Over a thousand students commit suicide each year in France. The photo is of a N° 47 bus here in Lyon, France.

The connection between those two pieces of information is what happened to me two days ago. (Oh, and why ME?!)

I was on a n° 47 bus and a young woman got on and sat down next to me. She looked very sad. After a few moments she asked me if I knew where she had to get off the bus to get another one for the hospital. She sounded even sadder than she looked.

-Sure – I anwered, and told her.

She thanked me. After a few seconds I began to feel really bad about her looking so sad.

- Excuse me, but are you ok? – I asked her.
- No- she said, and just burst into tears, right there beside me. Not just tears, but really deep and desperate tears. Her whole body was shuddering.

I put my arm around her and tried to comfort her, and the other people on the bus just looked on impassively. She rested her head on my shoulder and cried until we got to her stop.

I was just about to ask her if she wanted me to accompany her to where she was going, when she asked me if I wouldn’t mind talking with her a few minutes.

We went into a cafe – coffee for me and apple juice for her.

She told me that she was a student and that she was feeling suicidal and just couldn’t cope any more. She was from a small village in the north of France and big city university life was just too much for her and she missed her family so much but did not dare tell them how she was feeling because she feared her parents would not understand.

Other students had tried to befriend her she said, but she was just too estranged here in Lyon and she never ever went out in the evening, and so, little by little, the others had left her in her corner. Now she was missing class and feeling extremely detached from herself and knew it. That worried her but she could not pluck up the courage to tell anyone about how bad she felt. She had stopped eating too. And she said..

- I just can’t stop thinking of killing myself. It’s like a compulsion but it almost seems like a kind of refuge. I think about it all the time and I imagine myself doing it often but I’m too scared to do it right now. I’m just worried that I may just do it soon, because I feel worse and worse about myself with each passing day. –

She was trembling and crying as we talked, for over half an hour. I just wanted to persuade her to phone her parents NOW, and maybe go to the hospital after that if she still needed to.

She said that she would consider my proposal and that now she needed to go for a walk, alone, to clear up her ideas a little.

So I asked if I could give her my name and mobile number, and she accepted, so I wrote it all down large and clear on the back of a cash machine reciept.

Then she got up and left.......

......She was wearing jeans, a blue jacket, and had blond hair with a clasp at the top.
__________

As I said, over one thousand students kill each other every year here, and thousands more try to.

It’s so sad to think of all these young people wandering around big cities feeling lonely and distressed; so distressed that they have to talk to complete strangers. I know that’s just life, but it still makes me feel angry and powerless to know that there is so much misery around.

I have resisted the strong temptation I have to read the local papers since then.....................

................and, when the phone rings, I answer. Immediately.

Michael C

(Photo - ciofrance.com)