Suicide Trains

CW FISHER
Lady Cop walks in smiling as usual only tonight there's a great sadness in her eyes. Had another one, she says.

Immediately we know it's another train suicide. That's four in less than a month.

We live in the train suicide capitol of the world we think, though statistics are sketchy on the difference between a train suicide and a trespass fatality.

Numbers can play dumb but experience knows. A trespass fatality is an accident, as when a college kid tries to see how close he can get to a moving train and gets sucked in by the vacuum. Or when a kid throws a rock at an oncoming train and the rock bounces back at him faster than a speeding bullet.

Trespass fatalities are horrible, but they're accidents. Suicides are also horrible, but they're done on purpose, and the violence gets on everybody, especially the poor engineer who sees the whole thing coming and is powerless to stop it. Chances are the engineer has been through it before, or knows somebody else who went through it while going through this very town.

Imagine the terror of being the bullet. It explains why the trains blow their horns all the way into town and all the way out, both directions, all times of the night and day. Behemoths trumpeting to scare away death.

Lady Cop says there are two types of suicides. The ones that walk toward the train, and the ones that walk away from it. Ones that put their arms out, ones that kneel and pray. Ones at night and the ones in broad daylight. The ones with their ID and suicide notes and the ones without. The college students, and the folks nobody knew. She remembers the one in her wedding dress, how she stood there calmly after crossing herself. And the guy who laid his head on the track; he only lost a three-inch slice off the top of his head, but it was enough.

She feels for the engineers, who have it the worst, followed by the railroad guys who do the gruesome job of clean up.

Who are these people, we wonder, and why they do this thing, and in this way, and why here? What's so special about DeKalb, Illinois?

The kneejerk answer: it's a college town, grades go down, it's the end of the world, suicide. Except that very few of these suicides seem to be by college students. Then again, it's hard to say. None of them are talked about, whether they leave a note or not.

Local newspapers often keep the victims anonymous, ostensibly to preserve the family's privacy, but the real reason is more mundane, and therefore sadder. In this town a train suicide just isn't news anymore. It's like seeing the fiftieth robin. What's to say?

Maybe we don't talk about them because we don't want to honor them. Maybe we want to dishonor them. Shunned in death, the so-called suicide "victims" can learn where the glory train brings them: Nowheresville, Anonymityland, the Great State of Oblivion.

How do you punish the dead? Don't talk about them. Say nothing. Forget they existed. Short of that, whisper.

There's an argument for the silent treatment of train suicides, for putting the focus on the "real" victims: the families, the rail workers, the community. Train suicides are public messes, and attitudes toward them might be shaped by the emergence of suicide bombers. Maybe we think these life and death decisions are made casually, or with revenge in mind.

We don't know why people are standing in front of fast trains because we don't ask.

Suicide is self murder, yet suicide is rarely investigated with the vigor of homicide. Instead, the determination of suicide is the answer rather than the first of many questions asked of everyone who last saw the victim alive. The act of piecing together the facts might lay to rest speculation that would otherwise rattle like a runaway train down through the generations. It's rarely done.

Yet without investigation how are we supposed to know how to spot a person who's about to stop a train? Have they been drinking? Are they in formal attire? Are they zombylike? Are they walking on the tracks?

Some say suicide is a momentary mistake, and that's comforting to families, but the truth is that suicide is a momentary mistake that's a lifetime in the making. There will usually be a long trail of clues leading back to the crib, and, perhaps even beyond.

The culprit is depression, undiagnosed or untreated major depression. Depression is the only cause of suicide. It precedes the gun, the poison, the train; unemployment, divorce, alcoholism.

Depression isn't always dramatic; it often hides in humor or manifests elsewhere in the body, but it always has to come up for air eventually. Major depression is easy to see by those who know it, and easy to deny by those who don't. But it's the number one killer in America, so it's wise to pay respect.

Fortunately it's treatable for the first time in recorded history. Good thing too, since we're approaching an epidemic.

The fact that depression is treatable makes ignorance and denial inexcusable.

How do you recognize it? It's a bad mood, just a long lasting bad mood. Depression is an illness, dryness in the brain that produces unthinkable thoughts.

They say don't speak ill of the dead; if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, and sadly that's often how it goes for the misunderstood victims of their own chemically deluded brains.

It might look like your brother killed himself, but it isn't true. Your brother's broken brain came to that conclusion, and took your brother down with it.

And so to turn away from any suicide victim is to kill him twice. In judging the sum of a life by the end of a life, the tragedy doubles.

I don't know, says Lady Cop; she buys what she came for and goes home to bed. She might think he talks too much. Two men in grimy jumpsuits get their coffee and come to the counter grimly. Their hats say Union-Pacific. There's no charge.