Easter and tragedy

There was a suicide on our block on Easter.

Under any circumstances a suicide is a tragedy. All the more so on Easter. What further amplified that for me was that Fr. Phil in his Easter sermon, before getting back to the  resurrection of Jesus, told us “Death is not a rare event in this world.” I wasn’t expecting immediate confirmation of that.

After church I spent a couple of hours in the front yard pruning roses and generally cleaning up the yard. I took a shower and got cleaned up and Terry picked up lunch. I then pulled out my laptop to make some additions to my recipe database. I heard sirens, and thought it was sad that there would be sirens on Easter. I didn’t realize that the vehicles running those sirens were headed for our street.

A while later Terry told me that there was a suicide at the house two doors down. I have written about that house before. The husband has long had a serious alcohol abuse problems to the point where he cannot work I have not seen him in ages. His wife, in order to make ends meet, takes in boarders. Those boarders, I have long observed in my biased and not terribly charitable perspective, tend towards the unsavory type and seem to mostly be part of the recovery community.

It seems that there was a husband and wife couple living there whose responsibilities included taking care of the back yard. As Terry heard it, the husband was away overnight, hadn’t done his yard work, the owner of the home got mad, and the wife took an overdose. Certainly overdosing on account of yard work not done points to far deeper and more serious problems, for which this was perhaps merely the tipping point. In fact there is no way to prove cause and effect. Maybe the angry reaction and the overdose were two sequential but unrelated events.

The actual reason for the overdose doesn’t matter. There was a suicide on our block on Easter.

However you look at it, that is a tragedy.