Why do you not commit suicide? – my search for meaning

 Why do you not commit suicide? – 

used to ask Dr. Viktor E. Frankl his depressed patients.

Such an easy question, almost silly, but when I heard it I stopped on it for a longer while.

Not it was not now, but still a few months ago before my mom's death.

As always when I found something nurturing me I went to my mom to talk about it.

I said her how weird it is that in spite of everything I still continue my life.

I could end it yesterday's evening, right? But I didn't. So why?

Why even when I felt such a pain that I could not breath I still continued it.

I continue it.

An answer turned out suprisingly easy. Because of all my beloved people.

I live for them. I want to devote my life for them.

And now? I lost my mom so...

Wait, wait a minute and look on the life of Dr. Viktor E. Frankl

who asked this catchy question.

Yes, he was a psychiatrist, but also and, what even more important,

he was a psychiatrist with an experience of being 

a German concentration camps prisoner.

When I read his Man's search for meaning

I was shocked.

How is it possibly that words like that could be written

by the human who survived a hell and lost almost all his family?!

I was sightseeing Auschwitz lately (in February) so my memory about it all 

was really clear.  How?!

Dignity, love, art of suffering, meaning in life?!

Tragic optimism?!

I can say that nobody can feel the pain of others

and some people are stronger than others but...

 I can not deny that

Between stimulus and response there is a space. 

In that space is our power to choose our response. 

In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

We can talk about courage and heros,

but who can be a bigger hero than a man who

has the courage to suffer with such a dignity.

I have a lot of nihilism inside me so I can not stop

asking myself: but what for?

Why do we even need all this effort 

if life doesn't have any sense in the first place.

So Why do you not commit suicide?

He asks me again. He got me.

I am left spechless.

Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how' –

he continues disturbing me with his strenght. His courage. His belief in life and human.

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

He is making me crazy. He thought all these things in a concentration camp.

The beauty and salvation through love.

And then he speaks about aging.

About the beauty of aging.

Or even comfort of aging. Serenity.

Young person has only possibilites and can lost all of them

when an older one has so many realities

nobody can take away.

What is the reason to envy a young one? 

Isn't silly to envy things which can be

when you are the one who owns things that already are in your possesion?

It is not even idealistic. It is all so earthbound that I can not deny it. 

I feel like I lost this fight with Dr. Frankl. He won.

So all response lies in finding  All that matters

to live for, to not care about how.

All that matters is a different book I read written by Jan Goldstein.

A story about a young girl who tries to commit suicide 

and she is recovering thanks to her grandma

who taught her to appreciate life.

Grandma who again... lost her family killed by Nazis.

Finding these two books in similar time looks like a destiny.

Grandma tells a story

about her childhood when she spent a few months in an attic

hidden by a good woman who wanted to save a Jewish girl.

She was afraid. She felt alone. She missed her family and wanted to die.

You must life for those who didn't have a choice 

– said the good woman.

Grandma says about little things which with time helped her to find a meaning in life.

Ray of sun, a memory of mother in a kitchen, a butterfly, melting snow.

Little gifts from life. 

Little gifts to enjoy for ourselves but also for those who didn't have a choice

but who are partly inside of us.

But inside us they are not from the time when they suffered 

and when their life was taken

(by war, illness or whatever else)

but from better times. Before IT all happened.

Using Dr. Frankl words I would add that these memories,

these realities are our safe treasure. Nobody can take them away.

So summing it up:

finding the reason to live and collecting little gifts seem to be a recipe for life.

Of course it not that easy and there will be hundreds of times when we are fed up 

with all this play in the world but...

Why do you not commit suicide?

I almost feel like he smiles at me with a whit of irony.

Because he knows that he won.