Sense and Sensibility

The incomprehensible effects of suicide

Last week a friend of mine killed himself.

We were old friends but not close friends and in that way that life can geographically scatter you yet leave you emotionally bonded, his death left me shattered.

For days after a friend emailed me the news, I phoned her repeatedly and frantically, before realizing she was likely avoiding my questions because they were her questions, too. And she had no answer to them.

Only a third of suicides ever leave notes and the notes can tease the grieving into scrutiny. Perhaps reason is exclusive to the healthy mind. That, of course, is a faculty fatally elusive to the suicide.

I saw a man jump off a building once. Well, not jump, but land. I was in Waterbury, heading for lunch and the man’s sprawled, contorted body stretched out on a side street like a broken bale of hay. I did not know the man, nor drew near enough to see his corpse, but I could not eat that afternoon and prayed for a mother he may not even have had.

About 33,000 Americans – or 83 people a day —  kill themselves in the U.S. Most, or 24,672, are white men. Women tend to attempt suicide three times more than men but men succeed at a higher rate. Suicide is the 11^th cause of death in the U.S., just behind septicemia and above liver disease. Experts keep all kinds of statistics on suicide – the most common months – April and May – the most common manner – firearms – and the age groups most affected – older men.

You can search pie graphs and Excel sheets and collate data from any number of well-meaning sources, but you will never find the definitive “reason” – singular or plural. By its nature, self-obliteration is as distinctive as a fingerprint.

Whenever a person commits suicide, all sorts of commentary, from the predictable to the absurd and occasionally, the insightful tends to follow. People say things like “How could he have done that to his family:” “Wasn’t he getting help?” or, more productively, “He just didn’t seem like the type.”

My friend Steve would have been among those who “just didn’t seem like the type.” He was tall, urbane, extroverted, wry, sharp-tongued and outrageously successful at a young age. I knew him at college because the woman he married was a sterling singer whose bewitching stage presence captivated campus audiences and gave her the guise of a woman who was “going somewhere.” Steve seemed the only man polished, ribald and confident enough to keep up with her.

They had two children – a boy and a girl. The kids should be in high school now.

More than 90 percent of suicides have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder. In a world saturated by prescription drug advertisements, the facile can presume that a mere pill stands between the mentally ill and tranquility.

It is, of course, so much thornier than that.

Steve had bipolar disorder. I only learned of his condition after his death, when donations in his memory were directed to a bipolar support group.

I am not sure why I felt so remiss when I learned of his condition. But it is unbearable realization that a friend was mired in a quicksand of torment to which you were oblivious. No doubt it is hubris to presume that I or any body else who knew him could have done something to alleviate his anguish, could have reached out, could have dissuaded him. But the burden of suicide for the survivors is in those punishing moments of self-recrimination that turn back to just that that slippery presumption: If only.

Speaking once about the obligations of morality, the Jewish theologian Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “in a democracy some are guilty but all are responsible.” I thought about that in relation to Steve and the impotence I felt in the wake of his death. Perhaps everyone feels guilty and responsible in the wake of a suicide.

A friend of mine, a Catholic nun, says that she always believes that on the question of suicide, something can always be done. “Yes, but doesn’t that leave us all feeling horribly guilty?” I asked her. No, she said. It shouldn’t. It should only make us a little more aware, a little less hesitant, a little insistent when we press forward and lean inward to get a better idea of how an old friend is really doing.