Steve Ladurantaye: When surviving suicide is a kick in the (galvanized) nuts
Years ago, I was driving down the busiest highway in Canada when a transport truck started wobbling on the other side of the road. We watched it in slow motion as it tipped onto two wheels and launched over the cement barriers and directly into our path.
They tell you time slows down when you’re under the threat of death. It’s true. In a tenth of a second, a flurry of thoughts ran through my mind. I thought about how this was going to be an idiotic way to die. I watched concrete chunks the size of my head pummel the cars around me. I side-eyed the ditch.
As time accelerated to a more normal speed, I made a hard right turn toward the ditch. We went off the road and should have rolled and rolled as the car crumpled around us. Instead, the front of the vehicle hit a cement drainage pipe and stopped us cold. We instantly went from 100 km/h to a dead stop with nothing more severe than airbag burns on our bodies and the shoes knocked off our feet.
The car was a write-off. So were three others and the truck. Nobody died, but everyone should have. One guy was reading a book with his seat reclined — a chunk of barrier smashed through the front window and went right through the back window. If he were sitting straight, the cement would have taken his head off his body and kept going.
My super clever editor asked me to write a story detailing the cost of the crash. I spent a few months adding big things like automobiles and little things like Band-Aids. The total was almost $200,000 if you included the cost of gas for everyone stuck waiting in traffic as emergency workers cleared the wreckage.
The point — I didn’t have to pay anyone for destroying the cement pipe. We hit it, we smashed it and all kinds of other bad things happened all around us that cost a lot of money. And aside from a relatively smooth process with my insurance company, the topic of payment didn’t come up.
The actual point of this column is…
All that to say that you gotta feel for Peter J. Smith. The Ottawa-man drove his car into a light standard in a botched suicide attempt. Instead of killing himself, he killed a lamppost.
“Miraculously, thanks to airbags, he survived with broken ribs, internal bleeding, and organ damage,” Kelly Egan wrote in the Ottawa Citizen. “The car was a write-off. He spent 23 days in the Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital, where, fortunately, treatment began for his mental illness.”
As an occasional suicide-enthusiast (I’m fine, really), the story drew me in. Unfortunately, the media rarely report on methods of suicide, worried that other people may find inspiration. I’ve wondered about that a lot as a reporter over the years but tended to believe it was best to provide details in some stories because it could dissuade people from attempting when they realize how difficult it is actually to pull something like that off.
Anyway.
Smith would be just another hospital-ward admission if not for what happened next. A year and a half later, he received a $5,235.78 bill from the hydro company for damages done (to the post, not his body).
“Smith, now 50, was sent a bill for $5,235.78 for the repair to the concrete, light standard from a company, Envari Energy Solutions, he’d never heard of, for amounts he couldn’t verify,” Egan wrote. “The bill was surprisingly detailed: $660 to Hydro Ottawa, $2,579 to service provider Black & McDonald, 34 cents for a galvanized nut, $1.20 for a square washer, $5.61 for a galvanized bolt, all among the long list of itemized expenses.”
I’d be curious to know what sort of costs are passed down to those who fail to kill themselves but cause property damage.
Traffic tie-ups, emergency resource dispatching, medical bills could all be used to punish and hold the suicidal to financial account. And since the bills land when they are especially vulnerable, there’s less a chance they’ll attempt to fight back.
And where Smith showed absolute courage talking about his story, that kind of public disclosure he exposed himself to is as gross a price to have to pay as the fine itself.
We don’t want people killing themselves. That much should be obvious. Penalizing them when they miraculously survive is no way to help them recover.
“It’s like being kicked when you’re down,” he told the paper. ”I think it’s wrong, at the worst moment of your life, to ask people to cover property damage you might have caused in a mental health crisis.”
The energy company has come up with a few ways to stretch out the payments without interest. It’s a nice (but silly) gesture to make to someone who is trying to rebuild his life — a monthly survival penalty.
They haven’t wiped the debt completely. But they should — anything else would be another kick in the galvanized nuts.
