On Suicide

Like most of you, suicide has touched my life many times. 

When I was 13, my mom died young from a blood disorder called TTP.  It caused a lack of oxygen to her brain which left her brain dead.  She died or was allowed to die (I don’t know which) a couple of weeks after that.

But she had tried to kill herself by overdosing on pills at least a couple of times when I was younger than that.  Her despair was tied to Dad leaving her.  I remember one those times clearly from when I was about 10.  It was in our house in Longwood, Florida.  I think it was a Saturday night.  She wouldn’t let me watch the color TV in the family room.  I had to watch the crappy black and white one in the formal living room. 

While I quietly watched the Saturday night monster movie, she wrote a note and took a bottle of pills, probably Valium.  She fell asleep in the recliner, which was something she never did.  When we got up the next morning, she was still asleep in the recliner.  We couldn’t wake her up and eventually called an ambulance.  I remember visiting her in a psych ward behind locked doors with reinforced glass windows once or twice while she recovered.

 

More recently we’ve had a couple of friends take their own lives.  An old friend of my wife’s overdosed on pills and wine after a fight with her husband.  A couple of years before that a friend from work shot herself in the abdomen and bled to death. 

Three years ago my brother drank himself to death.  While not quite the same deliberate act as most suicides, he had a hand in his own death even if it was guided by the demon of substance abuse.

Suicide is usually such a private and lonely affair. In 2013, there was a sportswriter, Martin Manley, who blogged his own suicide in detail, explaining everything he did and why.  The blog is gone, but you can read about it here and many other places.  At the time, I read the whole blog and my take away was that he gave up too soon.  He was still healthy and wasn’t poor.  But by god he wanted to be sure he died before his health or money gave out. 

Addendum: I found a mirror site of Manley's suicide blog.  It is morbid but fascinating reading.