Beyond the rail

Renaissance Concourse
Atlanta Airport Hotel

My room was on the ninth floor. Yesterday (Friday), standing a few feet from my door, I took the photo to the right. By my estimation, the Renaissance Concourse Atlanta Airport Hotel has at least two hundred rooms whose door is about ten feet from a short railing leading to misadventure. Maybe three hundred rooms, assuming that you might not have to fall but two or three floors to kill yourself. And you can't see it well from that photo, but the balcony for each floor along the far right juts out farther than the balcony below. There's no chance on that side of grabbing a railing on your way down (obvious from the photo below).

From an elevator opposite the
spot where the photo above was taken

    Upon my arrival Thursday morning for an overnight meeting, the sight of the balconies had made me feel uneasy—the same way I'd felt walking across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge in 1967 or 68. I hugged the hotel balcony wall as I walked from the elevator to the far corner where it turned out Room 938 was located. (It was a good location so far as the window view was concerned.) When I returned to 938 at the end of the afternoon session, a housekeeper's cart blocked my way along the wall, so I had to get closer to the railing than I liked. I considered moving the cart, but I made myself buck up.
    Yesterday morning, preparing to go down for breakfast, I thought about calling the desk to send someone up to escort me to the elevator. The intervening hours had given me too much time to reflect on the Golden Gate Bridge Feeling—the sense that your body might suddenly try to jump over the rail and you wouldn't be able to stop it.
    It made me wonder how many suicides each year aren't really suicides in the sense of a willful act to do away with yourself, but just people's bodies acting on their own without the bodies' "owners" being able to intervene? Might be difficult to get statistics on that.
    Again, I steeled myself and went unescorted. I may have walked faster than the day before.
    But why was I having this uneasy feeling now? I'd been near high cliffs and rails quite a few times since 1967, and I had rarely had the feeling again.

When our meeting convened on Thursday afternoon, we'd all been asked to introduce ourselves and share "something interesting." Most of us already knew each other, from one or more previous annual meetings of our enterprise, but several people were new this year.
    When my turn came, I said,

In eleven days I'll no longer be who I am, so there seems to be little point in telling you who that was. But for those who don't know me yet I will say that this is my tenth annual meeting. I am, for the few days left before my retirement, the state coordinator for North Carolina.
    I've been asked one particular question so often lately, it might possibly be of interest to you how I'm dealing with the prospect of retirement.
    The most interesting thing about it to me is the strong polar-opposite feelings I have about it.
    On the one hand, I'm really glad to be leaving the organization I've worked in for fourteen years. One of the reasons is that it has already ceased to be what it was, and I very much dislike what it has become. Your organizations back home are hierarchical too. So has mine always been. But over the past few months it has become rigidly so—more top-down, more chain-of-command. The commands come down, and subservience is supposed to go back up. If you want to communicate with someone in a different part of the hierarchy, don't call them directly, but go up your chain to where the two hierarchies meet.
    Enough! I'll be relieved to escape my division's oppressive regime.
    But on the other hand, I'm already sad thinking that this is not only my tenth annual meeting—it's also my last. I'm going to miss working with all of you on our beloved tuition-savings program for college students in our states who want to pursue degrees that our own state doesn't offer. I'm going to miss each of you personally. We have become friends.
    Of course, no one likes to feel sad, so I'm trying to focus on the glad part of the situation —escaping the division I've worked in for fourteen years. I'll try to put off the sad part until later.

Well, the truth is I can't feel entirely glad about retiring from work that has given me a great deal of satisfaction. I think I'm feeling...diminished.
    It happens to many retirees. Some feel that they no longer have anything to live for, and a number of these die soon after their last day at work.
    Walking along the hotel balcony, think I feared that some hidden part of me might commandeer my body and pull or push it toward the rail....

After passing through the The Zimbabwe Exhibit at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport yesterday afternoon, a World Wildlife Fund poster brought back a powerful feeling I'd had the day before on the flight to Atlanta. The sound of a young child talking to its parent had provoked in me a profound sense of vulnerability. My heart went out to that child. I ached with the knowledge that it would not always be taken care of, that it was subject to wanton hurt, ill-treatment, even abandonment. How helpless are our children, how dependent on us our pets and even the livestock we raise...to slaughter. How vulnerable wild animals subject to legal hunters, to poachers, to each other.
    On the plane, I thought it was the child's vulnerability I felt. Stopped before the poster of the young elephant and its mother, I thought it was the vulnerability of the small elephant.
    I suspect now it was my own vulnerability that was trying to speak to me.