Response #11 to the Craig's List suicide note, edited for grammar and spelling:

Date: 2003-09-25, 11:37AM

I have read other posts sympathizing with you. I disagree. You are being selfish. My father attempted suicide years ago when he was going through a rough period. Luckily, someone found him before his overdose became permanent. I would have been destroyed to live my life without him, especially having to know that he ended it. Today, we are closer than ever. Troubled times have passed.

My point is that somewhere, somebody needs you. You may not know it; you may not even have met them yet. But I guarantee you that somebody will be negatively affected by your selfish, cowardly decision.

So for your own good, I pull no punches. If you go through with this, you are a selfish, cowardly quitter, who is too busy wallowing in his own self-pity to see the true beauty that the gift of life is. So many have had it taken from them, and could have done so much with it. So many have had it taken from them, who never wanted to leave. And you want to just give it up. I have no sympathy for that.

Get over yourself and choose life.

Lovely, a classic "tough love" approach. The best I can figure is that the tough love approach sees suicide as 100% self-pity, and tough love will make him come to his senses and not kill himself. But how does the tough love approach expect the suicide to respond?

- "You’re selfish", "Yea, you're right, I should stop, shouldn't I?"
- "It’s a selfish, cowardly decision", "Hm, I don't want to be a coward. You wanna go shoot some hoops?"
- "You’re a selfish, cowardly quitter who is too busy wallowing in his own self-pity to see the true beauty that the gift of life is", "Now I feel even worse. Aren't you gonna tell me I'm 'worthless and weak'?"
- "I have no sympathy for you", "I didn’t ask for your sympathy, get the fuck away from me!"
- "Get over yourself and choose life", "Hey man, I’m pro-choice, aren’t your kind supposed to want me dead anyway?"

Tough love is pretty irrelevant and ineffectual for suicides, and probably has a better chance of ending up with a suicide or a suicidal gesture. If you have no sympathy, the best thing you can do is encourage them to do it if you really don't care and want them to do it, or if you don't want them to do it, just get the fuck away. If you have no sympathy but don't want them to do it, your thoughts aren't going to be of any help, so keep them to yourself and be gone, damn spot.

There are some interesting points in this response, though. He acknowledges that knowing his father had ended his own life would have made it especially devastating. We all die, anyone around us can die at any time, but there's something particularly disturbing when one of us chooses to die. When someone just dies, the death is the entire issue. But when it's suicide, there's a whole nother dimension added to it. We can't hear of a suicide and just take it as someone having "just died". Even though the afterfact is still the same, they're still just dead.

That ties into the "happy ending" aspect to this response's experience (which may have helped him be so self-righteous and unsympathetic). A completed suicide includes: 1) the attempt, the self-committed act; and 2) the death. Death, we all know, can hit at anytime, and as bothersome as that is, it's the attempt, the self-committed act, that really, really gets our goats regarding suicides.

This response experienced the attempt, but not the death, and that results in happy ending. No resentment that he could have been gone. The father did the act, he had the full intent, but without the death, all the weight that would have been put on the act is pardoned. Even though the act was done. I know I'm twisting the logic around into illogic like a mobius strip, but I just find you humans so damn curious.