Contemplating Suicide

This is not my first time, it is neither my last, I suspect, to contemplate suicide.

But then, I am not obsessed by it. I do not contemplate suicide because I am ‘suicidal’, or because life has shoved me to the corner (which I have had my human share of), and therefore inclined to it. No. For me, to live life is to accept the inevitability of death – the certainty of the fall of the curtain.

Suicide intrigues me because the person chooses how they want the curtain to fall on their lives:

                   “To be or not to be…”

It is the bravest choice that a man bares, yet the most cowardly. Kind and cruel in the same measure. Kind to s/he who chooses it, cruel to those s/he leaves behind.

Of interest to me are the final preparations before the jump into oblivion. I know of a person who woke up early, earlier than he was wont, cleaned the house, prepared breakfast (to the surprise of the wife and kids), escorted the children to school, and then, when left alone, wrote a long letter describing his motivations – then he hang himself. His suicide rocked my village. He was the man we all thought could never take that route (after all, no (wo)man is ever thought of as capable of committing suicide until the day s/he actually attempts to). The whole scenario reminded me of a poem my high school teacher loved; “Richard Cory”.

If there is a character in fiction who intrigues me in his desire to commit suicide, it is the eponymous Steppenwolf in Herman Hesse’s classic Steppenwolf. (For those who only know Steppenwolf as the bad guy in DC’s Justice League who, obsessing over three boxes, wants to rule the universe for its own sake, need to read this novel.)

Hesse’s Steppenwolf is tired of life. He has lived a life of order and routine; he has made the right choices, read the right books; fallen in and out of love and even settled for a favourite drink – everything, as we often do. But now, he is facing his fiftieth birthday. He has no desire to live beyond fifty, and so he decides to survive until that final moment – the eve of his fiftieth birthday. However, he meets a young girl and, well, let’s say what follows is YOLO and many highs and experimentations (there is a managé-a-trois involved! ta imagini!). Steppenwolf actually lives his life in these last minutes of his self-appointed rendezvous with death.

In birth no man has a choice, you are simply born. Period. Could suicide be man’s greatest choice? Or is living life the bravest of all choices? Well, I do not presume there is an easy answer to a question as old as humanity. Yet there are a few questions which can be asked;

When a person is hunched over the table, or his/her lap, scribbling a suicide-note does s/he pause and reflect on what the life after will be?

Or does s/he simply not care for what to come?

In his/her final explanation, is “to be or not to be” a relevant question?

Does s/he smile/cry at the hand that life has dealt him/her?

Does s/he proofread the letter and check on the use of adverbials? The use of prepositions? Do these matter?

Does s/he erase some names which, if they were to be found in the note, would change lots of lives?

Does s/he, at some point, think of suicide as a revenge against others who have hurt him/her in this life?

What truth does s/he die with? What truth is s/he dying for? A truth that would have transformed the world? How many stories lie in her/his bosom untold?

Does s/he re-read this note in an air of satisfaction?

Does s/he think to him/herself; “I hope they find my body before the weekend is over. I do not want to be found all decayed in this room.”

Does s/he think of all those people who will agonise thinking that maybe, just maybe, if they had listened to her/him, s/he would not have committed suicide. Of all those who will be suspected, and even blamed of having pushed him/her to this choice.

Does he think of his nursery school teacher, that patient woman who taught him how to hold a pencil and curve a smooth ‘e’ and dot the ‘i’s? Does he check to see if all the ‘i’s are dotted?

Does he attempt to re-write his whole life? Make it more intriguing than it ever was. Or even more mysterious?

Does he think about his first love? His first kiss which turned out to be a little bit too salty, or too wet?

Does he think of that scene in that little room, no, in the fields, when he first cupped her breasts and sucked on them? Does he shudder on the realisation of his naivety, of his thinking that he knew everything? Of his breathlessness as she showed him the way and guided him into the darkest recesses of passion?

Does he remember how she helped him out of it all? How she laughed at him as she picked herself up and left him lying down, his eyes gazing into nothingness?

Does he think of the first time he saw his father angry? How his mouth frothed as if on the verge of a seizure? How his mother had shielded him from his ire? And his siblings? Does he justify why he is closer to one than the other?

Maybe, after all, all these things are irrelevant and it is why suicide becomes the way out. Out of this Sisyphus like life.

Think of Sisyphus: Sisyphus was a man cursed by the gods to forever push a huge rock up a mountain, and each moment the boulder got to the top, it would tumble downhill and he would have to go for it – again. Again and again.

Well, even like Sisyphus we push our boulders up the hill every day, and down the hill they tumble soon after. Yet in this brief moment, that millisecond, before the rock goes tumbling down again, we have life - this is life. In that instant when we reach the peak of the hill, we rise above the gods and fate. Life is to be found in that minute, that second, when we no longer agonise about the rock that tumbles down, but rather enjoy the scenery, no matter for how brief a moment. This is beauty.

What hope is there in my contemplation of suicide?

Does it make my life any better or easier?

I cannot readily tell.

All I know is it reminds me of a choice, reminds me of an important truth: memento mori.

          Remember Death. Remember you’ll die.

          “I have got a rendezvous with Death”

If I decided to go to war, isn’t a part of me being suicidal? Is it not choosing a way out? Picking an enemy’s bullet rather than old age? I know smoking kills, yet I puff on. Is not this suicidal? When I pick a newer matatu, as opposed to a rickety one, am I not choosing what metal I would rather have crash me into nothingness?

Is not every choice we make, ultimately leading to the final reckoning? Is not life the final preparations before the jump into oblivion?

If so, well then, I have choices to make before my rendezvous:

I will call her today, tell her I love her (this may, as well, be the very thing that kills me).

Memento Mori.    

          Remember Death. Remember you’ll die.

          “I have got a rendezvous with Death”

Contemplating Suicide.

By Macaria Wa Gatundu