The Pros and Cons of the Suicide Note

There's something to be said for a good suicide note.  This wasn't a subject I had contemplated much until about three weeks ago, when I was sort of forced into it by circumstances beyond my control.  More on that in a minute, but first, this:  We had a friend who committed suicide about two years ago.  His name was Pat, and because of a falling out about a year prior, we were actually not on speaking terms with him at the time he made the decision to write his suicide note and put the gun to his head.  I was still angry at him at the time it happened because of the circumstances of the prior falling out, but when I read his suicide note, I had to admit that it was oddly kind of nice and eloquent.  Pat's note reads as follows:

------------

Friends and Family,

I have no regrets.  I have lived a life filled with fantastic highs and lows.  I have experienced incredible things few people have in a single lifetime.  I have had the opportunity to share love, and to love passionately.  For this I am grateful, for both the good and the bad.

But as the saying goes, "The candle that burns twice as bright burns twice as fast."  I have cheated death many times.  So please have no grief or sadness.  I never expected to live this long even as a child.  I leave this life with a clear and calm mind free of attachment.  This is a quality of life decision, my decision.

"Share a little joke with the world."

Au Revoir,
Patrick

------------

Everything in the note is entirely true.  Pat was a pretty wild and crazy motherfucker.  He lived a fun, wild and exciting life in his youth from what I understand ... and I know that he cheated death many times with severe addictions to illicit drugs in his youth and severe addictions to prescription drugs in his later years (I think he was about 58 when he committed suicide), and from lord only knows what other crazy stuff he engaged in when he was young.  And the key is that he did leave his life with very few attachments.  He had no kids, and his wife had died of an accidental prescription drug overdose a couple years prior (which was a major part of the impetus for his decision to put the gun to his head to begin with).

I hadn't thought much about that note in the two years since it happened, but something happened just three weeks ago that forced it back into my mind.  Something that violently tore the guts out of my entire family and many other people:  My Aunt Amy, my mom's youngest sister, who was only 10 years older than me (9.5 to be exact), committed suicide at the age of 44.  She was bipolar, and she was very vocal about her disorder and the problems that it regularly caused in her life.  We all knew in the back of our minds that this was not completely outside the realm of possibility, but I don't think many of us ever allowed ourselves to go there mentally.  I think we all thought that as long as her life (marriage, kids, job) remained fairly stable, that she would always be able to carry on and endure.  I am now realizing that her husband and kids, though, had attempted to mentally prepare themselves for this much more than the rest of us had, because they saw her day in and day out and they saw every issue that she had as a result of the disorder on a daily basis.

My reactions to this from the time I first heard the news up until this moment have of course ranged from one end of the spectrum to the other - extreme anger, frustration, devastation, disbelief, denial, gutwrenching sadness, and on and on.  One thing I'm realizing is that I'm probably subconsciously turning back to frustration/anger pretty regularly because I just can't fucking stand the bottomless abyss of sadness and emptiness at the whole situation ... those are too much to bear all the time ... and frustration and anger are way easier (at least for me they are because I am very talented at being pissed).  :-P  Oh and not to mention denial, which I still have a LOT of right now.  My brain can't comprehend that this isn't just a long nightmare that I'll eventually wake up from.

And I'm not sure if this is weird, but one particular thing that I've found extremely frustrating is that she did not leave a note.  Well, she started to write like two sentences of a note in her email and then abandoned it, and instead posted a Facebook status that said something to the effect of, "Sometimes words are just not enough."  And all I kept thinking was ... she made the decision to completely and royally screw over her teenage children and husband, and she didn't even have the decency to leave a damn note for them!?  She even deleted her damn facebook account after posting that status, so that every comment she ever posted on anyone's pics or statuses or walls has been completely wiped out.  Sounds weird to even be talking about Facebook in this situation, but it's SUCH an ingrained form of communication these days that there were a lot of nice and fun memories and conversations on there that I would have liked to have still been able to see and remember.  And hell, the closest thing she did leave to a suicide note was that cryptic Facebook status ... as well as her final "statement" to the world, which was to wipe out her FB account.  Ahh, the age of modern technology.  I guess the pre-internet-age version of this action would be to take every photograph and other documentation of yourself that you can find and burn them or something.  It's either an "I'm not worthy of even existing" or a final "fuck you" to everyone that loved you, or a little of both.

In the midst of all this, I ended up looking back on the Pat situation from a couple years prior and almost appreciating it in an odd way.  Even though I was SOO angry at him both before he did it and after, I found myself looking back and almost wanting to thank him for leaving such an eloquent note.  So I went back and re-read his note again for the first time in two years (it was printed on a pamphlet thing from his memorial).  I wasn't sure what the hell re-reading it was going to do for me, but I think somehow I thought it would help me mentally ... I'm not sure how.

It didn't help one bit though, it simply illustrated the enormous differences in the two situations.  They couldn't be further apart.  He had no wife or kids and therefore not many attachments; she had a husband and two teenage kids, and several sisters and brothers in law and nieces and nephews and very close church friends and so on, who she was very close to.  Lots and lots of attachments that are now suddenly ripped apart like limbs torn off.  He felt like he didn't have much left to live for (and given the fact that he spent most of his time in a complete drugged out stupor, those feelings were not entirely unfounded), and she had a TON to live for.  Like SO SO SO fucking much to live for.  She had a GREAT family and an AMAZING husband and two AWESOME kids with limitless potential, and all of us in the rest of her family who loved her, along with many great friends.  He felt like he had already accomplished all he needed to in life, and I really can't see where Amy would have felt that way (goes back to the having so much to live for thing).  But the problem with Amy is that she had a lot of anguish bottled up and swirling around in her own head that most other people never saw ... so I suppose she was having many of the same feelings that Pat did, but no one else could really understand why (even she couldn't understand why).

So then if she HAD left a note, what would it have said??  I can't imagine how the hell she could give any decent explanation for peacing out on her husband in the prime of life and ditching her kids at such a young age.  And her son, who is clearly wiser than the rest of us, pointed out that any note she would have left would not have been at all helpful, because it would have simply been the bipolar disorder talking and not "healthy Amy".  I still keep thinking that I would have wanted to read it anyway just to see what WAS going through her head during that planning process, even if it was only part of a brain malfunction caused by this disorder.  But I know it would only confuse or frustrate me more, given that situation.  Since it would have been the bipolar talking, there's a chance that it would have actually hurt more than it helped.  So she may have actually been doing us all a favor.

So what the hell is my point??  I'm not entirely sure, but I suppose it's something like this:  There is something to be said for a good suicide note, but not every suicide situation is the same or even very comparable at all.  In Amy's situation the note would not have helped, and may have even caused more harm than good.  It certainly would not have solved anything or brought her back.  Yet, that does not take away the fact that I (and probably many of those who loved her) will now spend the rest of my (our) life with an insatiable longing to just figure out exactly why ... to find out what was the thought process behind the final decision ... to just one time ask her what it was on that particular week that made her turn to this, vs. all the other weeks in the past where she had gone through those similar types of feelings due to the bipolar disorder.  But that is a need and a hunger that will never be satiated.  Not now, not a few years from now, not 30 years from now, not ever. The only time that conversation will ever happen is in my dreams, and the only answers I'll ever get will be generated from my own imagination.

R.I.P. Amy ... I hope you have found peace from this decision, as I do (or at least am really trying to) understand the fact that your disorder caused you unbearable pain and irrational thoughts, otherwise you would never have done it.  But you are gone now, which means that there's something much more important at this point.  And that is the hope that Jim and the kids will eventually find peace with this.  Is it at all possible for them to ever find it?  I don't know, maybe it will be easier for them in a way because they witnessed more of your pain than anyone else did, as you normally put on the braver face for the rest of us?  The only thing I do know is that I'm pretty damn sure that I will never find peace with it.  But I'm not the one who matters, I'm just the whiny bitch writing this blog.

Tahoe July 2010

Tahoe July 2010

Tahoe, July 2010

With my brother, 1979-ish