Reflections on the Suicide at Ground Zero

"All suicides kill other people. However isolated the moment, suicide is also always an act of cruelty. Anyone left behind after someone close to them commits, or even attempts, suicide is likely to spend much of the rest of their life wondering whether they themselves have, or should have, survived. Suicide is rarely the singular, definitive act it appears to be. The ego, Freud tells us, turns onto itself the hatred it feels towards the object. But the object is never spared. No one commits suicide, the psychoanalyst Karl Menninger wrote in 1933, unless they experience at once ’the wish to die, the wish to kill, the wish to be killed’. You can die, but you can’t commit suicide, on your own."
– Jacqueline Rose-

For the sake of argument, let’s personify our country, our government, and our United States military industrial complex. Imagine, and it shouldn’t be hard to do, a mean-spirited fat, balding, nearly financially bankrupt man in a wife-beater T-Shirt with beer stains on it. His underwear bears telltale yellow traces of dried urine, a testimony to incontinence and disorder. Both his breath and body odor are so offensive, they reek of death’s smell. In short, he is a disgusting creature. Intellectually, you know that this demented individual belongs to the community of humankind, but emotionally it’s hard to fathom, let alone accept.

Now, each and every day, we are made to witness this oafish bully beating the living daylights of anyone he damn well pleases, just because he is the biggest, baddest bastard on the whole damn block. Worse yet, we are forced to economically contribute to the evil this disgusting, horrid spendthrift perpetrates in the form of the taxes we pay.

Anytime, you try to talk this ogre, you realize that he is coo-coo for cocoa puffs. He has the temerity to tell you, with a straight face, what a swell and good guy he is. When you point out his legion crimes, he states, flatly, that he is merely defending himself. He reveals that he lives in a paranoid colored coded state of perpetual terror and fear. By beating his 98 pound wife, despite all evidence to the contrary, he feels he is ensuring his safety. This is further proof, as if any additional corroborating evidence were really needed, that not only does he have bats in his belfry, but that the bats are afflicted with an especially pernicious form of contagious rabies.

Now, I’d ask if you lived next to this man, and saw him habitually beating up his wife, his children, and his dog, would you take a shotgun and blow your own brains out, by your own hand? Would that make a lick of sense?

We need every single person alive and well in our ongoing fight for peace and justice. Every single person can make a difference no matter how small. Even though these times seem awful, it is always the case that out of the forest fire, new trees are born.

There are friends that I could not reconcile to life. I bury them twice. I entomb them in my subconscious. In burying the pain, I sacrifice the fond memories too. It is a self defense mechanism. For me, to remember the good times is to remember the ending.

Hermetically sealed below the surface of the neural network of that which composes consciousness, the memories never-the-less do escape through fissures in the defensive sealant. Sometimes it is a movie or a news item that will trigger remembrances, but whatever the cause of the repressed memory being resurrected, usually the feeling is the same: an overwhelming queasiness and spiritual malaise, which is usually accompanied by a desire to excuse myself from my immediate surroundings in order to regain my bearings.

There is a connectivity to the universe. Cooperation is the natural state of human affairs. Think of all the instances, large and small, within each day where your very existence is due to the trust you have placed in others. You trust that the auto worker did his job when he fashioned the brakes on your car. You trust that the food you buy at the grocer will not contain a hideous germ that will be your demise.

Warfare may be as old as man, but it is not the natural order of things. It is the anomaly. It is the evil that is to be hated and avoided above all else, as thinking men and women have always railed against throughout the ages.

We place our human value judgments on the animal kingdom. Listen carefully, and you may hear a television documentarian become more serious, change the tenor and modulation of his voice (the narrator is almost always male), as he reveals a peculiar and particular unpleasantry, a bit of regrettable bad news, regarding the behavior and action of some animals. That cuddly wild animal that, though you know you can’t, you still would like to pick up, pet, hug, or take home and domesticate even, has a very bad habit, a very bad habit indeed: it eats its own sometimes. Usually a scientific reason is given as to the evolutionary advantage that is had by a particular species making a meal of it friends, or even its offspring. What I’ve not heard though is a convincing argument for the cannibalization of our own human species. All humans are created equal, with the same wants, needs, desires, hopes and dreams. All warfare therefore is fratricide, is internecine, is cannibalism.

Human emotions are eternal. The horror one feels at the death by suicide of a friend is the same now, as it was two thousand years ago. Consider the following:

“Corellius Rufus is dead; and dead, too, by his own act! A circumstance of great aggravation to my affliction; as that sort of death which we cannot impute either to the course of nature, or the hand of Providence, is, of all others, the most to be lamented. It affords some consolation in the loss of those friends whom disease snatches from us that they fall by the general destiny of mankind; but those who destroy themselves leave us under the inconsolable reflection, that they had it in their power to live longer.

I keep thinking what a man, what a friend, I am deprived of. I sadly fear now, that I am no longer under his eye, I shall not keep so strict a guard over my conduct. Speak comfort to me then, not that he was old, he was infirm; all this I know: but by supplying me with some reflections that are new and resistless, which I have never heard, never read, anywhere else. For all that I have heard, and all that I have read, occur to me of themselves; but all these are by far too weak to support me under so severe an affliction.”

Of course, technology has changed in the intervening millenia. If Pliny, the Roman patrician, were writing today, he’d most likely be met with the equivalent of a Greek internet chorus of something like, “Oh Pliny get your own blog for the Gods’ sake!”

The window of opportunity for life is fleeting, seven decades or so, perhaps, at best, if we’re lucky, whereas death is an eternity. The pity of it all is that depression is treatable. The disease distorts rational thought and interferes with memory. Sufferers can’t ever remember feeling good, and don’t know they will feel good in the future. Suicide, it has been said, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

Depression is a medical condition. No sane person one would think of telling a diabetic to just try harder in lieu of taking insulin, but something like this is the advice that is still given to people with depression by well meaning, but ill-informed, well-wishers.

You may not want to own a car, but your situation may be such that depending upon where you live in suburbia, you may need one to get around and to function in daily life. Now, let’s say you have the means, so you go to a new car dealership and ask to take a test drive. You’re not sure which make and model will best suit your needs, so you ask the salesman to recommend one. You just want something that will be reliable and dependable.

You get in the car and turn the ignition and nothing happens. You feel betrayed and devastated. You are angry at the salesman. You leave the dealership saying to yourself that cars don’t work.

To most people that would seem to be a pretty ludicrous reaction, but such is cognitive error of some seeking treatment. Sometimes one treatment, or one type of medication, is contraindicated for an individual, but there are others.

Richard was a graphic designer and friend. He would confide in me and other friends that he hadn’t slept in days. We knew he was depressed. We all encouraged him to return to his doctor for treatment or to get a new doctor. He said that he had tried it once, and that it didn’t work. We didn’t know that he had had a plan. It was our mutual friend Jerry who found Richard’s rigor mortis corpse swinging from the end of a rope on which it had hung for three days. How is it right that Jerry, who has never hurt a fly in his life, will now have to carry such a jarring image for the rest of his life? Even if Richard had been found by someone else, the pain still would have been as intense and raw as it was for all who grieved his passing.

I agree with the author, Jacqueline Rose, quoted at the beginning of this article, in her assessment that all suicides kill other people.

Whether through natural causes or at their own hands, we are all diminished by the loss of our friends and loved ones. Indeed, it is murder by numbers, one, two, three. As the lovely author, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in her poem Conscientious Objector, “I shall die, but that is all I shall do for death.”

It’s a great poem:

I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall;
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself:
I will not give him a leg up.

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his pay-roll.

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much,
I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me Shall you be overcome.

"Conscientious Objector"
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sources:
Un-cropped print by Kathe Kollwitz
http://www.ku.edu/~sma/printedart/images/kollwitz2.jpg

Jacqueline Rose
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/rose01_.html

Pliny the Younger 62 A.D. to 133 A.D. Letter to Calestrius Tiro (Alas, my antiquarian book is missing the title page, it’s Letter VIII)

Resources: http://www.save.org/

Also published Nov 12 on:
http://newjersey.indymedia.org/feature/display/14716/index.php