Title: Painless
Author: ScribbleDream
Rating: PG-13 (for mention of suicide... a lot)
Disclaimer: They aren't mine and it has taken me months of therapy to admit that.
Authors Notes: This is my first SVU fic, so please be constructive. PLEASE. I know I need it. Oh, and I'm looking for an SVU beta, if you're interested, leave it in the review.
The night after my father died, I went to my rabbi for comfort. I told him how I was feeling, only because he already had a guess. I mean, he knew my father well, and probably missed him almost as much as I did. I thought he could help with everything I was feeling. I was wrong. Rabbi Goldberg's words of ultimate wisdom were, "Death is painless, son."
I knew he had only meant it to assuage my guilt, but it just made me more angry. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to scream. I wanted to ask him how the hell he would know if death was painless, since he'd never died. Most of all, I wanted to cry because I knew he was wrong.
One of my Christian acquaintances, a boy named Harry Mills, told me that killing yourself was a sin and that my father was going to hell. Although it is against the Jewish custom to believe that any Jew is going to hell, or that there even is a hell, I began to get worried. I socked Harry for saying that, and it made me feel a little better, but as I did it on school grounds, the week of detention didn't help anything. Neither did the phone call to my mother from Harry's, but that's beside the point.
The point was that my father was going to hell. No two ways about it. He wasn't exactly a perfect man when he was alive, and to kill himself would have been the icing on the cake for God. At least, that's what my twelve-year-old mind thougt at the time. And for Rabbi Goldberg to say that death was painless... Well, it showed me just how screwed up people's views on things like that are.
For one thing, how can shooting yourself be painless? I've seen people who were shot. It's hell to be shot. Maybe doing it yourself, prepairing yourself for it, helps a little, but still. A peice of metal lodged into your brain? As a kid I didn't understand that he had died instantly, and had no time to feel pain. Even when I was told that it was instant, I believed that there would have been an instant where he was in the most excrutiating turmoil of his entire life. But now when I think about it, I realize that he thought his entire life was turmoil. Turmoil that couldn't be solved or even lessened. And he didn't even want to try to fix it.
I still have no idea why I told Amy Solwey about my father. Sure, part of it was so that she wouldn't kill herself, but the other part of me wanted to talk about it. You know, for me. Not for her. There's no such thing as a selfless good deed, right?
I don't know why I cared about her so much. Although I fought so hard to get her tried and in prison, I also cared about her, in a twisted sort of way. I saw my father in her, I suppose. As I watched her in the court room, her face kept molding into my fathers. Of course, my father and Amy looked nothing alike. He was a bald, fat, old Jewish man, and she was a young, pretty, confident woman, but I saw him. I swear he was there. And I just kept thinking, if I knew then what I know now... if I knew the signs of someone who is suicidal when I was boy... maybe I could have helped him.
As I told Amy my story, I kept telling myself not to cry. I didn't want to cry. I hadn't cried since I was twelve. Incidently on the night my father died. It was important at the time. To cry, I mean. Even as a kid I only cried when it was really important, never for anything frivolous like not getting an ice cream cone when I really, really wanted one. Although there was that one time when my brother got one and I didn't, but that was about the equality of all men as written in our Constitution... Wait. I had a point. Where did it go?
Ah, yes, death and pain and suicide, that was it. I always was the cheery one.
After Rabbi Goldberg talked to me about a painless death, I refused to go back to synagouge. No amount of yelling, coaxing, bribing, or even slapping from my mother could get me out of bed on a Saturday morning to go listen to an old man talk about something he didn't know anything about. But, now that I think about it, I realize he was right. Death isn't painful at all. The state of being dead is anything but painful. I mean, you're dead. You have no nerves, so you can't feel anything, painful or pleasant. Yes. Death is completely painless.
Dying, however, is not.