I’ll confess, upfront, that I’m really not a NASCAR fan. But that fact didn’t deaden the shock, when I learned that veteran NASCAR driver Richard “Dick” Trickle died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound the other day. Other than being familiar with his name, I didn’t really know much about him or his career, yet I felt a pang of heaviness hearing that he had chosen to end his own life. Suicide is such an inconceivably lonely and shocking act that I think we instinctively look for some sort of reason or rationale to explain it and put it in context.
As I began to think about what could have driven him to such a desperate act, I couldn’t help but think how surprising it was to me that a professional racecar driver would come to that point. For those of us who devote a great deal of our free time to the “Walter Mitty” pursuit of historic racing—where, in essence, we role play being a professional racecar driver—it’s hard to imagine a life where living out such a privileged dream could somehow lead to the desire to end one’s own life. Even though I know that this is a very simplistic and absurd idea, I found myself wanting to investigate whether there have been that many suicides among professional drivers.
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