Suicide

I start­ed to write this as a com­ment after some­one repeat­ed some­thing I’ve heard many times about sui­cide being self­ish. Then I decid­ed that it was real­ly incon­sid­er­ate in regards to the sit­u­a­tion about which she was writing. 

Sui­cide has come up in sev­er­al friends’ lives late­ly. I always feel a bit fun­ny dis­cussing it. I tried to kill myself in 1988. I very near­ly suc­ceed­ed. I had­n’t planned it—I went home from work with a headache and took all the pills in the house, start­ing with those I’m aller­gic to. I did­n’t say good­bye to any­body. I did­n’t threat­en. It just—happened.

My first thought when I woke up in ICU days lat­er was, “Damn, that was stu­pid.” I felt like shit, phys­i­cal­ly. Emo­tion­al­ly, I was still too depressed to real­ly care much. My fam­i­ly and the few friends who even knew about it gave me a tremen­dous dump­ing of guilt, telling me how self­ish I’d been. Boy was that help­ful (not). From the way they talked, it was all about them. Because they cared about me, they believed that I had an oblig­a­tion to stay alive.

I still disagree.

There’s only one case in which any­one has an actu­al oblig­a­tion to live, as far as I’m con­cerned. If you have minor chil­dren, you have an oblig­a­tion to stick around and rear them to adult­hood. That’s it. Yes, I def­i­nite­ly *want* my life part­ner to live, and I’d be very hurt if he com­mit­ted sui­cide. He’s not under any oblig­a­tion to be with me, though. His only real oblig­a­tion is to stick around until his youngest child is 18. And that’s it. Mine is to be around until Katie is 18, which will hap­pen in 2008.

No, I’m not plan­ning to off myself in 2008, or at any oth­er time. I’m not sui­ci­dal at all. Now, I’m very glad that I did wake up in ICU way back when. I would have missed some of the most won­der­ful parts of my life if I had suc­ceed­ed in killing myself. I hope I nev­er get that depressed again. I hope that if I do get that depressed, some­one like Sam will be able to inter­vene until I am more ratio­nal again. Is that his, or any­body else’s, job? Absolute­ly not. I’m an adult, and I am the only per­son respon­si­ble for me.

How­ev­er, I find a lot of the talk about sui­cide to be full of extreme code­pen­dent bull­shit, and I just need­ed to final­ly say it to get it out of my system.