The Wrong Choice
- Image by Creations Look Divine via Flickr
So after writing about suicide last week—in support of the legality of assisted suicide—I’m now thinking about another side of the issue. The terrible part of killing oneself, the reprehensible part, when it is done so that it hurts other people. A distinction should be made, of course, between choosing to end one’s life when faced with incurable, worsening illness and doing so for reasons of depression. But I also realize we’re on slippery turf when we start trying to diagnose like doctors. When we’re not doctors.
I wrote a post for The Awl yesterday on the sad news that Mark Linkhous, who recorded music under the name Sparklehorse, had killed himself Saturday. He shot himself in the chest outside a friend’s house. My editor Choire immediately added a comment pointing out the selfishness inherent. “Fuck you, Mark Linkhous,” he wrote. Having lost a number of friends to suicide, having suffered suicidal feelings himself, Choire said, “I have a policy that people who commit suicide need to be roundly rejected for their acts.”
I think this was a good thing to write. But another commenter said that he felt it displayed “an extreme lack of empathy” for the pain that anyone who attempts suicide must be feeling. I responded that I thought it was possible to both feel empathy for someone in pain, while also condemning a decision that would then spread further pain around the world. Another commenter then wrote, “It is very, very hard to do both things.” Her mother’s attempt at suicide, she said, had had a devastating affect the rest of her family. “On most days, I don’t think it’s her fault… a combination of bad medications and mental illness can be deadly. But on some days, I think she was incredibly selfish and that one act shattered our family.”
Then things got a little frightening. Another commenter wrote:
Some of us just don’t want to get old. Some of us have no control over anything in our lives except our deaths. Some of us feel like it wouldn’t affect anyone if we did kill ourselves because we don’t have kids or husbands or wives or girlfriends or boyfriends or friends, but only very distant family members. Some of us don’t want to continue this unbearable life that’s only going to get worse just because there’s the off chance that it may hurt someone else. Some of us hope that our true friend(s) would understand that this was the only way for us to stop the pain. Some of us just don’t want to get old. And some of us think it’s none of your business what we do with our lives.
Not having a direct email for this commenter, Choire responded in public:
It actually is my business what you do with your life. You’re right here, in my community, on the same Internet as me, hanging out on my website. I follow you on Twitter now, which is a lively and funny thing. Still, we don’t know each other! Your friends will, I’m sorry to tell you, actually disagree with you that death is the only way to ’stop the pain.’ That is incorrect. You are wrong. I encourage you to continue to think about this further. One never knows what is going to happen in life. The long years when I was extensively depressed, I pretty much believed as you did. And after depression lifts? Those thoughts and conclusions that seemed so reasonable no longer make any sense whatsoever.
This would be my point, too. The connection we do have to other people goes beyond our choosing. To say, “It’s no one else’s business what I do with my life,” does not make it so.
My younger sister’s boyfriend killed himself when she was 18. He was a musician and addicted to drugs, and she had been trying to end their relationship for more than a year. They’d recently had a conversation on the phone that ended with him telling her that he hoped she could live with herself. He shot himself in his parent’s house, with his father’s gun, while his mother was home. I can’t imagine a more violent, aggressive, hateful thing to do. It was as if he was trying to take the whole world out with him.
He did a pretty good job of it. I’ll never forget the sound of my sister’s voice when she called to tell me the news. It was a type of pain I wouldn’t wish on anyone, least of all someone I loved, someone who I’d want to protect from such a thing. The sound has stayed with me; too much of the pain has stayed with my sister. So for all the empathy I feel for the terrible, terrible state this guy must have been in at the time—and I do feel empathy—there is also an anger at him, for a selfish, hateful act that became very much my business whether I wanted it to or not. “Fuck you,” is right.
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I don’t buy it. Our time and place and method of death is one of the very few significant choices left to us. The people who feel their lives are meaningless, to themselves or to others, have the inherent right to feel that and make decisions accordingly.
Having said that, the emotional fallout and physical devastation left by someone’s suicide is hideous. It is aggressive. To have to face the dead body of someone you care about, let alone shattered by gunfire, is unimaginable.
But, as someone who has felt those impulses, as I think many of us have at times, I certainly understand them and empathize with them. I am grateful I did not act on those impulses, but I know how one can feel that simply disappearing from the torments of a life that is persistently not working would be the smartest choice to make, for you and the people who love you.
Most people do not get a choice about their time or place of death…. be it accident illness what have you, most have no say in the matter.I guess I don’t comprehend that statement
Disappearing is one thing, fine just go away and leave if it is so bad for you, but a final -shoot yourself in the basement- gruesome death is nothing but selfish, meant to punish those that wronged the person, real or imagined.
In these days, there is so much help available to treat depression and other problems, it is just a cowards way to leave the world and so I agree, a big FU to those that make a mess and expect others to clean up after you…. if they took some responsibility and thought of others, maybe they would not be so inclined to off themselves.
Of course that is awfully harsh and I can see how those thoughts harm the ones left behind but I don’t like giving glowing praise to the decision to give others the idea that it is OK.
In response to another comment. See in context »Please see my comment below about the role of rational thought, and try to truly rethink through your assumptions about suicidally depressed people. Educate yourself more before judging. Otherwise, all I can hope is that no one you know ever suffers from severe depression, because you’ll be incapable of guiding them to that supposedly abundant help.
In response to another comment. See in context »I agree with what you’re saying, but one element is nagging at me. Maybe I’m overthinking, but who are you really saying ‘fuck you’ to? Not the dead person. Or, if you are, s/he is certainly not getting the message. Family and friends will hear it and maybe feel the same way — or not.
I think, yeah, the ‘fuck you’ is to the dead person. In full knowledge that he or she can’t get the message. What I thought was so interesting about the policy of voicing that anger, of calling out the selfishness of suicide, and the aggression, and condemning it in no uncertain terms, was that it’s done in the hope of dissuading other people suffering depression from making the same choice. Again, I don’t mean to say that we can’t or shouldn’t feel empathy for someone in such a great amount of pain. We can and should. But also, we should condemn. Because, due to fact of human connection, the situation is rarely as simply as “it’s my life… it’s only myself that I’ll be hurting…” Others will likely be hurt, and in a way that is irreversible.
In response to another comment. See in context »But you’re thinking in terms of a rational thought process here, like a lesson is there to be learned if only they’d listen, but people in deep depression are largely incapable of thinking rationally, so they can’t really get the message when they’re still alive either. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to talk to someone deep in the throes of depression. It’s extraordinarily difficult to get them to accept how things really are as opposed to what their brain is telling them about reality. So to claim that they’re being selfish (and making “a choice”) is to assign entirely too much rational thought to them. And it breaks my heart to think that so many people do that anyway, because it only helps perpetuate narrow-minded thinking about depression that ultimately helps no one.
In response to another comment. See in context »This is very sloppy thinking: On the one hand suicide is the result of “depression” which doctors assure us is a perfectly respectable disease. It obviously absurd (though common) to blame someone for dying of a disease. If suicide is the conscious act of a more or less sentient being then clearly, the suicide did not consider your disapproval to be a very serious thing. The fact is that many people have interests which outweigh the natural desire to continue breathing. I’m not familiar with Mark Linkhous’s music but if he was hoping to achieve immortality through it suicide is certainly an orthodox strategy.