Have you ever contemplated suicide? Do you happen to know someone who might have seriously considered it or even attempted it? Are you sure you don’t? Suicide is veiled in controversy and social guilt. Success rates in suicide are unexpectedly low (as low as 1 successful attempt every 30). Apparently, it is much harder to take one’s own life that it might seem to.
What is suicide after all? Is it an act of utter cowardice, an easy way out of the existential angst? Or is it an act of ultimate bravery, a rebellion of free will against the tyranny of the genome infused in every single cell of our bodies?
Some philosophers have defended the right to suicide, others have passionately criticized it. Kant deemed it an act of irrationality. Hume released it from its scholastic condemnation. The romantics glorified it. Ultimately, the twentieth century existentialists pondered over its potential as an act of conscious liberty. Camus called it “the one truly serious philosophical problem”. Sartre, spoke of it as “an opportunity to stake out our understanding of our essence as individuals in a godless world”.
To me, being a materialist of sorts, sober suicide seems like an unattainable end, an act of almost superhuman realization. But in real life, suicide is often something completely different, such as the ill end of the impossibly common clinical condition called depression. Suicide in this case is to be averted the same way death by any potentially terminal disease is to be averted.
Depression is a silent enemy. It is all around us but it is so much shunned by prejudice and misunderstanding that more often than not we are not able to notice it. Someone close to you might be suffering from it. Like that familiar heroine of Aemilius Zutch, one of my favorite yet largely unknown authors.
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After the angst-filled adolescence and the troubled twenties, she first thought about suicide when she was 35.
It happened silently upon her without warning. One day, she was sitting in the tepid water of her bath and suicide was no longer unthinkable. Impossible. Distant. She could do it if she wanted to and then the strife would simply end. Nor did it seem so terrible for her loved ones any longer. For them it would be an end to something but also a beginning to something else.
By then she was a happy mother of a two-year-old, a much-loved wife, a successful professional with her own private physiotherapy practice. Nevertheless, the flavour had somehow been taken out of these minor pleasures and successes and with every day that she woke up to face, in her mind there were only difficulties and pain. She had argued at work over a difficult case. Her baby was refusing food and crying all the time. She had a raging toothache for the better part of the week that she hadn’t been able to take care of. She was feeling weak. She was getting old.
Sitting in the grey water in the tub, she found herself thinking about suicide the way she thought about preparing dinner, without excitement or other emotion aside from interest. In her matter-of-fact contemplation of the previously unthinkable thought she went so far as to look around for potential instruments that could be used to realise it. Her lady razors were the most obvious tool but the thought of all that blood repulsed her. As an afterthought, she wondered if perhaps she wouldn’t warm to them in time as she had to the thought of killing herself. There was also the possibility of using an electrical appliance, the hairdryer being equally handy in the bathroom, but she no idea how effective that was going to be and she shuddered at the thought of the questions raised by a botched attempt. She calmly decided to research the idea at a later time.
It was hard to say at which point her actions had become automatic. The myriad little tasks she did during the day, the smiles she gave and the tender intimacies she reserved for her chosen few, they no longer came from her. They had become absently performed rituals that someone else was following and she herself had become a ghost. In passing she reflected that a faint existence like that should be easy enough to kill.
The following day, after waking up, she still had the taste of suicide in her mouth. She took to doing her toilet, applying her beauty routine, brushing her teeth and still the taste of suicide lingered. She put breakfast out for the little one and she wasn’t bothered by it. She chose outfit for the day and she wasn’t bothered. The taste of suicide had become inextricable to the morning’s everyday tasks.
Afterwards, she seemed to forget about it for days. She went for lunch, she did her sessions, she made love, she planned for the Christmas dinner and a skiing holiday. In all these actions she was becoming more and more a ghost. A woman without meaning. A shell of pointless, disgusting biology. And through all of it, suicide still lingered.