Suicide is generally considered a religious problem: it’s a sin to commit suicide and you’ll go to hell. You can’t be buried with the nice people. It’s also a legal problem: the penalty for trying to kill yourself is involuntary life -- which is not very different from death. And now it’s seen as a medical problem: the blood molecules that make you want to die. Or you inherited it. Or maybe it’s a family voice in your head: “You earned it, you worthless screwup. Just do it.” A few states will let you die early to spare you a few months of terminal suffering. Spies are expected to use their poison pill as a way of protecting everyone else, as well as escaping torture. In Japan one commits suicide because of being disgraced, as a matter of honor. Then, of course, there were the Kamikazes. Once in a while suicide is a political act.
Re-enactment of the two people who hung themselves from a Portland bridge just as Amtrack passed under them.
No one remembers what their cause was.
This powerful piece of writing is about wanting suicide because of the suffering of depression, because somehow not feeling anything is a kind of torture. A young mother I know of in Canada who tried the usual drugs, electroconvulsive therapy, and so on has finally turned around because of intravenous infusions of ketamine, a cat and horse tranquilizer that is a popular street drug. http://www.bbc.com/news/health-26647738
No one knows how it works. So much of treating depression is like trying to fix an old-fashioned TV set by pounding on it. Ketamine may be like the dopamine discovery in Robin Williams’ movie “Awakenings.” In a while everything goes back. Like Robin.
I’ve thought a lot about suicide, more as a peripheral participant than a person considering it, because of being a minister. At seminary no course was offered in how to handle suicide threats. The first one I met was a public man who had molested his daughter, had been promised no prosecution if he got treatment, and then was exposed by the DA because he was up for election and needed to sound tough on crime. I tried to talk this man out of his intention, failed, then did his memorial service -- as he asked.
There was a pair of aged professors, one demented and the other so devoted to him that she killed him and then herself. She had left little notes all over the house with instructions about things like when the furnace filter was last changed. The one that impressed me was the sticky on her wristwatch telling when the battery would run out. Talk about a control freak. Suicide as ultimate control. She had not understood that when you die, other people buy your house and change everything. Not just the furnace filter, the whole furnace. They don’t even comply with your legal will.
Another woman was suicidal without me knowing it, though I’d stayed in her house. I didn’t find out until a few years after I left that she had finally succeeded. In retrospect it wasn’t hard to see. No one missed her much. Her husband quickly remarried.
Of my former rez students who have killed themselves (a mix of white and enrolled) the ones who weren’t just self-destructive, daring the devil all their lives, were extra-intelligent and gifted. Some would argue that made them more vulnerable. When there was a known cause for the suicide of a young man, it was almost always about love, sometimes same sex.
My kind, gentle professor/advisor at seminary had a son, a handsome jet pilot who seemed to glitter as he walked. He shot his fiancé and then himself. The doors slammed shut and we never knew more than that. At least I didn’t.
When I tried to really hear people who had come to say they want to commit suicide, (esp. kids) I say, “Well, all right. But if you really think you MUST do that, please call me first even if it’s the middle of the night. I won’t tell the cops or try to prevent you, but I’ll try to help you think of options. Because that’s the FINAL option and you might be missing another one. When you’re considering suicide, your brain goes flat.” I really meant it. They never called.
But that only works with people who are blocked, frustrated, and out of patience -- just need a delay. Some people are not chemically, organically depressed, but nevertheless in a genuine state of suffering that is near unbearable. That’s easy to see in someone with cancer or trauma that won’t respond to painkillers. Or someone who’s had an enormous personal loss, like someone they loved deeply or even a home or job they loved. These days people lose their country.
It’s hard to witness when the suffering is the result of social torture as in the situation of -- try to imagine -- a boy with HIV he caught from survival sexwork while living in a cardboard box with infected skin, hunger headaches, exposure to cold rain at the very least, a glue-huffing habit -- the kind of boy who is invisible because his situation is too desperate to think about. Don’t you secretly WANT him to die? Don’t you think he can feel that? Don’t you think some suicides are more like murder?
It’s hard to witness when the suffering is the result of social torture as in the situation of -- try to imagine -- a boy with HIV he caught from survival sexwork while living in a cardboard box with infected skin, hunger headaches, exposure to cold rain at the very least, a glue-huffing habit -- the kind of boy who is invisible because his situation is too desperate to think about. Don’t you secretly WANT him to die? Don’t you think he can feel that? Don’t you think some suicides are more like murder?
Jessamyn West
Jessamyn West was Richard Nixon’s cousin, but don’t hold that against her. She was nothing like him. You might know her as the author of the book from which the movie “The Friendly Persuasion” was developed. That word “persuasion” has a little more bite when you realize that Anthony Perkins, the star, despite marriage and children, had relationships with men and died of AIDS-related pneumonia. Berry Berenson, his wife, died a decade later when her plane flight crashed into the North Tower on 9/ll. That’s all true but irrelevant here.
Jessamyn’s sister developed cancer and Jessamyn agreed to help her die when it became unbearable. No one else can say when something is unbearable, but they talked it out, with the sister’s husband -- not quite so steely -- as a sort of fellow-traveler. The decision was that when the sister had less than an hour a day when she was coherent and relatively pain-free, she would end her life with pills (they had hoarded some) and alcohol. They did that. Jessamyn wrote two books about it, one fictionalizing it to avoid being arrested for murder, and then later when the laws changed, a nonfiction version. These two books are always in the back of my mind when I think about suicide.
Kevorkian had a connection to my home church in Portland because his first client, Janet Adkins, was a member there. She took spiritual guidance from the Reverend Alan Deale, the Portland Unitarian minister in the Seventies. He felt she knew what she was doing, had a right to her own mind, and blessed her. Oregon and Montana are both Right to Die states.
Let's hope he's tying the boy's shoe, not attaching shackles.
This is not the same as that street boy I described earlier because if the boy gives the slightest hint he is self-destructive, he will be seized, incarcerated with people who will make his life even worse, denied medicine, denied hope. He’s a little rat and we play “helper” with him.
If I were Mother Theresa I would be trekking up to Shelby to the private prison to try to redeem inmates. I probably know them or their parents. But I am NOT Mother T. Mother T is a “Martha” if you know the Biblical story. I’m Mary. I’m going to sit here and figure this damn social puzzle out. You should do the same. Prevention. PREVENTION. We know how. We don’t do it. Why?
"To See Eternity": Bob Scriver's portrait of his dying daughter, Margaret.
She was Catholic and toughed it out to the end.
She was Catholic and toughed it out to the end.
The tack I take against the wind, that will eventually blow us all away anyhow, is to get people to think carefully about what would tip the scales into doing it -- for them personally. It might be the pain, maybe not. Much of fatal disease is humiliating. My stepdaughter was shamed by her colostomy, sure we could smell it. Disease and its treatment put you pretty much out of control so that when you’ve had enough, you might not be able to manage suicide. I recommend that people write themselves a letter in which they figure out their tipping point and how they will cope. Write, because that makes it more concrete and objective, but burn it or people will read it and interfere. You may realize that your mind has slipped away too much to write and in that case you probably will not be able to find a way to send your body after your mind. Soon you won’t be you, just your surviving cell-colony. Don’t worry about it. Let it go.
The boy in the cardboard box can easily step off an overpass, hang from a tree, overdose. “Nice” people have it harder in this one regard: people will rush to intervene. Too often the only intervention we offer the street boys is a bullet, but they won’t be able to afford even one cartridge, much less a gun. So . . . death by cop. So easy.
