Beyond the abstraction of the opposing views on the ethics or morality of suicide lies the more relatable perspective of the pain suicide inflicts on so many more than on the person choosing to end their life.
Religion tells us that God gave us life and only God takes it away. When we appropriate what lies in God’s power, we are breaking our commitment to God. Suicide additionally is a breach of the social contract into which we have willingly entered. We are born with blood and kinship ties which we are presumably committed to honor and live by. When we decide to jump ship, what we kill is not just our own life but also the life of those around us – the near and dear ones as well as those whom we have managed to touch remotely and incidentally. Calling it quits is like throwing a pebble in a body of water. It cannot but cause ripples with wide-ranging effects on known and unknown lives.
Philosophers across ages have grappled with the ethics of suicide. Some see it in libertarian terms as an individual’s right to make his or her choice. Others who oppose it equate it to murder, an act forbidden by all societies except during war. Those who justify suicide deem it as permissible during unusually stressed circumstances, which an individual considers unendurable. Prohibiting suicide according to them in those cases amounts to being “irresponsibly optimistic” because it falsely assumes that it is possible to inoculate fully and absolutely everyone against the unbearable anguish and pain of human life.
The ‘will to live’ is directly dependent on how one perceives and experiences the challenges confronted in the ‘act of living’. Moreover, in so far as we are born free we must be deemed equally to be free to die. Simply put, our destiny lies in our hands, not in the state’s, the church’s, the synagogue’s, or the temple’s hands. To expect and compel a person to live when life becomes unlivable is therefore immoral and unjust according to the above line of reasoning. As Sidney Hook contends, it is immoral to insist that one must endure unrelenting torment.
Historically the more conventional stance and the one that is universally propagated by all faiths and societies views suicide not as a human right, but as an aberration and a tragic human failing. While empathetic towards the intolerable distress under which some of us exist, it nevertheless expects the sufferer to muster the courage and the inner power to continue wanting to live. Extinguishing life in this line of thinking becomes a heinous act scorned and deemed punishable as sinful without any possibility of redemption. Thus, when you take away your life, you are forever left in limbo, with no chance to re-enter the body and house of Christ or Ram or whichever prophet one has chosen to follow and whichever faith one has sworn to live by.
Beyond the abstraction of the opposing views on the ethics or morality of suicide lies the more relatable perspective of the pain suicide inflicts on so many more than on the person choosing to end their life. In this case, suicide’s ravaging effects on the survivors who are left behind to cope with the suddenness and inexplicableness of the loss they must endure become central to the case against suicide’s permissibility. There is no justification for inflicting pain on innocent others simply because you find yourself unable to bear the pain of living. In other words, the social contract within which you function and are obligated to honor must supersede your resolve to choose to end your life.
We are lucky as a human race that so far suicide remains an exception and not the norm. Even so, the numbers are staggering. An estimated 703,000 people die by suicide worldwide each year. Over one in every 100 deaths (1.3%) in 2019 was the result of suicide. The global suicide rate is over twice as high among men than women. Among peer countries, America has the highest rate – 13.9 suicide deaths per 100,000 compared for instance to 7.3 in the UK. Mental illness along with several socioeconomic factors are contributing causes.
As societies get socio-economically depressed globally despite the spectacular human and material progress on all fronts, the human ability to cope with the stresses of living weakens to the point of desperation. The desire or resolve to die is not just linked to poverty and want. It can be a product of one’s social ineptness and environmental dissonance, or occasionally merely a follow-up act on one’s intellectual search for the rationale of living. Growing up in India, I recall the horror in my college days of a promising youth who chose to end his life attributing his decision to his reading of The Rebel by Albert Camus. Where intellect leads and how it drives an affluent seemingly well-put-together young life to the conclusion that life is meaningless, and to live is unforgivable, remains a mystery. But the more the mystery surrounding suicide, the greater the pain for the mourners left behind to cope with their ‘leftover’ life.
Learning to bear the loss from a calculated or pre-conceived death is one of the most demanding challenges we can face. This is where some such as Charlotte Maya have stepped in with a piece of their own life from which to derive strength and lessons not only on how to cope with despair of a loved one committing suicide but also on how to render appropriate emotional and material support to enable a grieving family to deal with the vacancy caused by a beloved’s suicide.
On a “perfectly ordinary Sunday”, as Maya escorted her children to a soccer game while her tired husband chose to stay home to nap, she had no premonition of what transpired. The nap her husband took was unusual and as brutal as it was eternal. He jumped off a parking structure not far from his home where the police found him with a shattered body and a last testament-type note addressed to his wife and children. Maya’s solace if any was that she and her kids were given a farewell note although no clue as to what transpired and why.
Even when known, the knowledge of the reasoning behind committing suicide is no balm to the ones asked to comprehend the meaninglessness and injustice let alone the unending anguish of losing one’s life partner, parent, sibling, child, friend, or someone unknown. Each death diminishes our life. It pushes us to the limits of our endurance to find the best ways to cope with the loss of the departed, while also grappling with the guilt of being left behind to continue living.
This guilt of living and carrying on without someone we had deemed indispensable is the crux of the challenge we encounter in the wake of death by suicide. The burden is worsened by constant doubt about our own culpability in possibly leading the person to suicide, or at least not moving fast enough to preempt it. From helplessness arises anger and then incrimination. That is when we feel rage and contempt towards the one who jumped ship midway, not like the legendary brave captain who was last to jump after ensuring all on board were safely evacuated, or worse, who went down with the ship in an act of utter dedication to one’s duty and occupational vow.
Maya confesses to experiencing that rage towards her husband “who loved her and their kids with his life but hurt them with his death”. She feels her pain is incomprehensible to others when they naively assume “she was fixed” barely two years after the suicide.
Coping with loss after death is hard enough. But suicide generates moral and psychological crises for the surviving person(s) already reeling under the pain of a loved one’s self-directed death. Tragedy has a way of altering our relationship with God and with God’s precepts as conveyed to us by individual faiths. Some become instant skeptics and lose their faith in faith. Others who look to guidance from the divine find their faith in God redoubled. Maya personalizes in an easily comprehensible way the gist and role of faith in coping with the suicide of a loved one. While staunch faith does not necessarily minimize their acute pain from irrecoverable loss, it eases the path to reconciliation. By going to church or being in close touch with a fraternity of believers, they can have their bewilderment and the sources of their pain addressed, while permitting the healing to begin.
At the core of Maya’s journey lies the basic lesson of life which we have been asked and sent on this earth to live. Life is a precious and precarious gift – like a loan that we never asked for but received, but a loan also that can be recalled at any time without warning. If we keep that in our mind and heart, we know that each moment we live is best used when we treat it and those it impacts with utmost care – as though it is the last moment we have to be with them.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Lead illustration courtesy Pantheon Books
Charlotte Maya photo courtesy Sushi Tuesdays Facebook page.
