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The problem with suicide is that it was their decision; the problem with dying of disease is that it wasn’t, & the problem with both is that you can more or less get a material ‘why’. A soul or a heart just couldn’t keep going - because of depression, because of a virus, the brutality of the world, a Latin word you can’t pronounce, what happened Last Thursday.
But the larger ‘why’- why her, why us, why now, why ever, why like this, why this hour- you never get.
(This is all with the caveat that I know & believe that suicide & other ‘deaths of despair’ are just as much caused by a mix of physical and the environmental as so called ‘death of natural causes. To paraphrase foster Wallace- it’s the choice between the fire and the window.actually fuck it I’ll just quote the bandanna directly:
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise.
Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.
And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”