Coreyshead - Looking at the World 1 Pixel at a Time

About a month ago, a friend of mine posted on Facebook about someone who had killed themselves in response to their “soul” mate dying. Lot’s of people chimed in about how sad and beautiful it all was.

But I had to be a dick about it. You see, I can’t romanticize it – I hate suicide.

Now don’t get me wrong – I support euthanasia but let’s be clear: I’m not talking about euthanasia. I’m talking about suicide.

Of course, there are some who would argue that the person in question was, in fact, practicing euthanasia because they were so heartbroken, in such emotional pain. I understand this and sympathize. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to lose someone that important to you … but give me a break.

Let’s back up a little. I have a confession to make: I not only spent *decades* with a brain constantly flooded by suicidal thoughts, I even attempted the act a couple of times. Sort of. Half-heartedly. I was a dumb, miserable kid. One of my “heroes,” Frank Zappa, would have rightfully labeled me a “Suicide Chump.” Thankfully, I was as lame at suicide as I was for being suicidal in the first place.

You see, I was suicidal because I hated and felt sorry for myself in approximately even amounts, almost all of the time – and because I was a young, dumb, selfish kid. I was in my thirties when I noticed that I was having suicidal thoughts even when everything was going okay and I was in a good mood!

What I realized was that I was so used to having these thoughts, I was now using them to relax. How’s that for loopy?

You see, suicide is often envisioned by the bonehead thinking about it as a way out. No matter how bad things are, there’s always that back door to escape. I was in such a mental rut with the concept that I would fall into it almost as a meditation. Wotta goon. The minute I understood this, I had my tool to stop and I was almost instantly successful. I haven’t had a sincere thought of it in over a decade – a real achievement that I am proud of.

But that’s not why I hate suicide.

Let’s get back to Zappa.

In the winter of 1993, Frank Zappa, a personal hero of mine, died of mis-diagnosed prostate cancer. A real blow to me. Rolling Stone magazine printed something like a half-page obit for this admittedly acerbic and staunchly non-mainstream but still important and influential musical genius. He didn’t even make the cover. Instead, there were the meatheads of the moment, Nirvana, with Kurt front and center, there on the cover. But of course! Zappa might as well have not even existed …

Four months later, who should wimp out but cover boy himself. Kurt Cobain put a shotgun to his head and, in a mixed attempt at relieving the pain of stardom and addiction (awwwwww) he blew his pretty, little face off. Did he make the cover of Rolling Stone? You bet he did – and he also received many many pages inside; heartfelt tributes and analyses worthy of someone of a far greater stature and career.

Okay. Let’s look at the two.

One was a hard working musical genius who continued to work and suffer up until his death by cancer. The other was a flash-in-the-pan, media darling who was the poster boy for a rogue wave of nihilistic idiocy that washed up not long after he decided that life without cancer was just too damned hard – and we celebrated which?

It still sticks in my ever-lovin’ craw and there’s a grain of my reasoning in there – but this is not why I hate suicide, either.

A couple of years later, in the mid 90’s, a relative whom I wasn’t close to – had only met once, in fact – killed herself. I and her daughter found ourselves in charge of the clean up. Not that we had to clean up the body, mind you, the city did that, but we had to clean up everything else, which was plenty. She’d lain and decayed on her blood-soaked mattress, undetected in the summer heat of her home, for a week.

Yes, that’s right: the government makes relatives clean up messes like this in the hopes that they will learn a valuable lesson – and it works, or it did in my case.

The lesson? Suicide is the *ultimate* selfishness.

It wasn’t the clean up that bothered me, even though that was disgusting, considerable, and a definite component of the selfishness of which I write. It was the emotional mess.

When you take your own life, you leave behind a physical mess for others to clean up and an emotional one that may be *impossible* to clean up. Despite your pathetic selfishness, people love you, or rely on you and, when you take yourself away like that, you remove the chance for *others* to heal, not to mention yourself – and you’re a selfish piece of garbage for doing so.

When I was suicidal, I always had all these romantic notions about people visiting my grave and missing me and shit. The fact that you care about this means you don’t really want to die in the first place. It also assumes that you are an integral component of the world you are leaving behind. You’re not – especially not after you’re dead.

Look: you’re gonna die eventually, anyway. Even the biggest, most important person on the planet doesn’t qualify for a portion of footnote in the overall scheme of things, so stop kidding yourself about the level of give-a-shit people will have about you once you are gone. With the exception of the people who love you – you know, the folks you’re about to scar irreparably? – your disappearance will be no more memorable than an overgrown lump in a field.

Suck it up. You will get over it. Tomorrow’s another day. Blah, blah, blah, right? Well, it’s all true.

That ache you feel that motivates you to death? That’s an emotion ache – not at all unlike a headache or a stomach ache and, chronic or not, it is going to ease up. I can philosophize with the best of them that not a single moment of this life is worth a tinker’s damn and is but an illusion, anyway but, if it’s so unimportant that you’re willing to throw it away, how has it had the power to hurt you so? BECAUSE YOU KNOW HOW BEAUTIFUL AND AMAZING IT CAN BE, that’s why. It’s the only game in town, folks. Those who cave in to their inner-whiny may do society a favor by removing a weak and emotionally useless food-tube from the mix – but it’s still a damned, foolish shame, anyway.

In the case that prompted these thoughts, there were a lot of romantic notions being batted around: “Oh, how sweet – he followed her.” Barf. My reaction to that incredibly stupid and juvenile notion is that the person he killed himself for would probably be *horrified* to know that he had done so – or certainly should have been.

How many of you would be happy to know that your spouse or – oh, please no – your *kids* killed themselves when you died? Not many takers on that? I thought not. The world would be a real mess if all of us just gave into our darkest urges and just sank into the inky morass of our blackest self pity. There’s nothing romantic about killing yourself because a loved one died – just something terribly, terribly stupid and, really, dishonorable to the memory of the one you pine for.

Of course, I posted my original thoughts about this on the fly, online, and may have come on a bit strong (may? gimmie a break – I was a beast). My harsh remarks caused my friend to reply that, right or wrong, I could stand to have exercised a little COMPASSION (their emphasis) – to which I almost agree.

Almost.

I should have just left well enough alone, like I do when I see things like political lies or conspiracy theories about lizard men posted by friends but I was horrified to see suicide being held up as a romantic ideal and I cracked.

What I really should have said was “Hey, at least he was able to kill the guy who murdered him.”

Tags: romance, self loathing, self pity, suicide