I have spoken earlier in my missive on Death that we, the living, experience the death of one near and dear as an abysmal tearing asunder, an amputation without benefit of anaesthetic, no matter that that death is expected or how much it is a deliverance from suffering. Death takes not only the beloved; it takes also from the body and from the soul of the one left behind. We are interconnected, and no act upon one body is without consequence in another.
In the matter of suicide we have a certain type of the living experience of death. The heart is torn out. The horizons of life are darkened and exsected. Hope and trust are trampled upon to the point of ex-haustion, to the point of, as the term indicates, the spirit, the life of one, goes out.
In principle, this experienced hopelessness is never terminal, never incurable, never truly without hope, but too often that which is most lamentably lacking is the face of hope in the comfort, the light, the guidance, the aid, the presence, the touch, even the repentance of another. The ultimate cry of a creature meant to be-with-others reduced to being-alone is to further reduce self to being-no-more. Here rests a sorrow, individually and socially, for somewhere within a society cohesion and meaningfulness have faltered, the bonds of vitality, mutuality, and humanity are experienced as annihilated, and despair weeping for its comfort and rest allows its solitude to disguise both as death.
In principle also, we may say that one whose hand provides the end of one’s own life may not be looking to all possible horizons of action, may be too wrapped up in certain expectations from life, too insulated in one’s own pain and hopelessness.
We, however, do not live our every day in the Aeolian sphere of “in principle”. We are neither merely rational, nor volitional, nor emotive beings; we are all of these in complex admixture, and all of these inextricably in the milieu of our society.
When one experiences one’s world blasted and blown apart, under ceaseless attack, when one experiences one’s heart trampled upon over and over, one is being abused, battered, pursued, beaten into the ground. They that inflict such torture may smugly think they are just pursuing some self-satisfying prank or a simple “innocent” deception, but that is their grossest self-absorbed self-deception. They that so attack the heart and mind, the body and soul, the world of another are criminals of the highest order. They beat their prey remorselessly, dump it–bloodied and bleeding–upon death’s door, and to preserve their own sense of in-culpability, refuse to deliver the final blow. This is murder most foul—to trample a soul over and over and yet withhold the last strike, to leave a near corpse to suffer excruciatingly without escape, to force the victim to become the hand that brings one’s own death. There is no suicide; it is simply a murder wherein the murderer hides in the shadow and at a distance—physically, spiritually, morally.
We are, for all the veneer of civility, a cruel species. We selfishly torment, torture, and drive to the brink of perilous cliffs the weakest and most gentle among us, and wag our heads when they fall to their death as if they were in some manner the culpable. Suicide is murder, not of self, not by one’s own hand, but by a culprit too wicked, too self-absorbed to reveal his face. It is lazy murder, murder by remote control. And it is intended murder, for the victim is the one not wanted in the murderer’s world. It is cowardly murder.
They whose world is so devastated over and over, whose hearts so broken blow after blow cry out “How many times can my world be destroyed, my heart broken?”
How many times?
How many?
Life beaten out of us, in deepest deprivation of hope and trust, life’s most basic animations, we close our eyes and we sing “Come! sweetest death”. Come, my rest from this knurled pain. Come! I have no place else to be.