On occasion, we are presented with an insoluble, intolerable dilemma. We are witness to things we truly understand, and our heart cries out that we can do something to make a difference for the better.

Our head knows better, though, and comprehends that any action, no matter how seemingly beneficial or at worst benign, in the end will make things worse.

Through an unknowable, vile combination of nature and nurture, some are burdened with more than their fair share of demons haunting their lives. Most have the great good fortune to be blissfully ignorant of this doom and cannot truly comprehend the existence of one so afflicted, for it is nothing more than an existence, certainly not what those unknowing would call a “life”.

The torments never go away, dimming the vibrance and joy in life into a black pit of despair.

It cannot be escaped through drugs; the pain cannot be washed away by alcohol.

Witnesses, no matter how compassionate, no matter how comprehending, cannot help.

Nothing outside the black pit can illuminate the path of escape, because the darkness comes from within.

The message was terse, she “passed away on August 30.”

Passed away, a euphemism frequently exercised because it is impolite to use the hard word “died”, a delicate diversion of attention away from the harsh fact of life, that it ends. Also, a deflection from acknowledgment of things that society has chosen to cast shame upon, a refusal to even see the choices made in despair, in the loss of all hope, thereby creating dark secrets of the departed life of pain and the new ache of loss now the affliction of those who survive them.

The witness has a burden, too, for in understanding what led to the choice made, yet in also knowing that no action could have prevented it, the true tragedy of the black pit of despair is revealed.

I was once in the black pit of despair; somehow, through both luck and perseverance originating I know not where, I managed to crawl my way out. With the comprehension gained through having once been inside the pit, it is in some ways harder to see the situation from the outside than to experience it from the inside.

I met her four years ago at work. I recognized where she was, understood some of what she was feeling (only a partial resonance because each of us has our own, unique demons), and came to know that nothing I could do would help her life; the change needed to come from within, not from without, not from me.

I watched, and was forced to re-experience vicariously and helplessly the progressive deterioration of relationships with others, the blackness crushing her spirit, the inability to see things other than through the distorting lenses of despair and hopelessness.

After little over a year, she could no longer function and left her job. I never saw her again, and I only heard of her indirectly. What little I had heard was hopeful: counseling and other treatment, a new job.

Out of sight, out of mind, until today, renewed as a distant apparition in a tersely worded email message.

If there is some existence after this life we know, I can only hope that in that existence she finds some small measure of peace that was denied her in life.

However, even if there is nothing but oblivion after our life here, I cannot fault her choice; I confronted the same choice, and I know.

Sometimes, oblivion is preferable.

In the wake of hundreds dead in Iraq because of a panic on a bridge, and hundreds or possibly even thousands more dead and certainly millions of lives unalterably changed in the wake of hurricane Katrina, tragedies on a large scale affecting millions, what is one life ended by choice to escape the back pit of despair?

What is one life, filled with darkness and pain not understood by those closest, what is the legacy other than how we who remain choose to remember and learn from them?

On occasion, we are witness to things we truly understand, and our heart cries out that we can do something to make a difference for the better.

Our head knows better, though, and comprehends that any action, no matter how seemingly beneficial or at worst benign, in the end will make things worse.

We can choose to rage against things we can never hope to change, an action that creates much heat but little good.

Or… we can choose differently.

We can make a choice that provides a legacy of some meaning, not of meaningless darkness.

But in the shadow of a choice made out of hopelessness, what is left?

All that remains is for us to strive to make our minute part of the world a better place in whatever small ways we can.

Otherwise, nothing remains for us but the black pit of despair.

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