The misery of Henry Foreman

Henry Foreman who just divorced his wife,finds himself in a dilemma towards his own faith.

In a semi empty apartment in central London, Henry Foreman gazed at the endlessly spinning ceiling fan, pondering the dilemma that had haunted him for a very long time now.

He kept wondering whether to take his own life. The thing about Foreman was that he wasn't afraid of hanging himself; he knew all too well how miserable his life had been, and how terrible his own self is since his childhood.

In the last month, Foreman had divorced his wife, lost custody of his children, and consequently, lost his job—and that was just last month.

At the age of six, he and his family had been in a car accident. His father, who was driving, died a horrific death when a pipe pierced his skull, killing him instantly. His mother, who was sitting next to his father, died in a similar way. His older sister, whom he had been playing with just moments before the accident, died from internal bleeding. And Young Foreman survived from the accident with minor scratches and bruises, terrible nightmares, mood swings, and a psychological trauma that still haunts him today. He then lived in an orphanage, where you could say he wasn't treated well, which only worsened his mental health problems. You can imagine why his wife asked for a divorce, which angered him enough to punch a coworker and break his jaw.

For him, everything that had kept alive him was now gone. He is now a walking, unresponsive corpse, waiting for death, fully aware of the impossibility of reclaiming it's life. He knew this well, perhaps even before all these events, perhaps even since that horrific accident that took his family from him. There had never been a reason to continue living in the first place, just an excuse to keep going.

And ridiculously enough, even in the mind of a dead man, pride remained. For him, suicide was an escape, a surrender. Deep down, he had long believed that these devastating events in his life were a challenge from God, a challenge he wanted to win at. Perhaps this challenge was the fuel that made him continue living, and all his beliefs and actions revolved around it. He refused to believe in God and refused to ask for His help, but this didn't come from a newfound faith after much questioning; rather, it came from the idea that God had ignored him.

For him, suicide was a surrender to the idea of God's existence; He saw suicide, drug and alcohol addiction, and other misfortunes that comes from misery as a kind of fate from god.
Hanging himself meant surrendering to the fate God had declared for him. All Foreman wanted to prove was that despite his misfortune and the events that had plagued his life, he could still live a decent, even somewhat happy, life. All that Foreman wanted was simply living an ordinary life with his wife. He wasn't driven by love or the desire for children; he simply wanted to prove that he could live the ordinary life he had wanted for himself, not the miserable life God had supposedly ordained for him.

From the moment he became aware of life and the miserable reality imposed upon him, only one thought remained in his mind, clinging to his very core no matter how hard he tried to ignore it: "Why hasn't God helped me?" When he heard the laughter and joy of the young couple in the apartment next door, when he saw their eyes free from the traces of nightmares and restless sleep, when he saw them greeting him with such enthusiasm, like people eagerly awaiting the dawn of a new day, he asked himself each time: "Have you forsaken me, God?" But from Foreman's perspective, this question was illogical. Why had he, specifically, been made unhappy? Why did this couple live a life of pure love while he argued with his wife every night? Why did this couple visit their parents on every holiday, while he could only visit their decaying, putrid graves? Why couldn't Foreman experience the same happiness? Wasn't it possible for a being of such knowledge, power, and wisdom to make this possible? "Why hasn't God blessed me as He has blessed you?!" But no, this doesn't make sense from Foreman's perspective. No, the reason for all these events is the absence of God, and the world is merely a series of random, illogical events based solely on pure chance. This fateful challenge, so inextricably linked to his life, and perhaps even connected to the misfortunes that had hurt him, is his way of rejecting the logic of God's abandonment. His refusal of this tragic fate and his continued defiance of God is his way of saying, "No one abandoned me, and no one could have abandoned me from the beginning!" His rejection of the expected misery that leads to his suicide means his victory over God! No, it means his victory over the very principle of God's existence!

But now, with his divorce and his failure to achieve that "ordinary" life, Foreman can only question the faith upon which he built his life...