“Today, my mother is alive because I found her. Today I am alive because a stranger with pink hair stopped me to take her photo.”
With that phrase, Billy Lezra sums up the reason why she considers herself a survivor: seven years ago she considered jumping in front of a California train. She was just 23 years old at the time.
The young woman who asked him to take her photo belonged, without knowing it, to a special group of human beings whom Lezra calls “those who interrupt” misfortunes. And that interruption, in his case, caused him to “miss” the train in front of which he planned to jump and end his life.
In her story, which was published in The Washington Post, the woman reveals that to carry out her plan she had turned to alcohol with the idea of joining forces.
“I was 23 years old. Two months earlier, my mother had tried to take her own life, and I had interrupted her attempt. This experience, compounded by years of depression and addiction, left me with the desire to feel nothing,” she recounted in an article written in the first person and published by the Post.
“It’s not that I wanted to die, exactly, it’s that I didn’t want to live,” he wrote.
The decisive moment
Lezra said that just as she approached the platform, shortly before the train arrived, a voice interrupted her.
“Excuse me, but could I take your photo?”said the voice.
The order was placed by a small woman, he wrote, “with pink hair and a titanium ring in her lips.”
“He stood a few meters away from me, smiling and offering me his phone. She had her nails painted silver. She would not be more than 19 years old,” she said.
“I just arrived in San Francisco,” she recalled saying, and confessed that she was very happy.
Lezra could have said no, continued with the plan to end his life. But without thinking about that, he nodded, took the phone and captured several photos of the young woman.
After the brief encounter, she sat down, but contact with another human being derailed her enough for her to forget her decision to no longer live.
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Then he walked to a nearby park and decided to observe those present: “Groups of people gathered on the grass, playing the guitar, drinking wine. “I sat down, lit a cigarette, and stared at the dark water behind the gleaming San Francisco skyline.”
“I took out my phone and took a photo of the silhouette of a dog against the light. My hands were shaking so much that the image came out blurry,” he wrote in the Post.
Helping others
Her experience, in some way, seems to have forced her to help others, and perhaps herself, with the text published in the newspaper.
“The process of collecting data and information has helped me understand what almost happened to me. The child of a parent who has attempted suicide is almost five times more likely to become suicidal than the child of one without such a history,” she wrote.
“People with alcohol consumption problems have up to 120 times more likely to attempt suicide than those who are not dependent on the drink. Approximately one in four people who commit suicide are intoxicated,” he stated.
(Mayor dies after apparent suicide days after they published photos in which he supposedly appears dressed as a woman)
And about those who “interrupt” his plans to take his own life, he added: “Those who interrupt are everywhere: there is a man who has taken more than 400 people from the railings of the bridge over the Yangtze River in Nanjing, in China. There is a retired police officer who has driven more than 600 people back from the cliff ledges of Tojinbo in Japan. And then there are the accidental hecklers: the people who approach devastated strangers in subway stations.”
Lezra confessed in his text that he is in the process of recovery, he no longer drinks alcohol and is receiving therapy. Even so, there are days when desperation consumes her inside like a “forest fire,” she says.
“In those days,” he confessed, I force myself to go out and ask strangers if they want me to take their photo.“.
With your gesture you may be saving lives.
