Suicide, and Hope for Our Future Selves

I was thinking about my dear friend Jim while running in the woods yesterday. Jim was my wife's only son who ended his life eight years ago after wrestling with his inner demons for a long time. I miss his company and think about him often, still. Like probably everyone, I have had occasional encounters with the suicide of friends and acquaintances and celebrities known to all and strangers. The ones that stand out most in my memory were the three attempted suicides that I prevented when I was a high school teacher. I sometimes wonder if those three students are still with us; I wonder if showing them that someone cared at just the right time made a lasting difference; I wonder whether they grew to become fulfilled, happy adults.

Young people may be the most vulnerable among us, and the most precious when we lose them to suicide. I have read that suicide claims more young lives than accidents and that suicide is a greater cause of death among soldiers than battlefield mortality. It seems a sad waste, yet I think most of us can probably identify with the desire to end it all at some point in life. I have suffered occasional bouts of depression and have become despondent at times, wishing I was anywhere else but where I was. The thought of returning to that peaceful mystery from whence I have come has occurred to me on several desperate occasions, but a general fighting lust for living has always stood in the way of entertaining such thoughts seriously. I love life, but I also relish the struggle, the suffering, and the pure sensations that shower me daily through my mind and senses in this abundant incarnation. I think the thing that would stop me from exiting this life prematurely, more than any other, would be an understanding of how suicide would hurt the people that love me, and others that I know as well. Suicide seems selfish in that regard, so I choose to stick around and live through every challenge, no matter how difficult, for myself and for the other people in my life.

What can we say about helping others achieve this same perspective? I sense that there are people in my circle today that entertain the notion of suicide. Just today I read where a young girl hung herself live on Facebook. But just what can one do or say to help those in a moment of personal crisis to live through their overwhelming dificulties and not abruptly and tragically end it all?

A great many people who think about suicide claim that it is because they think they are a burden; they've been depressed for awhile, maybe they've had a humiliating blow in life - a breakup in a relationship, trouble at work, some embarrassing legal challenge. They think very poorly of themselves at the moment. What anyone contemplating suicide needs to understand is that suicide is an exponentially greater burden to those left behind. The person thinking about suicide is not thinking about the effect on those left behind - not just family and friends that get hit the hardest, but people at a distance that may only have some vague connection. It's not just grief and the sense of irreversible loss; people are left empty, often feeling guilty thinking about what they might have done to make a difference. Then there is the anger at those who left you without saying goodbye, the selfishness of it, followed by guilt over that anger. A whole cycle of emotion may carry forward for years, even a lifetime, in the wake of a suicide. That is the unforeseen legacy that suicide leaves.

The message we must convey to anyone we know who may be lurking in the shadow of suicide is: Your staying alive means so much more than you may be aware of at this moment. We are all in this together in some unfathomably profound way. Take strength from that. Suicide may seem like an individual matter right now, but because of our interwoven, enmeshed personal connections, not a one of us in apart from the rest. When you die, a part of each of us dies. You owe it to other people and to your own future self to stay. We all have ups and downs; we fall in love and we lose love; why let the lowest of moments cut you off from experiencing the happy times your future self will have? Remind your down mood that the happy mood is still there within, waiting to return. Suicide is always impulsive, and if you can just get past it with some sort of conceptual rationalization in your head you will be able to continue through the worst of personal challenges. None of us can know just how much we mean to other people and none of us can know what wonderful things our future self will experience. To continue to live is an act of courage. Be brave. For now, just stay.

Historically, society has both demonized suicide and celebrated it as a moral freedom. Rather than look it it from the perspectives of morality or as a right, perhaps we should combat it from the standpoint that we all have an essential need for each other. When I was in college I read a lot of existential philosphers, many of whom took their own lives as a measure of total control. Among those writers was Albert Camus. In his book, The Myth of Sisyphus, he postulated that there is really only one philosophical problem we each need to address in life: the question of suicide. Camus said that life is absurd, there is no outer reason to keep on living, but he also said that suicide is the wrong choice. Life is worth living and just when you think that now is time to exit, it is worth sticking around to see just how it is all going to play out. He argued that we all need to have some respect for our future self who is going to know things that we don't know right now. We CAN embrace the weird side of life; we don't have to make everything right and reasonable. We need to stop trying to dot all the i's and stop expecting everything to be fair. Camus' advice was to embrace the absurd and be interested in the unseen future. When people read The Myth of Sisyphus, what most get out of it is an inevitable identification with the character of Sisyphus, imagining him being happy. It has been of remarkable help to many people in helping them find an alternative to suicide. I'll always wish Jim could have found the happiness of Sisyphus.

from "No Hemlock Rock" by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Poison yourself, it poisons the well;
shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome.
I will give badges to everyone who's figured
this out about suicide, and hence
refused it. I am grateful. Stay. Thank
you for staying. Please stay. You
are my hero for staying. I know
about it, and am grateful you stay.

Eat a donut. Rhyme opus with lotus.
Rope is bogus, psychosis. Stay.
Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus.
Dare not to kill yourself. I won't either.