Isn't That Kurt Cobain Whispering, "Don't Be Frightened"?
If we support reproductive choice, how can we oppose suicide?
I know what I’m talking about. I had two uncles. The one I loved — the one who was a wonderful friend to me when I was a fervently self-loathing, miserable teenager — successfully poisoned himself on his second try. The Black Dog’s relentlessness notwithstanding, I’ve never been up on a ledge, but God knows there’ve been lots of times when I couldn’t imagine being able to bear much more of the pain of being alive. I wish I could say that what’s kept me off ledges is my disinclination to cause those few who love me great pain, but it may very well be more a question of cowardice. I a little acrophobic.
The photograph is apparently of a guy who was about to leap to his death when a group of fellow Londoners heroically restrained him until the fire brigade or cops could get there. The person who captioned the photo thought it showed how gloriously kind people can be.
I see something very different. I see a bunch of people who have no idea of how much pain the prospective jumper might have been in imposing their view of The Sanctity of Life on him, much as Christofascist zealots try to impose their own view of TSOL on pregnant women.
If God finds suicide so offensive, why did He/She make it so easy? (Wait. Wait. Don’t tell me. Because He/She is testing us?)
How, if he’d come to find his pain unendurable, did the guy in the photo’s “rescuers” imagine themselves qualified to say, with their intervention, “Let a smile be your umbrella on a rainy afternoon,” or [substitute a line from your own favorite ode to human resilience here]? The arrogance!
I wonder how many of the intervenors asked the cops or fire brigade to make sure the might-have-been jumper had their contact details, so he could ring them for consolation if his suffering again became more than he felt able to withstand. Or maybe they felt that it was quite enough that they’d so vividly signaled their virtue by keeping him from doing what he’d decided was best for him.
As one who’s been stalked by the Black Dog since the age of six, I hate it passionately when my fellow shopper feels called upon to ask an apparently disheartened supermarket cashier, “Why don’t you try smiling?”
Right. And why don’t you try fucking off?
Do some people revel in their own misery? Of course. Is that both sad and obnoxious? Fuckin’ A. But is it any stranger’s business? No, not unless the stranger’s prepared to follow up, as I doubt few of the intervenors on the bridge were. If you’re not prepared to insist that the miserable-looking person let you buy them a cappuccino or sandwich and tell you in detail why they’re miserable, mind your own business.
Full disclosure: If the prospective leaper is likely to hurt someone beneath him or her, I fully support strangers restraining him. And I of course acknowledge that some prospective leapers are up there solely because they want another human being to seem to value them. I guess the best idea is to ask. If they admit that they were just desperate for attention, then by all means intervene.
Here’s a song I wrote in 2005 about suicidal despair. Tom George sings. Dazza du Toit guitars. I arrange and play that which Dazza did not. Nick Drake was an English songwriter and singer.
In 1964 I joined my relatives in sitting death watch over my uncle who was dying of Hodgkins disease. a muscular 180 lb man had rotted away to an 80 lb living corpse that smelled of death.
The attending doctor informed me that he was on morphine pills, that the morphine pills were counted, and if I gave him any morphine other than as directed I would be guilty of murder.
My uncle came to, saw me and asked me to please give him the pills, I cried, I'm sorry but I can't, this was in Christofascist god fearing Texas.
I now live in a liberal paradise, and in the last year two of my wife's relatives, a brother and an uncle, chose euthanasia, over the lingering suffering of throat cancer and congestive heart failure.
If it gets that bad,, I am going to self euthanize
In my opinion, the decision to self euthanize is a personal choice, and I will not stand in the way of a persons choice.
I used to be fervently against suicide. I come from 3 generations of this and my brother is now teetering on the edge. And I'll say this: Without warning, it hits like a concussion bomb through generations. And you have no idea the harm that travels into the future. Everyone is left with wondering why, and a deep sadness is just there. I had a "normal" childhood, but there was just sadness in the air that no one talked about.
I've changed my viewpoint on all this.
A. You hit this: if you "save" someone from suicide, you better be committed to devoting a good portion of your life to saving them forever.
B. You grow up not truly downloading the reality of "oh yeah, I'm going to fking die one day and I have no idea how it will happen and no idea how lingering, drawn out, or horrific it might be. And until I had experienced that with someone else, I hadn't given it much thought.
C. So yeah. My body, my choice. If I know that I had some horrific terminal disease that will leave me paralyzed, gasping for air, painful, whatever, then I'm going to make a plan and will be utterly clear with EVERYONE so no one is blindsided. So that people could even, possibly, be happy that I made that choice, or at least they understand.
My brother's depression runs so deep, so hard, it destroyed his life. After a extremely successful career in the movie industry, an amazing marriage to a extremely smart and beautiful woman, a fantastic daughter, he blew it all apart. Every bit of it. And he talks about suicide. And if that happens, I forgive him. idk what it is, but I can feel him. I'll have a bad feeling and get a call the next day that he's been taken to a hospital. I can feel his sadness, it's somewhere around my stomach area, and if this is only a 10th of how he feels, it's unbearable.
So I'm going back to point A. Something I figured out as a little kid. I can't help or change this for a person. Somehow they have to change. I spent so much time as a child trying to make sad grown-ups happy, I understood my job. That's what children bring. I think now, that some people just break upon the way. And no matter how many ropes I throw into the black hole, he's not going to grab any. And it feels too close, that I can be pulled over the edge. He has to find strength to climb out on his own. I changed everything about my life about 13 years ago. It can be done. The black hole is far, far away. But I don't know if it's possible for people to completely realign and change their life outlook. I think maybe I was just lucky.