For the few minutes it took Chris and me to roll “Mom” from her front door to the back of the van, we gave the dog walkers and yoga moms a cheap, manageable thrill. A whiff of depravity, a small taste of their own mortality.
PUSH THE BUTTON
CBS NEWS, SAN FRANCISCO—A man possibly in his 20s appears to have voluntarily stood on Bay Area Rapid Transit tracks before he was fatally struck by a train at a San Francisco station around noon Saturday, BART officials said.
Witnesses claimed the man “stood in front of the train waiting for it to hit him,” BART spokesman Linton Johnson said. “He did not make any attempt to get out of the way.”
The man was struck and dragged under the BART train at the San Francisco Civic Center Station, halting all trains at that station for nearly three hours and causing system-wide delays, according to Johnson.
Jacob was twenty-two when he climbed down onto the BART tracks and waited for the train to end his life. Twenty-two was only one year younger than I was. He didn’t look like someone who had been dragged under a train. He looked like someone who had been in a two a.m. bar fight—light facial bruising, a few cuts.
“The guy we had in here last month, the one pushed under the MUNI train, that guy was chopped in half,” Mike said, unimpressed.
Jacob’s only major damage was the absence of his left eyeball, which presumably went missing on the tracks. But if you turned his face to the right side, he looked almost normal, as if he could open his remaining eye and hold a conversation.
The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran said that suicide is the only right a person truly has. Life can become unbearable in all respects, and “this world can take everything from us . . . but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Cioran, a man “obsessed with the worst,” died an insomniac and recluse in Paris.
Cioran may have been predisposed to Negative Nancy-ism, but madness and despair can touch us no matter our philosophies. Nietzsche, who famously said in Twilight of the Idols, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” suffered a mental breakdown at age forty-four. Eventually he fell into the full-time care of his sister, whose own husband had committed suicide in Paraguay.
Cruel and selfish as many view suicide to be, I suppose I felt supportive of Jacob’s decision. If every day of his life was dull misery, I could not demand he stay alive and endure more dull misery. I couldn’t know if it had been mental illness or a sense of endless despondency that had driven Jacob to suicide. It wasn’t my place to speculate on his motives. But I could pass judgement on his methods. There, I was firmly not on his side.
There was something in the way Jacob had killed himself that unsettled me. The public spectacle of staring down a crowded train. In college, I managed a coffee shop on the University of Chicago campus. Only two months before I started at Westwind, my former assistant manager hanged himself in his bedroom after a fight with his girlfriend. His roommate had to come home to find his body. The fact that he left those two women with the lifelong burden of his suicide made me ill, even more so than his death. If you are going to take yourself out of commission, it seems only fair you do so in a way that does the least harm to others, slipping out the back door of the party of life, ensuring the other guests don’t have to agonise about your choice.
Most of the damage Jacob caused by stepping in front of a BART train that day was financial: thousands of people late for work, flights from San Francisco and Oakland Airports missed, important appointments broken.
But for the train conductor, the person who had to look into Jacob’s eyes as he barreled towards him, helpless to stop the train in time, the damage was not financial. The average train conductor will involuntarily kill three people in his career. Having no choice but to kill someone (or several someones) has to be the quickest way to lose affection for an otherwise stable, even desirable, job.
Nor was the damage financial for the people waiting on the platform. They had to stand there screaming for him to get out of the way: didn’t he see there was a train coming? Then came the moment when they realised he knew perfectly well the train was coming, and they would be forced to witness what came next. Forced to live with the image, the sounds, their own confused screams for the rest of their lives.
Mike pointed out that a few of those people would envy the opportunity I had to cremate Jacob. “Maybe they’d smack him around a little first,” he said. “Some light revenge.”
As it was, they would never see his body. Jacob would maintain his power over them, haunting their dreams.
I thought of the years I had spent reliving the little girl hitting the ground at the mall, and I felt a searing sympathy for those people. I wanted to throw open the crematorium doors to the train conductor and the other commuters. I wanted them with me that day, gathered around Jacob’s body so I could announce, “Look, here he is; he wanted to die. He is dead, but you’re not. You are not dead.”
It was illegal, this open-house-at-the-mortuary fantasy of mine. The California Code of Regulations clearly states that “the care and preparation for burial or other disposition of all human remains shall be strictly private.”
In the late 1800s, the citizens of Paris would come to the morgue by the thousands each day to view the bodies of the unidentified dead. Spectators lined up for hours to get in as vendors sold them fruit, pastries, and toys. When they reached the front of the line, they would be ushered into an exhibit room, where the corpses were laid out on slabs behind a large glass window. Vanessa R. Schwartz, scholar of fin-de-siècle Paris, called the Paris morgue “a spectacle of the real.”
Eventually the morgue exhibitions became too popular with the citizens of Paris, and they were shut down to the public. Morgues remain behind closed doors today, perhaps because those in charge of regulating death believe the hoi polloi would be too interested, and that such an interest is inherently wrong. Close the morgues if you will, but another attraction will always arise to fill void. The runaway popularity of Body Worlds, Gunther von Hagens’s travelling exhibit of plastinated human bodies, shows us that the human urge to file past corpses on display is indeed as strong as ever. In spite of the ongoing controversy that von Hagens obtained some of his bodies from Chinese political prisoners, Body Worlds is the most popular touring attraction in the world (having drawn 38 million people by the start of 2014).
JACOB LIVED IN WASHINGTON State, and visited San Francisco for reasons unknown. His parents arranged his cremation over the phone, faxing Westwind the required forms and reading us their credit card number to cover the balance. As usual, it was just Jacob and me as I loaded him into the cremation machine, his one eye gazing up at me.
Because of his violent death, Jacob was taken to the Medical Examiner’s Office before being brought to Westwind. The Medical Examiner’s Office is the modernised version of the Coroner’s Office, and is run by medical doctors trained to investigate suspicious or violent deaths. Whenever Westwind Cremation went to pick up a body, the examiner’s staff would give us whatever personal items arrived with the deceased. This usually meant clothes, jewellery, wallets, and so on.
Jacob came with a backpack. His parents didn’t want it mailed back to Washington, so the only place for it to go was into the flames alongside Jacob.
I set the backpack on a table and pulled open the zipper. Jackpot, I thought, one serving of understanding of the mind of a depressed madman, coming right up. But each item I pulled out was more obscenely normal than the next. Change of clothes, toiletries, a kombucha bottle. Then: a stack of notecards. At last! The scribblings of a suicidal lunatic? No. Chinese language flashcards.
I was disappointed. I had expected answers in that