TW: Suicide
Heartwarming Tearjerker of the Day: The sheer cliffs at the mouth of Sydney Harbor have long been a popular Australian suicide spot. But they’re about to get a lot more deadly — the local man who is credited with talking at least 160 people out of killing themselves since 1964 died this week.
Window-watcher Don Ritchie, known as the Angel of the Gap, could spot the troubled ones from his home across the street; he’d wander down to the cliff-edge and calmly ask, “Can I help you in some way?” More often then not, he could. He’d chat with them a bit, then invite them back to his place for a cup of tea.
“My ambition has always been to just get them away from the edge, to buy them time, to give them the opportunity to reflect and give them the chance to realize that things might look better the next morning,” Ritchie once said. “You just can’t sit there and watch them. You’ve got to try and save them.”
One of the saddest realities is that we never know when our lives are at their peak. Only after it is over and we have some kind of perspective do we realize how good we had it a day, a month, five years ago.Jonathan Carroll (via petit-poids)
He that casts water upon it, to extinguish and put it out, is the Devil.
G. Woolliscroft Rhead, from The pilgrim’s progress from this world to that which is to come, by John Bunyan, New York, 1898.
(Source: archive.org)
I escape into sleep. Sleep is what I’ll miss most when I die.Anna Kamienska, from “A Nest of Quiet,” trans. Clare Cavanagh (via proustitute)