New Mexico Mercury

Many of us, I’m sure, have had friends or acquaintances who’ve committed suicide.  And the longer we live, the ever more mysterious and frequent suicide seems to become in our experience – often to the point of grieving despair.  Those left behind inevitably search themselves for missed opportunities to have helped, misperceived clues that might have signaled a call for intervention, and failures of compassion that might have lifted someone’s burden just enough.

Recently the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded that suicide was the10th most frequent cause of death in the United States. It also found that middle-aged people and the elderly have the highest rates of suicide – some 18 deaths out of 100, 000.

New Mexico has among the highest rate of suicide in the country across all ages.  It’s the 5th worst place in the country for self-harm behind Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Nevada, at 20 suicides per 100,000 deaths. The CDE report says little about attempted suicides except to compare the 38,364 known suicides in the nation in 2010 to the estimated 650,000 suspected attempts.

How is one to think about such sad statistics? Questions of suicide pervade the legal, ethical, and religious values and institutions of every culture. Since World War II two of the world’s most compassionate thinkers – Albert Camus and Viktor Frankl -- have made suicide the center of their philosophical systems. But it’s a subject most of us can’t stand thinking too much about.

But as our society ages, the specter of dementia, the tortures of cancer, the dreads of losing one’s freedom and mobility and capacity for self-reliance, and therefore one’s sense of meaning in a hard charging culture like our own, make suicide a final lonely option for many. And the loss of a beloved life-partner or the last of one’s tried-and-true old friends, or that of a young colleague or friend, can be devastating.  And, of course, some people with chronic depression simply fall into the black hole of their chemical imbalances and never return.

But, paradoxically, the possibility of release by suicide can also be a source of strength to keep on living against terrible odds. As the ancient Stoics said, “The door is always open,” if a humane and honorable life is no longer an option. It helped them endure the frightening miseries of a slave-based warrior society in which class determined everything, including the law.

Suicide comes in so many forms that it’s almost not a single category of human action, though the results of suicide are the same across the board.

Some of us have experienced another’s suicide as a form of hostile revenge. All of us who know about the suicide of a child, or a young person who isn’t aware of the inevitable workings of change and chance, find it perhaps the most crushingly mysterious of tragedies.

And middle aged people caught in the traps of poverty and ill fortune, who’ve suffered divorce, the shocking onset of illness or financial ruin may sink so low emotionally that suicide seems the only way out.

I am sure, as our population ages, as adequate health care becomes increasingly political and difficult to secure, many elders might consider rational, well planned suicide as not only a way to avoid unnecessary horrors, but also as a way of affirming their values and their respect for the living. But who knows what lies ahead.

Like religion, philosophy and psychotherapy can be of deep comfort. Camus, seeing suicide as the central philosophical question in a world that can seem so much of the time to be cruelly absurd, opens avenues of thought that could lead to a defiant and passionate embracing of life.  Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy helps patients find love and meaning in an existence that seems irredeemably vacant and excruciating.

If we search our memories we might find suicides that puzzled us and even hurt us at first but that came to seem humane and in keeping with a life worth living – the author, a long time member of the Hemlock Society, who was going blind and was about to have to abandon her house and way of life of 50 years, the elderly couple, both encumbered with terminal illnesses, who couldn’t contemplate the thought of living without the other, or the dying  person who consciously refuses life support to retain control of her existence.

We all feel, I’m sure, that we must do everything we can to keep a  young person from cutting off their chances in a moment of rage or despair. And we must come to respect the decisions of the elderly and dying.

I’m concerned more than ever, lately, that middle aged people contemplating suicide could be doing so in a state of disorienting, sinking loneliness. So many people, especially those who live alone, who work at impersonal jobs, and who are losing friends, have no one to listen to their life’s stories and reflections, or to hear them out in the spirit of productive dialogue. They feel the weight of their undisclosed experience dragging them down. Perhaps they aren’t even thinking directly of suicide but are methodically eating and drinking themselves to death.

Perhaps their loneliness will generate so much entropy they will implode physically, suffer a stroke or a heart attack.

Reading of the CDC’s findings on aging  and suicide, and on New Mexico’s sorrowful high rate of self-inflicted death, I think to myself how enormously lucky I am and how perhaps one way to repay that luck is just to become a better listener, a kinder listener, to those who need to be heard.