Time and again, I find myself asking: “How could a creature this wretched and miserable not kill himself?”
And the obvious answers are survival instinct, a blind and deeply rooted fear of death, along with attachment to delusional fantasies of a life worth living.
And those don’t seem like very good reasons. It kind of feels like if that’s all that’s keeping me here in such misery, I “should” find some way to overcome those inhibitions and end it.
But that then raises questions of what that “should” is based on, if not personal preference. And all I can really come up with in terms of a moral imperative is that which leads to less significant suffering, overall.
Which requires me to consider the impact on those unfortunate enough to care about me: my parents, my sister, my young nephew. I think it’s accurate to say my suicide would be devastating for them. Especially my mother.
It’s difficult to weigh up such pain against what I personally live with. I imagine the initial shock especially would be extremely painful. I can see it aggravating the health issues both my parents have. Assuming they find a way through that… it’s hard to picture. I can see it totally taking the life out of my mother. She cares way too much. She’s tried so hard to help me, and to put on a brave face all these years. I suppose I just imagine it plunging her into a deep depression. I think she’d still keep on trying to hold things together, for the sake of my sister and nephew. But I can see it killing any joy she finds in life.
My dad is already pretty cynical and world-weary. I think he’s kind of been low-level depressed for decades. I think it would hurt him a lot, but he’d probably just keep stoically getting on with things.
Not sure about my sister. It’s not that we’re that close now, but we used to be as kids. I do think she cares, even though she doesn’t really know me anymore. I can see it causing her a lot of issues, possibly depression. I think she’d hold it together, her marriage seems relatively stable. But it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t have a significant impact on my nephew, if one parent who constantly dotes on him is suddenly depressed and withdrawn.
All of which is hard to weigh against my current suffering. On the one hand, it feels like my predicament is so much worse than even the most severe grief or loss. They still get to have people in their lives. They’re not alone, like I am. They’re not the monster, the villain in everyone else’s story. They don’t have to hate themselves. Or if they do, they don’t have everyone else agreeing that they should.
But I think that’s probably just personal bias. Grief is grief, depression is depression. The pain is the same, wherever it comes from. And multiplying it would not be preferable.
So I probably shouldn’t kill myself, ethically speaking. I should probably endure my misery, and work on figuring out ways to torment myself less over it.
Which doesn’t mean that that’s what I’ll actually do. I’ll probably continue in the same self-destructive cycle I have for years, until something happens and I can’t anymore.
2 comments
See, it’s the same with me except I’m relatively sure that if I go it’s going to destabilize at least three people and send them off as well. So it’s the same as if I killed three people. What scares me even more is I don’t know if those three people have other people THEY might send off if they go…. how far does this ripple go?!
And three is the conservative number, it could be more. dang it, probably is more, this is why I hate living in the city, everything is so interconnected around here, death is contagious around here
if you die out in the middle of nowhere, no one notices, it can be quiet.
It’s like that movie Smile, where if someone sees it, then they have to do it too.
That is an extra consideration. There does seem to be an infectious element to suicide. And there are ripples of consequences even if no one else dies afterwards.
But I think it’s more about how fragile the people who care for you are than it is about someone seeing it and being inspired. Possibly, if enough strangers witness it, one will happen to be seriously depressed and decide to copy it. But more likely, someone who really cares about you will be thrown into such pain that they look for the same way out you do. So I’m not sure being in the countryside helps. As long as there are people that care for you, there’ll be consequences. And wherever you do it, someone is going to have to find the body eventually.
The only circumstances I can imagine my family killing themselves in is terminal disease, where they literally can’t go on anymore. Otherwise, they’re just too good at putting each other first. My parents spent their whole lives sacrificing, putting their own issues to the back of their minds. I think they’d keep doing that, no matter what. And my sister has learned to do the same. I could see my dad drinking more, and he’d probably die significantly earlier than otherwise. But I could never see any of them consciously choosing to abandon each other. It just goes against everything they’ve built their lives around. I think they’d keep enduring misery as long as they possibly could.