The deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain—“apparent suicide” one after the other—give me an excuse to resurrect from the grave of forgotten work this piece written almost 18 years ago in Medical Observer.
The first line is the one I used in the first chapter of—until today—an unfinished book titled Chasing the Wind, the writing of which began around this time 21 years ago, inspired by a life-changing event and by the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Here it goes: No death is sweeter than the one you planned and in the manner you chose. For that reason, suicide may be considered the highest form of death.
Lest I be misconstrued, this is not meant to justify—much less glorify—suicide, but to put the act in another perspective and give one a different level of understanding of the person who takes his own life.
Few people can face death in the eye. Nearly everyone is afraid of death—or of dying. Most people would do everything to prolong their life, unwilling or unable to accept that death is more certain than life itself.
But the person who commits suicide defies conventional thought and shows twice the courage it is required to live. Putting one’s final words on paper alone requires a great deal of courage. And most suicides leave behind a note, indicating that the act was planned and thought out.
In contrast, the remark we hear from many people is very often that the person who hangs himself, slices her wrist, leaps from the roof, jumps onto an oncoming train or drinks poison is weak in resolve to face life, if not sick in the mind. Loosely or not, but wrong as it is, many refer to suicide as an “insane” act. A person who commits suicide may not be the sanest person on Earth but he could be saner than most.
Suicide, of course, is not limited to killing one’s self. It encompasses acts that put one’s life in grave danger, pursuing a life that leads to “premature” death, or knowingly walking into a “grave invitation.”
In that sense, Jesus may be considered to have committed suicide—pressing on with His “Christianization” of the world, despite being fully aware that by His acts He would be crucified.
For us, Filipinos, our concept of suicide subliminally begins in childhood when we sing the National Anthem each single day for 180 days or so of every school year, proclaiming to the whole world that we are ready to die for our motherland—Ang mamatay ng dahil sa ’yo.
One can argue that this is entirely a different matter—it is dying for your country. But there lies perhaps a misplaced view of dying. Why is it okay to die for your country, or for a cause, for your friend, for another person, but not for yourself? Except perhaps for the Japanese and German suicide pilots in World War II, the Jews who killed themselves in Masada, and a few other cases, most suicides involve people who died for themselves.
Maybe, that’s one reason we find it hard to accept the “rationality” of suicide. We think death by suicide is a “waste,” “it lacks meaning,” and serves no purpose because we cannot understand why a person should die for himself. We don’t like it because, somehow, it makes us feel guilty and partly responsible—especially if the act was precipitated by a factor or event that relates to us or to our relationship with the one involved.
Do persons who commit suicide value life less than we do? I prefer not to look at it that way. Instead, I’d like to think that maybe, they have a more defined and concrete concept of—and a stronger faith in—the afterlife.
Granted that depression is a factor in suicide, does everyone who commits suicide die sad? Or does a depressed person who ends his life and suffering—at the moment of his last breath—experience a flash of joy, a split-second of triumph so that to him, death becomes “such sweet sorrow”?
Now, is there a genetic predisposition to depression and suicide just as asthma or diabetes could be in one’s genes? Obviously there is proof, and in this age of evidence-based medicine, such link cannot be easily dismissed. But this is one case I don’t like to give DNA more credit than it deserves.
The trouble with DNA-bashing is that it approaches racial discrimination. To a certain degree it robs man of the responsibility for his actions and diminishes man’s capacity for reason and intelligent decision. Suicide is a “conscious act” that qualifies as an intelligent decision.
Just because the Jews at one time in history showed they are capable of committing mass suicide does not mean it’s in their genes, or even if they have a suicide gene, that doesn’t mean it cannot be turned off. It’s a state of mind, and state of mind is more what you put in your process of thought than the chemicals that your brain uses to process thought.
As for depression, I’d like to view it as a force not unlike gravity. And from what we know of gravity, it is a stabilizer. It does not bring us down. Rather, it pulls us to the center of the Earth—to its very core, deep into the Earth’s heart.
Depression is a force that pulls us to the center of our existence, the core of our being, our innermost self. Like gravity, it stabilizes us and keeps our cup from running over; it lets us put our feet firmly on the ground. We should not fear depression as much as we should not fear failure, because, as one scriptwriter puts it: “Failure keeps geniuses from becoming too vain.”
To borrow from Ecclesiastes, “Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the countenance, the heart is made better.”