Suicide in NPs

I was reading an article on suicides in National Parks. It's interesting. Not because someone wouldn't commit suicide in a National Park, but because people forget suicide is about time and place. Everyone who commits suicide has to determine, when, where and how to die. And everyone who commits suicide wants to die in a place they love and find comfort.

What's so hard to understand? A National Park is a beautiful place to be and people find a person connection to be there. Some for a visit and some, like me, for a lifetime to keep going back. And some would like to die there. I plan to have my ashes spread in my favorite spot, if I can arrange and the National Park Service is accommodating, which I understand they are, and if they're aren't, people do it anyway to the departed.

So why the inerest in the article?

Well, I once thought about what I would do if faced with emmient death, meaning know the short time I have left alive due to some calamity, illness or accident. I doubt anyone would be able to find me, at least well into the future and I've essentially disappeared from this life. Harsh and cruel? Not really. Facing certain immediate death, we all should have the right to choose when, where and maybe how. That's just being humane and human.

And as I've written, I've seriouslythought about suicide twice, and once planned and nearly executed it, stopping just a handfull of seconds before fulfilling it. I'm not always sure what changed my mind, but something did and It haunts me still why I did and why I didn't. It's the reality of living with Dysthymia, suicide isn't always far from the surface of your consciousness, sometimes to pester you with hints about life and death.

It's no longer a serious thought with me anymore, or at least it hasn't been since the early 1990's between my brother's death and my Dad's death. But I still have to be conscious of it to make sure it's not just hiding. So I can understand what the article is saying, but I don't understand why it's a concern. How many people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge every year? Too many but they know it's a reality of the bridge and its attraction.

I'm also curious what training the rangers get for suicide prevention. Enough to stop it and get them to help? I can't see where they would get more because talking with someone on the edge about to commit suicide is risky and touchy, and I doubt that many rangers have the perspective and experience to save but a few lives. And do they get a standard method of persuasion? While I know rangers have a lot to do, with only two dozen or so suicides every year at all the the most common spots, I can't see where it makes them sufficiently qualified to be a suicide counselor.

The article didn't say how many they prevented, so it's hard to say if their efforts works, except I expect it does in some places and at some times. But if a person were convinced to commit suicide, only luck would make a ranger save that person. National Parks are too big and public to stop everyone, and you don't know if some deaths are accidents or suicides, and we know there at least one or more orders of magnitude more accidents in National Parks, so the rangers have more important things to learn and do with visitors than worry about the rare person who wants to die.

Anyway, I don't have an answer, just an observation. I don't have a problem with rangers helping the obvious ones, but the rest? They shouldn't worry about them, the rangers didn't walk in their shoes to understand, and if they did, who knows what they would do then. The best you can do is know they died in a place they loved.