This is about two dead people.
The day didn’t start too well. Sometime around noon Claudia’s brother calls. Turns out he’s abroad with Claudia’s dad, doing a bicycle tour through Austria, Italy, Switzerland. It seems that his wife went down into the cellar today to do the laundry and found their neighbour had hung himself down there.
Ugh.
I called, but she did not answer the phone. I expect that the police visited her and they probably have some psychology training to deal with these situations. Later she let us know that it was feeling better again and had gone studying in the library.
Before Claudia left, we talked about this. How we hesitated to go down into our own cellar now, Claudia saying that she would not be able to stand it, me claiming to be rather cool about it. Time passes, and she had to leave. I spent the day in front of the laptop.
When Claudia came back, I cooked for her, we ate dinner, she had to leave in about twenty minutes, we talked about this and that, and then I saw something flying past the window behind Claudia’s back. A moment of total silence. Then a wet thud.
I tell Claudia to absolutely not get up. I approach the window slowly, looking up, making sure that nobody is pointing a gun at me or something. Then I look down. A dead man sprawled on the pavement and a puddle of blood around his head.
“Don’t look, there’s a dead man down there!” I tell Claudia and go to the phone to call the police – 117 here in Switzerland. I give them my name, my address, tell them what I saw: Man, blood, I live on the third floor, he seems to be dead. No, I don’t know whether he is alive or not because I’m on the third floor and just looked down.
As I put down the phone I see Claudia by the window, looking down. She is visibly shaken and sits on the sofa. I’m angry now: “Why did you look when I told you not to look!?” I take her and lead her into the bedroom. There we sit for a while, holding each other.
We decide to go. By now there are about six police cars and an ambulance on the sidewalk, people shouting, the police asking questions, packing his belongings, taking pictures. I locate the boss and tell him that I’m the one who called and that I was about to leave and whether he wanted me to stay. Yes, he said. So we waited some more, and then approached him again. One of his subordinates talked to me, I have him my name and number and was allowed to go. I walked Claudia to her studio.
Weird. Two dead on the same day.
#Life #Death
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Tragisch! weiss man etwas ueber die Hintergruende der Selbstmorde? Ich nehme an, der Mann ist selbst aus dem Fenster gesprungen.
– Helmut Schroeder 2005-07-05 00:58 UTC
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Ich habe keine Ahnung. Ich vermute, dass auch nicht viel in der Zeitung stehen wird. Heute beispielsweise¹:
40-Jähriger bei Sturz aus Fenster gestorben
Ein 40-jähriger Mann ist am Montagabend in Zürich beim Sturz aus einem Fenster ums Leben gekommen. Hergang und Ursache des Sturzes aus dem Fenster im fünften Stock eines Hauses im Stadtkreis 4 standen zunächst nicht fest, wie die Stadtpolizei Zürich mitteilte. Mehrere Personen wurden zur Befragung auf die Polizeiwachs mitgenommen.
– Alex Schroeder 2005-07-05 08:19 UTC
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God. That’s a terrible day. 🙁 I hope you and Claudia are over the incident now.
– NoufalIbrahim 2005-07-06 06:32 UTC
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Yeah. Yesterday during Aikido there was a sudden moment when I thought about the image I had seen and was disoriented for a while. I haven’t brought the subject up again because I don’t want to reinforce the memories by talking about it. But who knows, maybe this way they just seep into our subconscious and linger there. Yesterday I noted some a candle, some flowers, and three men mourning at the site.
– Alex Schroeder 2005-07-06 10:06 UTC