A Different Perspective on Suicide

There is nothing wrong with suicide.  You read that correctly.  Keep breathing. 

We live in a society where saying that suicide is acceptable is like saying that the moon is made of cheese. 

Robin Williams killed himself.  

He has been called a coward, his death has been blamed on depression, or addiction, and all his potential (and personal) reasons for ending his life are constructed in negative terms, like he broke the rules, like we, the living, lost control of his life.  

We assume that we have the right to pronounce a judgment: that he made the wrong choice, that it was a mistake, a momentary loss of reason that could have been prevented.

When a family and intimate friends lose a loved one, there is hardship and there is pain, there is a long period of mourning, a personal, living, struggle to understand, to find peace with the loss. 

When a society loses someone who makes them laugh, who entertains them, who they did not know personally, we might do well to look at our own problem, celebrity worship, and a mentally deranged idea that we somehow have a special and intimate connection with, and ownership over, people who do not even know who we are. 

Robin Williams had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  Most people who commit suicide have a serious physical or mental illness, some reason to no longer want to wake up and see the sunrise or feel a lovers embrace.  The things that make life worth living, no longer do.  What kind of society are we living in when someone is not allowed to make a decision not to go on living when they will be subjecting themselves, and their friends and family, to a long, drawn-out, degenerative illness, as their own life becomes more and more difficult to live?  

I know something about suicide.  My mother died by her own hand, by drinking a glass of water with a deadly dose of powdered phenobarbital dissolved in it.  She did this while I was holding her hand, while my little brother and I sat next to her, keeping her company and telling her how much we loved her. 

To watch my mother drink that cup of water, that would not nourish life, but would end it, was to witness the most courageous act that has ever been performed in my company. 

Have you ever been standing at a bus-stop or subway platform, and felt the air move as this large machine approaches, and think, I could just step in front of it?  Along with that thought, when I’ve had it, was always this immediate sense of dread or revulsion, an absolute feeling of “no-way, I want to live.” I would immediately move backwards, even if I was already a yard from the danger zone, I would make sure I was safe. 

The will to live is not something easy to surmount.  Killing yourself is not an easy task.  For a person with the will to live, pointing a gun at your own head is going to feel very unnatural.  If you’ve ever gone out shooting and someone next to you holding a gun starts to turn toward you, you get very uncomfortable, and probably tell them they should take a gun safety class, tell them to turn their ass around, and get that gun pointed in the opposite direction. 

In our society there is a prohibition against suicide, they lock you up if you try it, you are punished, stigmatized, people think you are sick.  My life, someone else tells me, belongs to them.  I don’t own my own life.  

I imagine the prohibition against suicide leads to more suicides than it prevents.  Do I know this to be a fact?  No.  But the suicide rate in the United States is certainly higher than it is in, say, Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, where my mother, brother, and I were able to go so that mom could be freed from her suffering and sickness.  

In a society where suicide is made available, in a compassionate way, maybe it becomes less appealing.  If my life was mine, maybe I would care more about it.  That feeling on the subway platform would return, having death right there, would make me pull back, remind me that I do want to live another day, to witness the great mystery of living.

Who am I to say that Robin Williams shouldn’t have killed himself?  I can’t even say that my own mother shouldn’t have killed herself.  It was her decision.  It was her life.  It was her suffering.  I could only witness, be there, be present, be a grown-up.  For any of us to judge someone for taking their own life demands an enormous amount of immaturity on our part, and is a symptom of what a society of emotional wimps we are.  

To kill oneself is to go against the fundamental instinct of life, it is to overcome the will to live.  If someone takes this step we should feel compassion for them, understand that their suffering may be beyond our comprehension, and understand that they may have made the best decision for them, and maybe even for their family and society. 

Of course we should offer mental health care to all our citizens, it should be a part of any reasonable universal health-care plan, and we should try and prevent and treat depression and other mental illness (suffering might be a better word for illness) and many of the other drivers of suicide, addiction, and violence. 

We also need to look at the stigma against suicide in our society, and ask ourselves whether what we are really trying to avoid looking at is what a miserable society it is that has to command its members to go on living, and to prohibit something that should be naturally unappealing, except in cases that those of us who still have the will to live might not be able to understand.