Junior Seau 2.0

Still thinking about Junior Seau.
The human body is such a fragile thing. We are infinitely vulnerable. Knives, guns, fists, bats, loneliness; any of these and many other things can easily kill us.
Then there is the inside stuff. Heart attacks, cancer, strokes and hundreds of other hideous diseases.
A human body is an intricate and delicate mechanism.
When someone commits suicide it can be a knee jerk reaction to some calamitous or seemingly calamitous event. You lose your job, you lose your house, you lose a loved one. You snap and the gun is at the temple.
I think more often than not it is the result of long suffering, an accumulation of pain built up over a long period of time.
And yet the human body can handle this pain, hide this pain, walk around as if everything is OK. Jerry Rice got me thinking about this. He played golf with Junior Seau on Monday. Said he was bubbly, upbeat, funny; Rice said he was who he always was. Disbelief was obvious in Rice's tone of voice. He just could not believe there was anything wrong based on a round of golf two days before Seau killed himself.
I kept hearing about how cool Seau was from friends and teammates and coaches, but to hear Rice talk about Seau's demeanor two days before suicide blew me away.
I don't think he was suddenly overwhelmed in two days. I think he was in enormous pain on that golf course.
And Jerry Rice couldn't see it.
I see pain as a physical thing. It is inside you like a tumor. It has physical manifestations, it affects your heartbeat and blood pressure and breathing and psyche.
It affects your mood, how you deal with the world, how you see the world and yourself. It is all encompassing.
Some believe attitude is connected with disease. If that is true, pain must play a large part in all the hideous diseases that attack our fragility.
And yet a human being can hide this thing from the outside world. Walk out the door and smile and laugh and talk and function. With all our vulnerability, the human body can handle and hide enormous pain and keep on moving.
Bizarre.
I don't think most people who commit suicide do it thoughtlessly. It is a huge decision, especially given the unknowns about what comes after. I think it takes a lot of courage to kill yourself knowing that it may be the end of the road, period. No redemption, no reincarnation, no Jesus holding your hand.
Suicide must be the result of enormous pain. Enormous.
I am not one of those who condemns people who kill themselves. I believe that if your life is so unbearably painful that you just cannot function, why continue to suffer? What is the point of that?
I believe you should exhaust every option available to you to try to deal with your pain, get all the help you can get. Doctors, friends, relatives, whatever it takes, whoever is out there to support you. Obviously Seau didn't do that and I'm guessing most suicides don't. I don't know what the answer to that is. That is the downside to the human body being able to hide so much pain.
It's too bad we are set up that way. You have a nasty pain in your gut, you grimace and visit Dr. Feelgood. You cannot hide it.
You get a nasty pain in your psyche and you smile at the world. There is something off balance there.
One more unpopular point. Conventional wisdom says that suicides are selfish. "Think about the suffering inflicted on loved ones left behind." I say those loved ones should feel relieved that the suffering has ended. I don't believe the definition of love should include expecting the object of that love to suffer endlessly.
I don't know what was going on in Junior Seau's head. I am inclined to believe his football career radically affected his post football life. Maybe he was beginning to see signs of dementia. The gun to the chest might be a hint. Maybe he was suffering in other ways. Maybe these things have been coming on for a while now. Bear in mind that he just retired from football officially in 2010, although he probably extended his career longer than he should have.
I imagine it is almost impossible for a football player to handle dementia or incapacity of any type. On the field these guys are monsters, invulnerable, the toughest of the tough, and I'm sure that's how they see themselves in general.
The whole situation has me marvelling at the fact that the pain we need to deal with the most, the most hideous, self destructive pain we can endure, is the pain that nobody sees. The pain we find a way to hide, no matter how enormous.
What does this say about our evolution as humans?
We vilify emotion as weakness. We hide anything that is perceived as weakness at all costs. What we celebrate as strength of character is often the very opposite.
We trivialize life in living this way.
And I don't hold out much hope that we will ever learn to do otherwise.