Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes

Today, I woke up late, I hit snooze on my alarm and when I woke up next, it was 7:30, that's over an hour late! I got ready, headed to the train and watched the police ticket a family that crossed the tracks when the gates were down and the train was stopped in the station. My immediate reaction was how bullshit this was, I watched the two cops sit on their bikes across the street and wait for the crossing arms to drop then leap on the family.


They also provided a nice service to everybody else who was there by blocking the sidewalk with their bikes...

Thing is, this happens all the time, the station at Orange is set up so that riders HAVE to break the law to get across the tracks (or walk about 3/4th of a mile around). Metrolink is building a pedestrian tunnel now to solve this issue, but for many years now, breaking the law was the solution. Watching these people get ticketed left a bad taste in my mouth.

The taste in my mouth was about to get much worse. About 10 minutes into the trip, as we were moving north along the tracks about to pass under the 91 freeway, the conductor announces the Fullerton station, shortly after, I hear a noise that sounds like rocks bouncing around under the train, I wasn't sure if these were ACTUALLY rocks or maybe somebody downstairs had dropped something. After a few seconds, the train begins to slow and the stops, "how odd," I thought, "the train has never stopped here before." This isn't a big deal but it does stand out. After several minutes of wondering if we'd had some kind of mechanical error, the conductor comes on the PA and says, "Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to be here for a while, we've hit a trespasser ." He said it just like he would of had said, and in fact later said, "Ladies an gentlemen, we have a red signal..."

I looked out my window, half expecting to see blood and guts everywhere, of course and thankfully there wansn't. I put on my press pass, grabbed my camera and headed up towards the front where I knew there would be personnel and radios to listen to. As I got to the front of the train, which was a club car and not a locomotive (pushing from the rear), I saw the engineer, he looked fine, as if it hadn't sunk in yet.

I asked him if I could interview him, he told me that he couldn't but he did relate to me what had happened. He saw what he though was debris on the tracks, by the time he saw it, he was moving too fast to stop so he decided to go through it. He said that he didn't realize it was a person until he saw a woman lift his head, look at him and waive, "goodbye."

When we hit the woman, the train aperently seperated her body into many parts and spread her oragans along the tracks. Thankfully, I never saw any evidence of this, I recieved all of my informati0n from radios and overhearing employees.

The rest of the story is relativley unimportant, to be brief we were stuck there for about 2 hours, finally the next train in the line-up came up next to us and we were transfered over to it. The mood on the train this whole time was mixed; joking, quietness, people were comparing stories of death, impatience... When we switched trains, I told the people around me what I had heard, we all went through the above emotoins for about 15 minutes, then, everybody just stopped talking, nothing. No cell phone calls, no chatting, no stories, just quiet. I made eye contact with a couple of people and instead of the shifting gaze to something else that you would normally get on the train, people just kind of looked at me, I felt like we were acknowleding the fact that somebody had just died.




When I got off the train, I kind of expected to see metrolink employees waiting to talk to us, nothing. I'm not sure if I would have accepted the help or what I would have said, but I think it would have been nice to see them.

I have a have a hard time dealing with death, I've never really managed to figure out in my head how I feel. I know if I wanted to, I could just blow this off, make jokes and go on, theres a huge part of me though that KNOWS I need to care, it's the link to my humanity that I care about so much. Part of my problem with death is my confusion toward what other people are thinking and going through, when I heard a train employee today refer to the body as meat, it left a very bad taste in my mouth, I wanted to get angry but in the end accepted the fact that different people deal differently.

I don't know how I feel about this, what I do know is that I'm very sad for the lady, what kind of life was she living that she felt her only option was to be run over by a fucking train? What of the people she's left behind, are they sad, are they callous bad people that drove her to this, are they wonderful people that she was trying to spare the burden of caring for her? I'll never know and I'll probably never understand how I feel around death.

The register has a story about this, in it, they reveal that the woman was 78, her name was Ruth Lopez. They said they found a walker and a purse near the tracks.