Response #8:

Date: 2003-09-25, 11:26AM

Suicideland is what I used to call it; I spent a few years where it seemed to be the fashion in my crowd. In one eight year period, I remember seven suicides: my dad, my cousin, my ex-girlfriend, my high school buddy, two co-workers, and my brother's best friend.

While I can empathize with feelings of hopelessness, etc., as I am human too, what you may not realize is the level of devastation left behind when someone kills him or herself. It isn't just something you do to yourself; it's something you do to everyone who knows you, everyone who raised you from a baby, everyone ever involved in your life.

Of course, that's the point: suicide is not self-directed entirely, is it? It's a way to get even; a way of releasing anger. Like seppuku, it is designed to humiliate all who drove you to it. Once they see your dead corpse, they'll be sorry, eh?

Well, bub, there is nothing noble about a petulant act of selfish nastiness. And thanks for sharing, buddy; those of us who've been through it are always thrilled at being reminded of how brutishly nasty some humans can be to one another.

This response starts off well-reasoned and makes good points, but then degenerates into the hostility of someone who hasn't healed from the anger and hurt of surviving a suicide; suicides in this case. There is a variation on the "suicide is the ultimate fuck you to everyone you knew" theme from the previous hostile response, #4.

In this case, it is posed as affecting every person "ever involved in your life". That's when this writer, in an almost paranoic frenzy, starts sliding down the slippery slope and begins accusing suicides of intending to hurt the people around them! Seriously, the first two paragraphs read totally differently from the last two paragraphs.

He mentions seppuku as being "designed to humiliate the people who drove you to it". My guess is that one of those seven people he knew used seppuku since he is mentioning it in this context (especially since that is an entirely inaccurate description of seppuku and its "design"). Furthermore, he mentions nobility in the next paragraph. Seppuku was considered a noble, or honorable, form of suicide in Japan. The writer of the Craig's List suicide note mentions nothing about being "noble". This response is projecting noble intent on this suicide as a way of expressing his hurt and anger at whoever it was who used seppuku.

As with the previous hostile response, this one ends off with a flair of his own sarcastic, petulant, selfish (unsympathetic) nastiness. This response should have stopped after making the good point of how far-reaching a suicide can be. And that is a hard point, I can't say anything about that. It appeals to any shred of compassion left in the potential suicide to consider the human repercussions. That might turn someone around, but we get into the problem of comparing pains.

The writer of this note would have preferred to have been spared the pain of surviving all those suicides. I couldn't project on what or how far he would have been willing to go to stop them, if he were even able to. He wasn't, they were out of his control. What is in his control is the ability to heal and try to understand what happened. Those people gave up, that was their choice. If he gives up healing and understanding, that's his choice.