The
suicide attempt or commitment of an individual is seen as preventable and
tragic by society. When a person takes their own life, they are mourned and
their acts are spoken of as misguided, wrong, and unfortunate. It’s seen as the
chicken-hearted way out. Craven, as if it was an easy decision to avoid any
difficult work towards a better life. Actually, the decision to commit suicide
is quite the opposite.
To think
about suicide and plan it is an easy task. It takes simple thoughts, and a
basic understanding of the fragility of life. Carrying out the plan is much tougher
than you would ever imagine. It may be easy to put a rope around your neck and
kick a chair out from under you, but the final moments leading to it take more
courage than any living person could summon. You must accept that it is the
end. You must check your mental bucket list and wonder if there was anything
else you wanted to do. Make your final goodbyes, and write your letters if you
want. And then you wonder if there is any other option; if there is any other
safer route that is not the pain of the life you have, nor the ultimate ending
that you are about to face. Most attempted suicides back out at about this
point with a slight gleam of hope, wondering about, and desperately clinging
onto the slim and slight chance that things will get better. Life never gets
“better.” It’s a long and winding road that leads to your door and will never disappear.
David
Foster Wallace brilliantly, and very accurately, described the act of
committing suicide as a comparison to escaping a fire: “The so-called ‘psychotically
depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote
‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not
square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in
whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself
the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning
high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their
terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for
you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view;
i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other
terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death
becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall;
it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and
yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’ can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have
to have personally been trapped to really understand a terror beyond falling.”
It takes
real courage to choose death over life. I have a level of respect for those who
have chosen to commit suicide, for whatever reason, despite the fact that it
hurts me and everyone else they were loved by. They have chosen to do something
that nearly every person has thought about once in their life, seriously or
from curiosity, and didn’t have the guts to follow through with. I admire them
not for their decision, but for the bravery that seems almost impossible to
summon to do it.
The girl
that taught me how to play violin when I lived in New Orleans recently
committed suicide by blowing up her apartment. I do not know why she did it. I
don’t understand what was troubling her so much. We had lost contact and
haven’t spoken in a couple of years, so I am unaware of what her situation was.
I don’t know if it was over love, over general depression, over a large amount
of small misfortunes adding up too quickly to bear, or a combination of
anything. I heard she was actually doing rather well and had just got a new
puppy. But she made her decision. I can’t change it. I can’t ask her to undo
it. I can’t go back in time and find out her telephone number and give her a
call to ask how she is. I have to learn to live with it. I accept these facts,
and I respect her choice even though I wish she had not come to that conclusion.
When we
hear of suicide, we tend to ask, “What could I have done to prevent it?” and
“Why did they do it?” and “How could they do this to me?” All of these
questions reflect on the self and what actions we could have taken to prevent
their decision. The answers are simple and easy, and often not accepted. “You
could not do anything to prevent it. When a person chooses that this is what
they ultimately want, they will do it and there is nothing you can do to stop
it.” “They did it because they would rather die than experience the life they
have in their situation and circumstances, and they found no other option.”
“They didn’t do this to you. They did
this to themselves. They chose how to handle their own life and it was about
them. Just because you are saddened does not mean they did something terrible
to you.” It is true. Most people tend to say the suicidal are selfish, when in
fact, the truer act of greed comes from trying to convince a person to live
when they would rather not merely because you
think you know what is best for them,
or you would be sad without them in your life.
When a
person in combat is under attack from an enemy or taken prisoner and their
situation will inevitably lead to their death, they will often take their own
life first. This is not seen as cowardly or insane. No one in their right mind
would advise going through trials of torture and suffering a slow and agonizing
death over ending it yourself quickly. In this type of situation, suicide has
been often encouraged in many countries for a number of centuries. It is even
still seen now as an honorable act if there is no other life-granting
opportunity. However, if a person is being tortured and driven mad by their own
mind and/or emotions, it is gutless. How is it really any different? The burden
that our own thoughts and feelings can cause and having to live through it can
be far more traumatizing than keel hauling.
Some
would consider it even reasonable to commit suicide if one was suffering a
terminal and painful illness. In fact, dogs and cats are often put down for
this reason, and the veterinarians surely don’t ask the animal what they want
first. It is merely assumed that it is for the better well-being that the animal
not suffers any longer. There are doctors around the world that have been known
to administer drugs to patients for a peaceful ending, given that the patient
has undergone proper medical analysis and is coherent and completely aware of
their decision. This process is more extensive and takes intense scrutinizing
of the patient’s mental and physical condition than any course a veterinarian
takes before making the choice for an animal, and yet most of these doctors are
ridiculed, and threatened for assisting suicide. Some of them have even been
sued for malpractice, which is about as reasonable and proactive as suing any
hardware supplier for selling the rope that someone used to hang themselves, or
an architect for designing a tall building that someone used to jump from.
If there
is one thing that ought to be said considering the act of suicide, it should be
agreed it is that it is a very difficult decision and is far from cowardly. The
one thing that every human has is their incontrovertible right to choose
whether or not they will take their own life. It is the biggest and heaviest
decision that a person can make, and not that many people have the balls to. The
person that chooses to commit suicide is not pathetic in their endeavor, but in
complete control, a fortune that few have on their death beds. Who are we to
question them?
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