Further thoughts on ending pain..

After I wrote my last entry, I was speaking to someone about what I personally feel is the bottom line in suicide. As much as someone wants the pain to end, as much as they wish to have it just go away, and suicide is the surest way of doing that, they don’t think of what will come afterwards, because for them, there would no longer be an afterwards.

There is a fallacy of that line of thought, for oftentimes, suicide does not succeed. Some people are left vegetables, kept in hospital for the rest of their life while their body functions are monitored by machines, or even worse, if their speech is impacted and they must live in a cocoon of their physical body, unable to communicate to others who come by, forever listening to the beeps of the machines that surround them. The luckier ones can try to learn to talk and walk again, but all that they’d accomplished thus far in their life, would be gone.

But that is not what I think of as the after effects. I think of the person who tries to commit suicide as taking themselves out of the loop, while shouldering all of the responsibility for their actions. For it is a situation that they alone, bring on themselves, it is not something that anyone else can be blamed for, no matter the extenuating circumstances that led up to it.

When I had to face up to what M would see, I knew that it was doubtful that she would find me first. Had I not given her the phone number I was at for them to find me, I would have died, but who would have found me? It would have been the cleaning person the following morning, police after that, taken to a morgue and then M would have been there to identify me, as I had requested she be called. Though I know T would have had to deal with that as well. (I forbid his visiting me in the hospital, though I was told later that he had come when I was in the CCU.)

What would she have seen, had she indeed been the one to find me? A sickly green tint to my skin and bloated perhaps? Cold and lifeless, that is what she would then remember, not the times we had laughed and joked, not the times we had wept together. It would be a grim reminder, not what I had been with her. And did I wish that? Not for her, for she was not the one who hurt me so. Was I doing this to ‘get back’ at T? Likely, if I were to be perfectly honest with myself, and I try to be.. but still, I wished for the pain to just stop, I did not want to do the work required to recreate my life. I did not wish to have to start over again, and I also knew how difficult it was going to be to go in day by day and face the two of them.

The supervisor who I worked for at the time told me he did not know how I could face it, that he didn’t understand how I could continue working there. While in the next breath, refusing my request that the door to my office be spring-loaded, so that I would not have to hear T’s very loud and resonating voice. I faced that for 1.5 years, it taught me a lot, not a lesson I enjoyed learning, for it taught me to be bleak, to hide away, to shut out the world around me as best I could.

When speaking to that one last night, I gave an illustration, an example that I thought might be fitting. (Yes, she’s talking like an old person now, watch out!) When I was in high school, I had performed in a scene from Antigone. For those unfamiliar with it, it is one of the Greek tragedies, and there is a scene where Antigone and her sister, Ismene are speaking, talking of what they would need to do to help one of two of their brother, Polynices, who had been executed for treason. His body was left on the side of the road for carrion, denied a burial as befitted one who committed said offense. Antigone wished to bury her brother, but Ismene feared Creon’s wrath, Creon being the ruler of the city and future father-in-law of Antigone, the punishment for burying Polynices would be death by public stoning.

I had performed this scene a year before, and in my senior year, I was an assistant to the teacher, one who taught me to love Shakespeare, she was an amazing teacher. So as assistant, she asked me to direct two others who were to do that same scene. I took them to sit in a corner of the theatre, where we had our classes, and asked them to close their eyes. Instead of merely rehearsing their lines, I described exactly what they would see, if they two were truly there. I asked the one who was to portray Ismene, to visualize seeing her brother, his eyes likely already plucked out, parts of him torn away, not to mention the wounds already suffered which would have brought about his death in the first place. This would be a rather common event for the two to witness, they would know what it was to look upon corpses along the side of the road, but in this one in particular being her brother. For the one portraying Antigone, I had further direction, I asked her to imagine picking him up, not merely looking, but for burial. I asked her to hold up her two hands and imagine him being held by her as she did so. For Antigone did do this deed, she was the stronger of the two.

It was not that I had some ghoulish reason to try to get them to visualize this, but I wanted them to put more reality into it, instead of trying to find new intonations for the lines that were unusual for them in cadence and speech. I wanted them to take a moment and see this before they performed the scene, to keep that there, as they stood on the stage before the lights. The way they reenacted the scene from that point on was quite different than how they had tried to do it before. I was very proud of them, they did a very good job, after the scene there was a hush in the room in reaction to how powerful it was.

My reason for mentioning this was not to try to toot my own horn for the scene I directed many years ago, but that I had them look, really truly look at what they were about to attempt. So few do that when approaching suicide, they do not look past that first part, they do not see what will happen. They only think of escaping pain, they do not realize that they will inflict that damage to their families and friends for the rest of their lives. That is not something that will merely be gotten over in time, if it is a parent who finds a child, likely they will wish to move away, if it happens in their home. And who will clean up the mess left, but family or friends? I thought by going to a motel at least it would be strangers, but I did not think of what it would do to my best friend, or my parents who would never be able to say goodbye, who would never again have cause to celebrate having had me, always wondering what they did wrong. No suicide letter could ease that pain or questions, though in writing one, one might think they are being ‘responsible’, it is merely a copout.

So I suppose it comes down to thinking before acting, do you love your family and friends enough to spare them worse trauma than what you are already experiencing? Are you selfish enough to commit their lives to live with the results of your own actions? For I cannot help but think that in doing this, one has little care for others, I know at that point I was beyond thinking past my own pain, and that is a guilt I will carry forever.