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Friday, September 10, 2004
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WHAT MAKES LIFE WORTH LEAVING?
II [for earlier post, see UD, 3/27/04] Now that there’s been a suicide - another jumper - at UD’s own university this week, she begins to suspect there’s a “cluster,” or what some observers call a suicide contagion, going on. The fact that all of the NYU students, and a number of the GW students in the last year, jumped, is suggestive, as is of course the sudden high number of deaths on each campus. There’s a glamour to suicide. It’s a powerful, enigmatic act. “A suicide establishes a man,” says a character in a novel written during the epidemic of fashionable suicides in France during the 1830’s. “Alive one is nothing; dead one becomes a hero. …. All suicides are successful; the papers take them up; people feel for them.” Some people emulate them, drawn by the finality of an act which seems to demonstrate a simple solution to whatever overwhelming problems have brought you to the brink. The drama of the public leap, and of the fall onto public plazas, strengthens, for some, the peculiar argument that suicide makes. And yet UD always feels, when university students kill themselves, that they must - wherever they are now - be regretting having done it. She doesn’t at all feel this way about old, ill people who do themselves in. But she can’t shake the thought that perhaps even in the commission of the act the GW and NYU students were hoping they could take back what they’d done, that in a sort of final flash they comprehended the breadth and the beauty of the life they‘d been given. Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. UD worries that candlelight marches, television spots, and high-profile blabbing about the subject might have the effect people don’t want - that it might concentrate the minds of certain depressives… |