Suicide Girl?

 

Unbearable Lightness by Steven A Brown

Retoucher Priscila Desingz

Suicide Girl?  No, I am not.

I've written countless times here about my near death experience at age three and how that changed my view of death.  I do not fear it.  Nevertheless, I do not seek or court it either.  My fascination with longevity should tell you how much I want to remain in this world a very long, long time - but, like countless others, on my own terms.

The only freedom we can find in this life comes when we let go of fear, and the cardinal fear we share as humans is of our own death, so where is the cowardice if one elects to take control of it?  Shakespeare's most famous soliloquy deals with exactly that idea.  He asks why we would suffer "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" when suicide is an option...

When he himself might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn
No Traveller returns, Puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus Conscience does make Cowards of us all,
And thus the Native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their Currents turn awry,
And lose the name of Action.

I was surprised at the reaction to my post Coming Back From Adversity.  We use the word suicide for a complex of things:  in the post, I mentioned that my 30x great grandmother Tyra starved herself to death after her husband died.  It might have been just simple depression, or what Josefina described as sheer exhaustion in a comment on the previous post, or perhaps an exercise of the ancient custom of honorable suicide to escape public humiliation, torture, or enslavement by the enemy following loss in a war.  Since Tyra's husband, the King of Norway, died in battle, it is likely she saw honor in a death that saved her from having to wed her husband's murderer.

As a student of literature, I am aware that suicide was not a taboo in antiquity;  Christianity ushered in the first precepts against it.  Prior to that, honor death existed in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.  Although suicide violates Jewish Law, the mass suicide of Jews at Masada to avoid enslavement by ancient Rome is considered an act of heroism by those of the Jewish faith to this day.

A dream last night reminded me of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's great masterpiece Hedda Gabler (1891).   Hedda ends it all when she falls into a trap laid by the local judge to force her into an illicit relationship with him. The play concludes with Hedda's honor suicide, and Ibsen plays up the connection between this act and Hedda's strong connection to her father, the late General Gabler.  Literary critics argue about Hedda:  was she an early feminist who took a stand against a corrupt and misogynistic society or was she a deranged and manipulative villain?  Those of us who know Ibsen as a pioneer for women's rights embrace the former interpretation. 

In that context, I honestly stumbled onto a strong societal taboo.  I have never looked at suicide as universally cowardly or aberrant. There's an implied moral superiority in calling another person weak.  To make suicide an issue of weakness vs. courage implies a condemnation not of the act but of the person, and that is a rather cruel after-the-fact kick in someone's balls. 

In the 1970s I learned in psychology class that people who take their own lives may be acting on the mirror image impulse to one who takes the lives of others.  My preference would be suicide over homicide, that people would kill themselves and not take the rest of us with them.  Which do you prefer:  Tennessee Williams, who swallowed a bottle of pills in a hotel room after a breakup with his longtime lover, or Brynn Omdahl who, distraught over their breakup, murdered husband Phil Hartman.

If you choose death, take that journey alone.  To take others with you - that is cowardice, in my opinion.  That I absolutely decry.  How many murderers have we watched on televised trials who care nothing about the life or lives they took but fight vigorously and shamelessly to keep their own?  A bestial embrace of the life force does not necessarily denote valor.

Assumptions, folks, prejudices, judgements of others without knowing the circumstances - that's what's bothering me about the comment thread on my previous post.  Suicide is one choice no one else can make for you, a pure ACT of free will, and it appears to occur as a result of cultural beliefs.  Here are the top ten countries by suicide rate in 2009/2010:

1 Lithuania
2 South Korea
3 Guyana
4 Kazakhstan
5 Belarus
6 Japan
7 Hungary
8 Russia
9 Latvia
10 Slovenia

I expected to see Japan there;  this is the culture of World War II's Kamikaze. I expected Denmark to be in the top ten, but in fact it is #35;  our perception of the suicidal Dane may have originated with Shakespeare's Hamlet. What I see is a prevalence of Eastern European countries. Having read a fair amount of their literature and studied Russian literature quite thoroughly, I know we are talking about prevalent cultural philosophies - systems of intellectual thought that affect this decision making.

Should we not have as much respect for philosophical/cultural beliefs as we do the Judeo-Christian commandments that have made suicide a taboo?

You may recall I wrote about changing my opinion of removing life support when I watched my mother die in early October. I used to think this was a no-brainer; no hope, pull the plug. Not any more. It's life, and when someone clings to it, I'm not sure who has the right to remove the support we've put in place. Her death was brutal, and I changed my own legal request regarding life support because of it.

We must always look beneath the surface for the why of common practice.  In this case, I saw a financial aspect to the decision. Maintaining a life costs a great deal of money in the United States, and she was old, after all. Maybe she was old and the prognosis wasn't good, but she wasn't deciding for herself.  Others were deciding for her.  The person who made the decision immediately left the hospital and did not stay to watch.  What does that tell you about life and death decisions?  Cowardice?  There it is for you.

Why is this OK and suicide is not? 

Just as removing life support is a more complex issue than we think it is, until we encounter it, suicide is also complex.  I wonder how many times a suicide is a cry for help or done in a moment of depression or passion and accidentally succeeds.  I wonder how many times it is an alternative for homicide, a way of "getting even" with someone who has already "killed" something in you, i.e., suicide as revenge.  But these are not passive non-responses.  They are actions.  They are choices.  Religion, philosophy, cultural norms all affect our views on suicide. 

I am sorry to hear suicide called cowardice and dismissed as a mental aberration.  Entire world cultures would have to be cowardly and mentally ill if that were universally true, and I'd need a lot of evidence before I made that ASSUMPTION.

I have never made any wholesale assumption about people who choose to end their own life.  I can only speak for myself:  that I am not afraid of death.  If I'm afraid of anything, it's the potential for harm in the sweeping prejudices of people, the quickness with which we judge others and attribute motives to them and critique their moral character.