On Suicide: The Living and The DeadA comment from a reader states:
it’s confusing sometimes…people tell us that we need to change and get over things..that we are ruining their lives-so we figure they are better off w/o us and in fear of ruining our families lives…we decide it just might be the answer after all. We hurt so much we are ready for it to be over…we don’t want to hurt anyone in doing so, but we are already hurting them now anyway. so what so we do? pray for death?
Austin says:
I thought I’d do an entry on this because it’s come up a few times in private 3D conversations as well as in a few journal entries of mine.
The biggest reason that suicide hurts others more than it relieves the dead is that the living are left with too many un-answered questions. As a survivor, I know that I take responsibility for faults that are not my own. I take on the burdens, the mistakes and the crimes of others and wonder why on earth I didn’t do this or that right so the situation would come out differently. I have found that this is a human response and not one that is primarily an abuse survivor’s issue. To illustrate this, let’s think about the surviving person of a car crash. Say everyone in the car died save one person. It is common for that sole survivor to wonder why he was left alive and why the others didn’t live. Even though the case wasn’t of suicide it still centers on a sudden and unexpected death. The questions that the survivor has are often haunting and life altering. He may sometimes feel he would have been better off had he perished in the car accident. Many times the grief that eats at our bones is worse than death itself. If you think about a person that is the survivor of a suicide victim the questions they have are much more intense and much more disturbing. (“Suicide victim” is the appropriate phrase. We are often victims of our own mind and it is from this mind that we seek refuge in death) There were most likely years of struggling with the victim and years of trying this or that to help them. When the person does take their life it may feel to others that they simply didn’t do enough to keep their loved one from suffering. Do you realize that you can never tell them exactly why you chose that day to die? You can never tell them that they did or did not do enough, that they did or did not understand you. The questions you leave behind and the grief that follows when there are no answers is to me, like passing on the grief I would seek to end. Yes, people would move on but I’d steel from them valuable days and nights. My mother stole the same things from me, sleep, happiness, closeness and peace of mind. Can I justify taking my life and passing on grief to another person who has not ever hurt me to the extent that my mother has? No. I can’t. I use to think I could. When a friend of mine killed herself a few years back it became clear to me that I personally can not justifiably take my own life. I’ve tried over 15 times. I’ve got about 10 serious attempts and at least 3 near fatal ones. I consider myself to be an expert on what doesn’t work!
There are many days when I think death would be better than living in my own mind. Of all the emotions I feel, anger, fear, depression and grief, joy and love, humiliation comes out on top by a land slide. This life I lead is humiliating. It’s degrading and many times it’s intolerable. Remembering what was done to me, remembering in my sleep and in waking hours, not recognizing myself when I look in the mirror, not recognizing my friends, my roommate, my dog, being afraid I’m going to run into my mother, just being afraid… it’s all so much to deal with that sometimes I think death would be better. But if I put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger I take all my hardships and pass them onto people that don’t deserve it the same as I didn’t deserve to be hurt.
This will sound rather hypocritical or contradictory but I don’t feel that suicide is a selfish act. I think suicide is often the result of terminal mental illness the same as death is the result of terminal cancer. There are times when the body and the mind simply give out. In my opinion the word selfish has no place in the same conversation as suicide. Many times when a person takes their life they worry that their family will be better off without them. The struggles we go through in our head, in our hearts… it can’t be summed up on one word such as selfish.
I can’t tell another person that they should or should not take their life. What I can do is tell you my perspective as the surviving friend of a suicide victim. In death the victim leaves behind more grief than they feel they caused in life. I’d like to as my friend Berlin what went wrong the day she took her life. I’d like to know why I didn’t get to say good bye. I’d like to know if she thought there would be people that would be angry with her or if she wrote and asked people not to be angry with her. I’d like to know if she realizes that when she killed herself she gave many people the okay to follow in her footsteps and if she realizes that while she lie asleep in death I still cry and grieve for her?
You might be asking yourself, well, what about all she was going through? I know. I know so well because as I said, I’ve tried numerous times to take my own life. So I know what she was going through. I know what it feels like to need to die, not just to want to die but to need to die. And now I know what it feels like to stand at the other end and wonder what I could have said or done to make a difference.
So what do we do? You asked if we should pray for death. We should keep going. We should take each and every tiny victory and hold it tightly. We should understand each failing and recognize it as a part of being a frail human. We should reach out to other people and not be caught in our own world. We should understand that without connection to others healing will be retarded and dwarfed in ways it should never be. We keep going… and we keep journaling.
Austin
Dignity and homelessness
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