Suicidal

One May morning I sat in the warm sunshine beneath a blizzard of oak leaf husks drifting in from the Botanical Gardens. There was a faint twitter of generic garden birds, and distant city noises consisting of hums, buzzes and sirens.

On this morning I pondered on why I am not more suicidal. After all, there's every reason to be. Last week, both the Occupational Health department and the councellor at the doctors phoned me and asked me strange questions for half an hour. Although both pleasant enough practitioners, they were both clearly reading from their own standard checklists. I could almost hear the empty ambience of criteria, the attainement of benchmark scores. They were, tentatively, in a roundabout way, concerned about any tendency towards suicide.

Personally, I don't much fancy it. I have an aversion to knives, guns, pills, feelings of asphyxiation, and buses and trains bearing down on me. However much the oblivion of death might appeal - and there are maybe a couple of occasions in my life when it did - the thought of the moment of pain and doubt beforehand removed all likelihood of the event occuring for me. I say this not from facetiousness, but genuine fear.

'Have you self-harmed?' one of the pleasant telephone voices asked me.

'What, ever?'

'No, in the last two weeks.'

'Oh, no.' Sound of pen making mark on inventory.

'Do you have anxieties or feelings about life being pointless?' she pleasantly intoned. This is trickier than I'd imagined. I had been reading a lot of existential novels and handbooks recently, so I was somewhat immersed in the absurdity of existence.

'Yes,' I answered, truthfully.

'Frequently, moderately, or hardly?'

There were more questions of this nature. After twenty minutes or so she thanked me, and, rather like taking an exam and wanting above all else to know the result, I asked her how I did.

'You are moderately depressed,' she said.

'Oh.'

That seemed disappointing, somehow. She instructed me to peruse the website, made a promise of some councelling, and then quickly withdrew the prize I'd nearly won by saying: 'But it's incredibly hard to get...' Particularly, I imagine, if you are only moderately depressed.

Which is why I was pondering suicide on this beautiful summer morning in Sheffield, in May. Certainly I had enough ammunition for it. I had been quite open about the grooming and abduction of my daughter three years ago, the traumatic impact on the rest of the family, the search for a support agency against the (it has to be said without hyperbole) aloof disinterestedness of South Yorkshire Police and Social Care, the continued mental health issues experienced by my son, ailing or deceased parents, and, in January, the suspension from my job (and career) of twenty-five years.

Surely that is enough

for something more expressive, descriptive, meaningful, or perhaps simply gratifying, than 'moderate'?