Since it was a purely reactionary act of a self-absorbed sixteen year-old, I can't call it a bona fide premeditated attempt, but I did deliberately slice open my wrist with a kitchen knife as an argument-ender with a parent.

Not before or since have I done or even contemplated anything remotely as idiotic (or cheaply dramatic!) which tells you something about how stupid suicide really is. As utterly moronic as I have occasionally acted since (and there have been some real doozies) nothing, at all, holds a candle to that act.

99.9% dumb.

To the potential suicide: If sickness or something else has killed you without stopping all your bodily functions, then you have the right to help along the Second Law of Thermodynamics and finish the job. But that probably isn't you.

-r

I'll go out on a limb:

I'll wager that every normal, thoughtful person on earth has contemplated suicide, to a degree that he was forced to consider its details and ramifications. To a degree that executing the idea was not out of the question. I'll say I think that's universal. I'd say it's as much a universal trait as wondering what a perfect stranger would look like naked. We've all done that, right? I think it's about that universal.

Someone will surely chime in and say he never did, and I'd be forced to call him a liar, but I suppose I wouldn't know for sure.

For that reason -- for the reason that I and everyone else has contemplated it if not acted on the impulse -- I cannot flatly condemn suicide. I have not been brought to the point of execution myself, and I hope not to encounter it among my friends, but I don't find it ridiculous.

I have to agree with tmidgett, however, that it is ultimately (!) more of a burden on those close to the deceased than is conscionable except in extreme cases of pain coupled with bleak prognosis. For the deceased, it is a punctuation mark. For everyone else, it is the first word in the first chapter of a harrowing epic.

steve wrote:For the deceased, it is a punctuation mark. For everyone else, it is the first word in the first chapter of a harrowing epic.

What should it matter to you, the recently self-slain? You're gone! If you end as an acting person when you die, why should what happens in regard to you post mortem matter in the least?

i had an uncle who killed himself, my uncle howard. he put his head under a slow-moving train in saint paul and a moment later he had no head.

it was as simple as that.

my uncle was on his way to work that morning. i remember that evening. my mom (his sister) didn't take the news very well. we'd just returned home from the dentist when the phone rang. at the dentist's i was given a green and red pencil with a knock-kock joke on it as a reward for having good oral hygiene. the joke read:


"knock-knock"

"who's there?"

"nanny."

"nanny who?"

"nanny your business."


i held on to this pencil for some time, never daring to sharpen it, though eventually i threw it away.

also, we're forgetting that everyone that commits suicide burns eternally in the fires of hell.

matthew wrote:

steve wrote:For the deceased, it is a punctuation mark. For everyone else, it is the first word in the first chapter of a harrowing epic.

What should it matter to you, the recently self-slain? You're gone! If you end as an acting person when you die, why should what happens in regard to you post mortem matter in the least?

Because we care about the people we love, and fucking with them in this manner seems wrong.

Ally In Exile wrote:Robert Quine committed suicide.

he wasn't terminally ill.

he was simply very depressed, unable to get over the loss of his wife a year prior.

to say that this act was cowardly and/or selfish seems disrespectful to me. it also seems to betray an unflattering lack of empathy.

Everyone experiences grief. Thanks to Quine's selfishness, everyone close to him got to experience a lot more of it and for far longer than Quine did. I feel empathy for his grief. Once he let it conquer him, I feel contempt for his self-indulgence.

steve wrote:Someone will surely chime in and say he never did, and I'd be forced to call him a liar, but I suppose I wouldn't know for sure.

Call me a liar, then. Get on with it.

It's never crossed my mind "to a degree that executing the idea was not out of the question." Just good fortune. Or good enough, anyway. There's still time!

Robert Quine is a good example. I have nothing but sympathy for his supposed mental state leading up to his death. I know what it's like to be so balled up you can't think straight for days on end. And I'd be fucking lost w/o my wife.

So I understand why it happened. I could never hold it against him, overlooking the fact that I didn't know the guy anyway.

But wow. What a mistake. What a tragic, horrible loss, even for people like me, who just loved his guitar playing. Not to mention people who actually knew him.

Ty Webb wrote:I feel empathy for his grief. Once he let it conquer him, I feel contempt for his self-indulgence.

He could've become incapable of rational thought when he killed himself -- this excuses him of being weak or selfish -- he may have been in a state of mind that significantly reduced his awareness of the pain his actions could be causing others. We simply don't know. I don't know anyway, and this fact stops me from judging the guy.

Unless you've been in "that place," through mental pain or physical pain, it's hard to comprehend how bad it is.