The day the train was late

My train was delayed the other day. By a little over an hour.

That's always a pain in the ass, and usually a good excuse for me to get upset at IsraelRail, or anyone else that I can blame for disrupting my day so inconsiderately.

But then they made the announcement explaining the delay and apologizing for it, and I found that I really couldn't stay angry or point a finger of blame anymore.

It turns out that somebody committed suicide at the station in Herzliya, about 4 stations before mine in Tel Aviv, and that was delaying north- and south-bound trains while the authorities were dealing with what needed to be dealt with.

A couple of people who were also waiting were half-joking with each other about how inconsiderate it was (and a couple of others made a comment to that effect on my Facebook page when I posted the status update about what had happened). They asked "why did he have to do it in a way that's such an inconvenience to others" If you want to kill yourself, do it quietly – at home, out of everyone's way…"

I couldn't bring myself to say that – or to even think it. Instead, I tried to understand what would make a person kill themselves in that public a manner.

Now, of course, I'm not a psychologist (and I don't even play one on TV). I took a couple of psych classes a lifetime and a half ago at the University of Maryland, and the most I got out of that was learning all about Classical Conditioning / Pavlov's Dog.

So, although I am far from being an expert on the human mind, like many people, I do make a regular practice at trying to understand people – in my own non-professional, non-expert fashion.

So I couldn't help trying to figure out this suicide at a train station which threw the schedule of hundreds, in not thousands of people out of whack.

I've heard it said (as most likely we all have) that a suicide attempt is a cry for attention and for help. If that's the case, then I would imagine that the person attempting suicide does not to succeed, only to send out the message.

So what does that say about somebody who does do it to succeed? Especially in such a public manner that affects so many others who didn't even know the person?

The only thing that I can think of (and again, I cannot emphasize enough that this these are the thoughts of an un-trained layman – anybody with other insights to the question and ,ore experience than I have are more than welcome to share their thoughts), is that the person is going out with a message to the world.

Rather than the message of the failed attempts of "help me!" this message is more along the lines that "Not only do I have nothing to live for, but in my life I saw myself as a nobody – because I went un-noticed by the world. Maybe I won't be missed after I'm gone, but at least for this one brief hour or two, I will be noticed. I will have an effect on other people's lives".

Not only am I not a trained psychologist with no "real" experience upon which to base this assumption, but I also do not pretend to be a mind reader, and I don't really presume to understand what goes inside somebody else's head. The best I can do is to try to imagine myself in that situation and to guess what would drive me to such an act.

Unfortunately, since the person who did it last week is now dead, there is no way that we can ever truly know what he was thinking, why he chose to end his life or why he chose to do so in the way that he did.

All we can do is to try to be more sensitive to those around us and more aware of their calls for help – whether they call be more obvious or more oblique and implicative.

We can ensure that those in our lives always do mean something to us – always can affect us – hopefully for better rather than worse. In doing so, we can not only help prevent people feeling the need to be noticed at all costs, but we can also make it so that the same people haven't given up on life to begin with, or on their role within that life.

Rather than getting home that day at 2:00 in the afternoon, I got home around 3:15. It really was a pain in the ass, but in the big picture it was nothing compared to a person who felt that his life was so irrelevant, or helpless or anonymous that suicide was his only way out.

I'm happy to give up an hour and a half of my time any day of the week to be reminded how much I love living and that I actually do matter to some people. I wouldn't trade that for anything.