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Holly MathNerd's avatar

Correct. I have wrestled with the demon of self-termination regularly since before puberty (really shitty childhood, nothing more interesting than that). You describe the way it actually works, accurately and eloquently.

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Spouting Thomas's avatar

Fully agree with this description of suicide. The last suicide to affect my life, 2 years ago, was characterized by an utter impulsiveness that drove this point home in a way that I never fully internalized from the prior suicide to affect my life, 7-8 years ago.

At that time, I suppose I still thought about suicide more as the culmination of a sort of grim, natural progression. A capstone to everything that friend's life had been building to, between a failed marriage and a failed career and a son that flunked out of college. He worked in sales, and so the Willy Loman analogies are inevitable, and I suppose putting the words "Death of a Salesman" on the playbill sets us up to think about suicide this way.

But the most recent suicide had none of that. A young man with a young wife and a baby and a good job and his whole life ahead of him, but also a handgun readily available and some bad but survivable news, and I suspect too much to drink. Sometimes that's all it takes: a loaded gun that happens to be in your hand on the worst night of your short life.

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