snuffing yourself would be an anguished act—the only way out for a torn and battered soul. That’s not what it seemed to Buddy. For him, it came as a logical conclusion, something that needed doing, like taking out the trash, only with an unfathomable sense of regret that there might be something worth scavenging in the bin.
Pathetic yearning, he judged. Fact is, I’m not really living anymore; I’m just existing. It’s that simple.
Well, in the case of self-destruction, perhaps not.
A part of him wished for a more dramatic ending, a Shakespearean conflict fraught with the torment and indecision between the pain of enduring and the horror of death. But when he came down to it, a more tortured exit than the insidious inhalation of carbon monoxide gas smothering him in a parked car, would have been fake. And probably painful.
Buddy imagined the Matrix’s engine idling contentedly, his headphones plugged into a soothing mix of downloaded Spotify tunes.
He stifled an urge to yawn.
Gloria, Robbie, Leanne, the Sanderson’s, Andrea… I love them!
But without passion, he had to admit. He had to work at it, and that’s not good enough, is it?
He had succumbed to a deepening sense of…
Unworthiness.
Realized, sadly, it had always been there, a background radiation sapping the vitality out of his life.
Love? It had become a catchall phrase, marketer’s patter—something he should do better, with greater flamboyance.
Don’t want to hurt them, is what it boiled down to. The essence of love had evaporated long ago, like naphtha on hot pavement. What he was left with was the residue of obligation. Duty.
But you can’t say that to the people you love. Can you?
Why not?
Because they wouldn’t understand; they would be hurt by his confession. For some, love and hope morph into knowledge and despair, he had come to believe. And you can’t go on loving that way anymore because you’re living a lie.
His pen hovered over the blank page a moment or two longer, then he put it down.
Pathetic, he sighed, to delay your finale because you don’t know what to say about it. Especially for a man who’d written thousands of stories… albeit almost all of them about other people’s lives, hardly any of his own. That’s what he’d trained for, what came naturally to him after thee decades as a reporter—the detached accounting of an observer on the outside, looking in.
News-style, he thought, remembering the missing person story he’d concocted during his erratic flight the night before. He hadn’t referred to the CP Style Guide since journalism school, but the basics of the form, its cadences and emphasis, had become hardwired over the years, his ‘mistakes’ elegant variations on a theme. Resolved, Buddy picked up his pen and dashed off his headline…
30–Retired newsman ends his story
Retired newsman Buddy Hope decided to take his own life today, citing terminal frustration and fatigue as the main, underlying reasons. “The only thing I regret is the anguish I will be causing those I leave behind,” he wrote in a parting note. “To Leanne, Gloria, and Robbie, I offer my deepest apologies. I hope you can forgive me for what I’m about to do and that you can get on with your lives and realize your amazing potentials.
“Although I haven’t been very good at saying it, I love you.”
He also apologized to former colleagues and friends at the Times Colonist, where he worked more than 30 years. “A man couldn’t ask for a better career than I had at the Colonist. There weren’t too many days I didn’t feel in the thick of important, exciting things, and amongst comrades—people who would check your facts, correct your typos, but congratulate you on a great story when their praise was earned.”
Hope lived out his final months in Chemainus, B.C. in a camper owned by long-time residents Harry and Bernice Sanderson. “In the short time I’ve known them, I’ve come to admire the Sandersons and respect their no-nonsense approach to life. To have lived on this spinning ball through almost 100 orbits around the sun would have been a feat in and of itself; to have lived well, continually seeking purpose and meaning, is an example I wish I could emulate.”
Neighbour Andrea Clarkson was also appealed to in Hope’s note. “If anyone could have rekindled my passion for life, it would have been you,” he said. “But, in the end, I’m left exhausted, asking, ‘Why can’t I love this incredibly beautiful, intelligent woman better? What’s wrong with me?’”
In closing, Hope said: “I’m not really living anymore; I’m just existing. I think for some of us there comes a time when all our joy and passion has been spent, and there’s nothing left except what you can squeeze out, like toothpaste from a depleted tube. Not because the world isn’t a wondrous convergence of life, but because the spiritual part of us has died before our bodies have stopped breathing, beating, and reacting to stimuli. When that happens, life becomes a prolonged sense of mourning for what’s been lost and can never be regained.
“When you realize that mourning’s become your resting state and that your enthusiasm for life is never going to revive, it’s time to shut consciousness down, because there’s nothing in it anymore but imitation and the annoyances of having to eat, sleep, and get up in the morning to do more of the same.”
He tore the page out of his journal and folded it neatly. Soon, he said. Add a date, put it someplace it’ll be found, and I’m done.
It’s a matter of timing and execution now, he thought, folding his note and stowing it in the overhead bin. He sat a while longer on the dining nook bench, acclimatized to the blare of a new day, which seamed the camper’s shuttering blinds with unrelenting light.
Coward! the radio cackled.
“Shut up!” Buddy yelled, but it broke into verse…
He bungee jumped without a cord because his life was such a bore but downward as his body flew a passion for his life renewed. 'Oh stop this horrible descent, my self-destructive, selfish bent. Please, let me live another day, Oh please! Oh please! Oh please, I pray!' But gravity won't be denied, a falling body cannot glide, so for a rash decision made our hero with his life did pay. If you are standing on that ledge if you have made that fatal pledge... Recant! Step back and think again before you make a bitter end.
“Gawd, that’s awful!”
A sometime poet on the brink must quickly say what ere he thinks. Meter, phrasing, tone and rhyme must fit within allotted time.
“Well, thank you, but…
A radio speaking out of turn emits a voice that must be spurned. Thank you for your free advice, but silence, now, would be quite nice.
Next: Dead air?