Thoughts on Suicide

I am a member of a circle of moms who have been conversing online for years, and the subject of suicide is one of our topics right now, due to some experiences in addition to my own family's. With some editing to avoid personal exposure, here's some of what I have to say these days:

I don't believe that suicide is a choice, I don't believe in using terminology like "commit suicide," and I find that I probably no longer believe in assisted suicide. That's not to say that I believe in heroic and unwarranted lifesaving methods when a person is close to death, and having observed such situations many times during my CPE experience summer before last, I am in complete sympathy with those who suffer end-of-life indignities and with their desire to put a stop to them. But humanely removing life support systems is quite different from actively ending a life, even if sometimes only in the motivation involved.

I have had plenty of hours (14 months x 24/7) to think about it and I am convinced that suicide is a complication of mental illness. Even a person who seems to have died as he or she lived -- perhaps selfishly and insisting upon control - was suffering from something. Ending one's bodily existence and all of one's connections to people on earth is too extreme a move for me to think of it as anything other than a consequence of serious illness. I doubt that it is even possible for a suicidal person to understand the consequences of his or her actions, to him or herself even moreso than to others. Sometimes I think that our son was selfish for not seeking help somewhere along the way, but then I realize that that behavior is part of the illnesses of depression and of personality disorders. The sufferer has no way of knowing that what s/he is experiencing is out of the ordinary, and most of us have no way of knowing that another person's secret thoughts and terrors are far different and beyond our own.

As far as the methods by which someone dies by suicide: they are all assaults on the human body. Most likely a person is not thinking at all in the way the rest of us do, or perhaps even the way she or she does most of the time, and is not making choices that are designed either to cause or to ease pain for the surviviors. I have gained considerable insight in the last year into how thin the line is between ordinary rationality and something else, into how easy it is to move into a dangerous frame of mind, and into how quickly a person can take an action that is irreversible and produces devastating shock waves that will ripple outward for generations. Our son was was one the kindest, most generous, and most gentle people I have ever encountered; he, more than perhaps anyone, would be horrified by the outcomes, in all aspects, of his death.

I don't mind discussing this subject at all, BTW. I find I am far more comfortable with it than I was before my son died, probably because it is always the foremost thing in my mind and because I have learned so much about it that it is no longer taboo for me. People sometimes tell me that they appreciate my forthrightness and transparency, but those are simply products of my refusal to deny or hide sad experience.