September marks Suicide Awareness and Prevention Month
I often hear people say suicide is a selfish, irresponsible choice. After all, it wrecks the lives of those who are left behind. Interestingly enough, the people who have shared this thinking with me have never lost a loved one to suicide. Those who have and have been close enough to witness their emotional pain, have a deeper understanding of and a more compassionate approach to their choice because, in the end, is it a choice when you feel you have no choice?
I remember my partner Alex’s last weeks of life. His anxiety was off the charts. His business had become a never-ending source of worries. At the worst possible time, our landlords started adding to his stress by dealing with the issues in our rental home with slow, inefficient, and uncoordinated efforts, always choosing the cheapest option that would cause the greatest inconvenience to us. I just couldn’t believe our luck. If only we could have a stretch of days or weeks free from worries so I could stabilize Alex’s mood and continue to look for professional help, someone who could truly connect with him and bring him back, tether him to this world again. I knew suicide was on the table, he had shared his desire to end his life about a month before it happened. At first, I thought his exhaustion was rooted in everyday stress, burnout from work, and the accompanying debilitating insomnia. As I started monitoring his every move in our home and paying very close attention to his words and the messages between the lines, I realized it was a very different kind of exhaustion, something that I had never witnessed before. It was exhaustion from pushing yourself to be alive when you would rather be dead.
Earlier in our relationship, Alex and I got into a spirituality debate. We were talking about souls, and I asked him whether he believed in having other lives after we die. A shadow settled on his face. “I’m exhausted from living this life. I can’t bear the thought of having another life,” he answered. At the time, I didn’t know what to do with that answer. But his words kept coming back during our last days together. I would often find him in the basement bedroom in bed fully dressed. I would sit by his side and try to lure him back upstairs with the promise of a tasty meal. “Why would you want me to live like this?” he would ask me. He was always so upset with me for giving him false hopes that one day he would get better. Nothing matters anymore. Those words would slip out of his mouth unwittingly, almost like he was reading out loud the verdict on his life. But sometimes, there was no need for him to say it. I could clearly see it in his beautiful, sad green eyes.
Suicide death is an extremely complicated subject. Many different factors can contribute to such a decision and I can only speak to the ones I have witnessed. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I’m sharing my story to offer you a new perspective. Inside the mind of a suicidal person, there’s a bleak landscape that extends as far as the eye can see. A state of absolute hopelessness. We are talking about an inability to envision a better future. We are talking about losing your capacity to have dreams. It’s a complete disconnection from everyone and everything, including yourself. It’s not knowing how to be in this world anymore and having to fake how to be alive drains your energy at a pace that you cannot sustain. And from that place, you feel like you have nothing to contribute to the people you love and the world around you, even worse, you even feel like a burden. During my brief time living with Alex, I saw his mental health decline in front of my eyes to the point of him becoming a black hole capable of destroying everything, including himself. And I often wonder whether his decision to end his life was an act of love and kindness to set me free because he knew he was on the path to destroy not only his life but also mine.
Knowing what I know now, I think about Alex and wonder whether he was dead before he was even dead because with Alex “the house was there but there was no one home,” like I once heard someone say when referring to a former partner. My counselor at the time pointed out that Alex had ceased to be a person long before his death. A person in the strict sense of the word, someone with reason, morality, consciousness, etc. Yes, it was his decision to end his life. But if he was no longer a person, how could he ever be accountable for his decision? “You can’t be there for someone who is not there for himself. You can’t connect with someone who has disconnected from himself. Alex had let go of your hand and he had let himself go as well,” my counselor explained during the aftermath of Alex’s death.
So again, is it a choice when you feel you have no choice? When you have disconnected from everything and everyone, including yourself? Is it fair to refer to suicide as a selfish, irresponsible choice? And more importantly, is it helpful? How is it helpful to those impaired by profound shame due to suicide ideation? How is it helpful to foster a conversation about suicide awareness and prevention? How is it helpful to those grieving a suicide loss? In my suicide grief support group, someone once pointed out that the tricky thing about suicide loss is that the person that you miss and the person that you are mad at are the same. It’s a very unique situation to feel simultaneously anger and sadness towards the one you lost. There’s sadness because their absence carves a hole in your heart and there's anger because you feel like they chose to leave you behind, to put you through all this pain. With time, the anger subsides, and the only things left are sadness and love. So why add to their pain and cognitive dissonance with shortsighted judgments? I will forever continue to host deep inside my heart a sadness from watching Alex suffer day in and day out. I don’t really care about what other people think about his choice. I was there. Witnessing.