It’s nice to meet you, don’t you know my name?

Hi, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Please let me introduce myself: I am a suicide. “A suicide…?” you say, with some shock, thinking I have just made a joke in very poor taste. Yes, a suicide is what I am. I have been dead for some time now, emotionally and spiritually, if not physically as of the time of this writing. My actual name does not matter, nor do the majority of my life’s circumstances. I was never a happy person; that is not to say I had always been sad, or down, or any other state implying the opposite of ‘Happy”, merely that I had never been one of those people for whom the world is a bright or enjoyable place. My life wasn’t inordinately cruel, or rough, or unkind, or demeaning. Honestly, I had no more than my share of ups and downs than any other average person. Why then am I a suicide? There were a variety of reasons that I gave to my doctor, and to myself. Most irreducibly, however, was that I hurt, and that this hurt had become something for which there was no cure. This pain I carried had not been alleviated by talking, was not mitigated by medication, and time only increased the burden on me. For more than a year I had been running a cost analysis: living vs suicide. Some few months ago, continuing on went into the red, and suicide became my only option. That was when I realized that the burden my pain was putting on me had also already begun to transfer to my friends and family. Everyone said that your friends and family are there to support you, that you are needed/wanted/loved, and that there is no real reason to even consider suicide. I am telling you, the conventional wisdom is wrong; what everyone says only adds to the weight. The abyss of sorrow into which I had plunged made me irascible, ill-tempered, emotionally distant and aggressively anti-social. Being told that there were so many who understood my situation and wanted to help me only rang false to me. I was as a result unable to feel any empathy with friends or family or in any social interactions. This also affected my working environment, degrading both my performance and the desire to excel at my duties. When living finally lost out in the analysis, I did all that I felt was necessary to see that those who survived after would be financially cared for, and that the emotional well-being of my family and friends would be seen to. I made my apologies with those that I had wronged, saw to my life insurance and will, strove to complete my last promises, and wrote letters to my spouse and children explaining that my death was neither their fault, nor a result of their not being good enough. Difficult letters to have written, I assure you! I saw to the means of my death and made the appropriate arrangements for my disposal afterwards. Finally, I reached out to my health care provider and made the arrangements to obtain some form of mental health assistance. (As can be said in several fields of employment, I was doing my due diligence in doing everything possible to sustain my life). Oddly, I also found an odd sense of freedom in my death. I had previously suffered from a debilitating phobia as well as a tendency to over-evaluate a given situation out of an overabundance of caution. My behaviors changed. My phobia was either erased, or utterly suppressed. I no longer regarded as risky many things that would have either stopped me cold or caused me to re-evaluate my position. Suffice it to say that as of that time I had means, intent, motive and opportunity to end my life; I was merely biding my time to a more appropriate point that would have the least emotional damage on my survivors. When I met my current therapist, I was at less than 2 weeks remaining in my timeline. (I will not give an exact date as that would serve to identify me). My therapist/doctor was able to alleviate a situation that had plagued me off and on for years, and was certainly contributory to my oncoming death. I was thankful to my therapist for that; it relieved the immediacy of my suicide and allowed me to let go of that timeline for my demise. Unfortunately for the therapists’ comfort, this would be merely a delay and a revised timeline. It should be noted that alleviation of an accompanying condition does not ever constitute a cure for an appetite for self-destruction. For suicide, there is no cure. One either is a suicide, or one is not. Whether or not anyone wanted or hoped to the contrary, I am a suicide. I took the time to pen this so that the mental health care professionals and therapists, the friends and family and other survivors so that you all would be able to obtain a perspective that may be unique: that of a suicide, not that of an attempt survivor, or that of someone who was talked out of committing the act. Suicides for the most part cannot tell you what was in their hearts or minds after the fact, as they had already exited this life. Many left letters to try and help their survivors, some few did not. Some were suicides due to incurable terminal physical illness, some due to mental illness, some as a personal sacrifice so that others would be better positioned to survive, and a very, very few due to spite. All suicides have these things in common, however: all suffered a burden that they were unable to share; all viewed their suicide as a final, irrevocable solution, and not one of them is alive to speak of it. The only thing that mental health care professionals, religious advisors or other advocates may do for a suicide is delay their timeline. In some circumstances that may mean an indefinite delay, but it should under no circumstances ever be misconstrued as a cure; after all, one either is, or is not, a suicide. As my therapist advised me, if a person is truly intent on suicide there is no means short of medically induced coma to prevent them from killing themselves. Many things were very carefully considered when I came to the decision to kill myself: what effect would it have on my children, spouse, friends, family or colleagues? Was there some exclusion in my life insurance that would prohibit financial care to my survivors? Was there some further stigma that would attach as a result of my death? Was I being selfish to choose death rather than endure more of the torture that my life had become? How much of a burden had I begun to place on my family by continuing, and how much worse would it become if I continued to struggle against my death? At the end of all deliberations, death represented respite from pain, a surcease of the relentless torment that my life had become, and an end to the lie that I was a well-adjusted, happy and carefree adult. I would hope that this writing at least demonstrates that I was rational, sane, well-educated and coherent. No action I took was unconsidered, even when I arrived at snap decisions. Choosing life was not something I could endure any longer; I had already done so for too long. When my time ran out, death came by my chosen method (which I do not elaborate on, research has shown that the media sharing those methods tends to cause a contagion effect). To me, Death was a welcome friend that came to help when no one and nothing else could. I am a suicide, and I apologize that I could not get to know you.