Nick,
Iāve watched your slide into hopelessness with sadness. I wish the Spirit would give me a word of wisdom to share with you, but none seems to come to me right off hand. Most I can say is that your view of āhopeā is, I dare say, niggardly and, IMO, mighty bold of you, which I suspect is boldness born of youth and ignorance and unlikely to be of any use to you in the future, and may lead you first into more grief and calamity than you can imagine.
In lieu of words of wisdom, then, allow me to share a true story with you before you continue your slide.
Iām acquainted with a young woman who is a relative, by marriage, of a near-relative. I knew her parents before they met and married, and over the forty or so years that Iāve known them, Iāve heard reports of events in their life that described a descent from hopeful youth through poor or bad decisions, into increasingly difficult circumstances. Scroll forward a number of years, and the much younger woman is married briefly and living with her two children, and unemployed husband, with her parents, in an apartment. More years later, the husband was gone, the womanās children are older, and the womanās parents moved from the apartment, as much to get away from the woman and her problems as to find a better apartment. With the support of her parents gone, the young woman quickly became homeless. Given the choice between seeing her children taken into custody by the state or taken in by their grandparents, the womanās parents took them in but not the young woman herself, until the kids were old enough to make their own way through the world.
As a homeless person, the young woman, without a husband and āfreeā of her kids, lived with other homeless folks in the same town that her parents and children lived in. The years continued to scroll by, and after a few years being a āmemberā of the homeless community, the young woman, now older, was rather well buried in hopelessness. So it should come as no surprise to you then, that the hopeless woman decided living was so miserable that death was preferable to a miserable life without hope. So she doused herself in gasoline and set herself on fire.
The word I hear from others is that she managed to burn herself over at least 65% of her body. After at least two months in the hospital, she was released and ā¦ taken home by her parents with whom sheāll be living for an unknown period of time.
An interesting bit of trivia that I heard was that in a conversation with her father shortly after her self-immolation attempt, she told him that she wanted to live.
Personally, Nick, I think youāre wrong. Sure, there are humans who are afraid of whatās after death. But I suspect that what discourages folks from choosing what they hope will be no-life after death is that getting there isnāt guaranteed to be painless and instantaneous.
