And just because of that, you have the right to inflict the pain on your loved ones and friends?
Couple of things, Frizz.
First, I'd like to point out that no matter how much pain your loved ones may go through because you're gone, they ain't dead, so they can shut up and stop moaning.
Notwithstanding the case quoted above, of the British mother who walked into the same train as her daughter, the pain a loved one goes through simply ain't up to the pain the sucide himself must have been feeling to commit the act. The suicide's pain is less than that of his loved ones? Or less important? I don't think so.
You recover from grief. You don't recover from death.
Second, if a suicide genuinely has loved ones who would grieve over him, he's much less likely to suffer suicidal depression in the first place.
Third, those so-called loved ones have often contributed to the suicide's motives. Depression doesn't just come out of nowhere. It's often the result of systematic long-term abuse or neglect.
I know that if I had chosen suicide as an answer to my own depression, my parents would have been angry as fuck. Yet they both regularly threatened me with death for misbehaviour.
If my dad ever found drugs on my person, he assured me he would administer a lethal dose, since I was as good as dead. My mother made up some cockamamie theory that if I ever got a girl pregnant, she'd rather I be dead so she could pretend her grandchild was an orphan rather than a bastard.
They would later maintain that such threats were meant to ensure my good behaviour. What they actually did was convince me that my life wasn't worth very much--a lesson difficult to unlearn.
Had I chosen to commit suicide as an answer to the depression this engendered, it wouldn't have been to spite them. It would have been to cut my own losses.
I have a friend whose mother was a survivor of the concentration camps. She bore two children, and after, she finally succumbed to post traumatic mental illness brought on, they say, by PND. Her sons were shunted from boarding-school to boarding school. Not surprisingly, he had chosen distant, neglectful women for "loved ones". And he blamed the fact that he was born at all for his mother's misery.
My pal was chronically depressed and hinted at suicide from time to time. I knew enough about the disease to intervene with offers of personal help, and the contact details for mental health resources. I asked if he shared this with his (then) wife, and what her reaction was. She berated him for thinking such a selfish thought, and threatened him with...well, it wasn't actually clear what she threatened him with, since he already made it clear he was prepared to die.
Suicide is selfish? What, like taking the last cookie in the box, passing on the collection plate, or tax-cuts for the rich? "If you're a good little boy, mommy will let you have a treat. Which would you like, honey? Ice-cream or cyanide?"
The gay US writer Robert Goolrick wrote a memoir called
The End of the World as We Know It. His childhood was filled with sexual and emotional abuse. An early suicide, he observes, would have saved him from a painful and loveless life. He resisted, he says, because of the pain it would have caused parents and siblings who, from the story, had no qualms about inflicting pain on
him. He writes of an imaginary button which, if pressed, could just erase him. Make it as though he never existed. The imaginary button was located on his right thigh. Oddly, so was mine.
The grieving-loved-ones anti-suicide argument just doesn't wash with me.
Depicting a sucicide as a whiny brat who just wants attention trivialises a truckload of human misery.
Ultimately, the choice is a
moral one. My respect for life, in principle, keeps me from ever acting on a suicidal thought. That said, I make no moral judgements of others. And until you've been there, neither should you, Frizz.