IPS

For some completely unknown reason my boss decided today that I was just the right person to special a scheduled patient after an attempted suicide who remains in an almost catatonic form of depression. Seriously?
When she started to cry I asked the stupidest question, and as soon as I said it I wished I hadn't.
"What's wrong?"
What's wrong? What the fuck? What do you think is wrong? She is so unhappy that there's no way out? She's fought for too long and finally wanted to be beaten? We're preventing her from finding peace. And I asked what was wrong? Anyone would think I was too naive to understand. Oh I understand, I just want to pretend that I don't because maybe if I tell myself that for long enough I might start believing it.
She broke my heart. She asked me, rather, pleaded, for me to help her. She wanted me to end it. "Give me a big needle that will make it all go away."
I told her I couldn't. That I wouldn't.
"I want to die, and I even failed at that."

That is my fear.
After all the hell you go through, in your head, your heart and your soul, when you finally pluck the courage from a place inside you that you never thought you'd find, and you do the thing that is to be your final action... and fail.
It's not something you can practice. It's not even something that you can study up on or gather others opinions over a mid-week lunch. It's something you work through in the silent darkened hours of the morning when you're trying to fall asleep as bakers and garbage trucks begin their day. You grind over each possibility until it's smooth and flawless and almost praise yourself for being so ingenious. There is just one thing missing. The courage to jump.

And so she tells me again, with tears in her eyes and quivers in her voice, that she just wants to go. I couldn't say what I was thinking. What else was I to do? Under the eyes of a student nurse, a physio and an unknown doctor, I lied through my teeth and told her that it could only get better. She called me wise for someone so young. I called myself a liar because I didn't believe it and don't feel that I ever could. When people say that to me I get angry. Fury bubbles up inside me because how can anyone know? I have heard it too many times only to prove them wrong. Now I've become one of them.
Deep down I know the system will heal her; heal her to a satisfactory level to get the stamp on that bit of paper. I can almost see her future though. She will slip through the cracks in that same system by setting herself free and becoming just another medical record to file under 'deceased'. I know she won't be at peace with herself until she finally wins.