Megan Shank dot com

On Saturday morning, I jumped into a cab at 9am to make it on time to meet my friend at a swimming pool in Pudong. Normally, 9 out of 10 times, I take the subway or ride my bike, but I was running a little late and at the last minute hailed down a white car.

The taxi driver was a non-descript man– his back slumped from long nights spent sitting behind the wheel, his brow furrowed, his hair a little greasy and disheveled, his glasses sliding down a flat broad nose. I told him where I wanted to go, and we started the usual Chinese cabbie and foreigner conversation — he asking me where I was from, what I did for work, how I learned Chinese, whether I was married, etc.

Suddenly, however, he slumped forward on the wheel and sat in the middle of a busy intersection where he had the green light. He looked at me, and said quietly, “You might be one of my last passengers. And you don’t need to pay for this ride. Today you are my guest.” He choked back a sob.

Not knowing quite how to respond, I offered him a tissue from my bag and asked him why he had said that. Behind us, the sound of angry car horns played a disorienting symphony.

“Because tonight I’m going to take my own life,” he replied. And right before the light turned red, he drove the car forward again.

I asked him why he intended to do so. He said that in the past two months, he had taken the money he and his family had taken out on loan to buy an apartment — tens of thousands of yuan — and gambled it all away on soccer games. He hadn’t been home in four days. They didn’t know yet what he had done.

He was miserable and vacant in his own body, and while the car wasn’t going much faster than 10mph, his thoughts seemed to be racing.

In order to dissuade him from his plan, I spoke to him about my own experience with suicide. When I was 21, in college, one of my best friends –M– put a shotgun in his mouth and blew off his head. He had been in Bosnia, done too many drugs, and read more than he needed to about religion. For whatever reason, he went crazy. The time he was successful was not his first attempt. After his first attempt months previously, he had called his mother and insisted it was a miracle the shotgun jammed and that God must have a plan for him. She had him institutionalized. I went to see him at the hospital often. I had loved him. We had once taken walks in a forest nearby our university three times a week with his gorgeous little dog. We went camping. We fished. When he was in the hospital, his eyes had the same slick glaze the taxi driver’s did.

When I walked into my M’s apartment and smelled the gun powder, when, in my distress, I picked pieces of M’s skull out of his bathroom wall and tugged at the dried blood on the carpet, I felt inside me a sense of grief that I never imagined possible. A waste, a devastating waste. M had done this thing a week after one of his two brothers died. The brother had been hit by a train after getting drunk and trying to walk home. Naturally, at the funeral, his mother was inconsolable. She had lost two out of three full grown sons in a week.

I asked the cab driver if he wished to cause more grief to his family — if it was the grief he had caused them that made him so despair, why should he wish to add to it? I also advised him that even if his wife left him and his family disowned him, he could still work his entire life to provide as well for them financially as possible. That life would take time to mend, but that it would if he had faith. He too was wretched beyond the repair of words. I gave him my card and urged him to call me if he felt that he would go through it and talk to me instead of doing the deed. I told him that if he felt he had no one else, he had a friend in me.

When we arrived at the destination, he wouldn’t let me pay. As he had said, I was his “guest”. And what an unwilling one I was. He thanked me for the card, but said he was bound to his action. Not knowing what else to say, I slammed the door, and the cab rolled slowly away.

Later that night when a friend asked me why I didn’t get the driver’s license plate number and call his company, I agonized again, and it made the memories of my dead friend flood back to me in large black waves. What could have saved M? An added trip each week to the hospital? A vigilance about his guns? Where had I gone wrong? A failure to see warning signs? That unanswered phone call? And of the cab driver? Should I have called the police? Should I have stayed with him? Suicide may take a life, but it creates more haunting ghosts of guilt, of regret than the spirit it takes away.

I loved my friend deeply. To this day, I love him. And because I think there is a human instinct, an impulse–if we are in a quiet and unguarded enough place to allow ourselves to feel it– to alleviate others’ pain with our love, I felt filled with love and compassion for the driver as well. How tragic the realization that love is not always enough.

And yet, how important, how very, very, very important to love and to be kind in a world that is so often unforgiving.

I never received a call.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 12:12 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.