"Have no fear of moving into the unknown. Simply
step out fearlessly knowing that I am with you…"
- John Paul II
“Would anyone like to volunteer to role play with me as a demonstration,” the Latina woman said.
For about thirty seconds the room was filled with the mild discomfort as folks hoped someone would raise their hand – you know, so they would not be picked.
“I’ll do it,” I said getting out of my seat in the back of the room. As I navigated the angled tables of five or six people, I thought, I’ll just make up a crisis situation and go with the flow.
What’s the deal?
This was the sixth session of a Victim’s Advocate training program I have been taking through the Tucson Attorney’s office. It teaches a method of helping people through episodes of personal crisis. This evening we were going to begin to learn the framework for interacting with someone in a moment of crisis.
After the first hour and a half of lecture, we broke for ten minutes or so and came back to role-play in small groups. While we had learned…well, actually heard…the techniques for interacting with a victim, we were now going to practice. Practice? Most of us felt like we had no idea what to do.
The question:
“Would anyone like to volunteer to role play with me as a demonstration,” the Latina woman said…and there we were facing one another in front of 70 or so classmates.
Yup, I had a fictional scenario ready to go by the time I got into the chair, and then she said, “Hello, my name is Rosanna and I’m with the victim’s advocate program. I’m here to help you in any way you might need. May I ask your name?”
I cannot explain what happened next, but in that very moment, I was transported into a real life situation where a friend tried to take her life. This was completely unexpected and in an instant, the entire room disappeared…there were just the two of us Rosanna and me in an insulated, intimate cocoon…two human beings – one dedicated to helping others and the other finding himself yielding to a scenario of genuine need. It was like someone had turned on a projector in my mind with the warning, DO NOT stop the film!
As she began to go through the active engagement process, I saw my friend lying in her bed…a glass of white wine on the small table near her head, a plastic bag of pills couched in her partially curled smallish body, like a teddy bear hugged by a young child…she was unconscious and could not be roused.
We called 911, but I felt impotent to do anything to help her. My brain went into cognitive dissonance and it seemed like I couldn’t find a rational thought in my head…a kind of Wait!! What the hell!!??
“It’s not like I haven’t seen or been in traumatic events in my life,” My throat catching as I tried to get the words out.
“Death, birth, things I wouldn’t talk publically about…I’ve seen a lot of things, yet as I stood there looking at her I felt completely impotent to do anything.”
“I can see you feel emotional about this,” Rosanna continued gently as my eyes began to water, and for a few moments, we just sat, saying nothing….waiting…waiting, until I was ready to continue.
I relayed that my friend survived the attempt and how in the subsequent month she and I talked openly about it. She had suffered years with Meniere’s Disease, a balance disorder of the inner ear, accompanied, in her case, by unrelenting pain that had completely robbed her of ‘life quality.' She had fought the good fight and frankly saw no light in the tunnel. Her decision was rational and well thought out.
My friend and I shared that neither of us wanted to find ourselves in old age, victims of a premature darkness that so often steals time by life deflating inches. In the last years of my mother’s life, she knew nothing, sitting, quietly moaning and rocking back and forth in a wheelchair…her days broken only by the meals she was fed and the visits we made to the home where she had come to die, one breath at a time. NO, that was NOT going to happen to me, nor my neighbor. We talked openly about the taking of our own lives when and if it appeared all hope was lost.
I brought this out as Rosanna continued to draw thoughts and feelings from my heart and mind. It seemed there were few filters from my side of the interaction. I am uncertain that the entire process lasted more than 15 minutes.
Toward the end, the thought emerged, It’s enough, that task is complete. With that, a rheostat of cognition dialed up and returned me to the classroom filled with onlookers, awkwardly quiet as though they had accidently found themselves exposed to an intimate discussion where maybe they did not belong.
The rest of the evening was spent practicing role-playing scenarios in small groups of three. I found myself distracted wondering why, or how this had happened. It was certainly not my plan at the start.
The night complete, as we gathered our things to head home, two older women separately stopped to thank me for the exercise. They indicated how grateful they were to hear someone openly talk about thoughts they had been afraid to express. It was, in a sense for them, freeing.
Maybe that’s the reason this happened, I thought. Maybe there were others who needed to see and hear someone completely vulnerable in a live situation.
Then again…maybe it was just for me…for my heart…for my mind.
I suppose, in the end, it simply needed to be….
- ted
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