“The poetic sensibility was too good for this world; it was best to burn brightly and to die young, like a shooting star.“
–George Howe Colt on Thomas Chatterton’s suicide.
There is no disgrace in choosing to die on your own terms. There is no “lack of coping skills” in you, if you in fact do not wish to cope. Suicide need not be an attempt at solving any problems, it may simply be a successful attempt at dying at one’s moment of choosing. The result is inevitable, but tragic to whom? How must we weigh the innate right of an individual against the somewhat impotent ownership of the collective?
To commit suicide or to “kill oneself” is not a cry for help or attention. That is what it is cloaked with, to keep away from the eyes of the world, the innate right of man to live, and by association, to die.
Even constitutionally speaking, when the right to life promises more than mere animal existence, then how can the negative interpretation of this right be ignored with such an acute sense of moral propriety.
For a society that allows a majority of people to decide to kill an individual, or a minority, on the basis of the “law” which is little more than the will of the ordinary many, or the powerful few, it is not surprisingly out of its character to deny an individual the right to choose to die.
Nobody lives my life for me. Nobody knows it inside like I do. Yet, for some reason, if I believe that this life is not something that I want to continue with, I have no choice but to do so, simply because everybody outside of me has such an unshakable hold on me? And this to some ears seems fair?
To see suicide as an act of helplessness is to kill the person who died. It is to murder him. It is to rape him. It is to march him naked through the streets at high noon. And yet, I am the criminal?
When a life is over, inside, what stops it from ending, outside?
If I think tomorrow, that I have seen, felt and experienced everything I wanted to, in this lifetime, why must I continue to be a cog in your wheel? An agent of your perpetuity? A point on you map?
Yes, help me if I need it. Help me if I want to live. But, let me go, if I don’t. There are others who want to, so much more. Give it to them. Give me to them.
I am sure many “suicidal people often feel lonely, misunderstood, helpless, hopeless, worthless or ashamed, guilty, and/or full of hate for themselves.”
But there are others who feel happy, contented and done with life. What of them?
Let them go, who choose to go. As they let you stay, when you choose to stay.
