Mysterious Ways

A local girl just killed herself a few days before her high school graduation. For me, as for lots of other people who didn't know her well, there's the blunt impact of realizing that the quiet girl who recently compelled me to buy a used copy of Six-String Samurai on Amazon probably didn't want to be alive at the time that we talked. (Misery, I've found, is either deafening or horribly quiet.) But I know some of the few people who understand the torment that defeated her, and what troubles me most is that for all of her unique problems, the world will only see the crater left by a girl who smiled in pictures and stepped in front of a train. No matter if you're plagued by nightmares or emptiness, cancer or celebrity; there's only one way out, which is through the fingers of everyone you've ever touched. One can only hope that peace exists after the last of their probing. What more cruelly fitting memorial than her Facebook profile, freshly swarmed with messages from people who liked her and loved her, but couldn't possibly understand her?

Then there's the selfish recoil that systematically follows the impact: take me, for example, shaking and sweating on the drive up to my boyfriend's house, unaware that I was one of the last people to hear about the suicide of his close friend, thinking that I'd have to break the news to him and having the nerve to think about how miserable that made me. I should be grateful to have been spared all but a bit of the pain that's just been unleashed. When my mom called later that day and asked how I was doing, I blankly said "Okay" while somewhere in a foggy part of my mind, I was thinking "What the hell does it matter how I'm doing? Someone else is dead." But this is the nature of the human beast, self-centered and delicate: something terrible happens and instantly we think of ourselves. When we join together in the aftermath of a suicide, holding candlelight vigils and compiling our memories, we don't act for anyone but ourselves. We embrace each other to alleviate our own grief, and when we mourn, we mourn not the pain of the dead, but our personal loss. Suicide is the most selfish act possible, and it in turn inspires great selfishness; in the end, the dead and the living turn their backs on each other, and we are farther away from the suicide victim than ever before.

When people end their lives, hardly anyone can understand how it could happen, because the equation is baffling (especially when the people in question are apple-cheeked young folk): on the one hand, there's friends and family and love and music and sunny days and laughter and the exciting promise of the future, and on the other, there's the abandonment of hope, the lonesome scary trip out of waking life, and the hellish aftershock of nausea and tears and scarring that is left behind. The choice of the latter is unfathomable to healthy humans, which is proof of good evolution. This hopeless oblivion haunts those who are close to someone that opts out of life (what's more disturbing than realizing that someone who seemed close to you was really very far away?), but the farther away from ground zero one gets, the more comforting the oblivion is. As the proverb gnomes say, "what you don't know can't hurt you". But depression taught me a very sick sensibility which led me to understand how the scales between life and suicide can start to even out. Never did mine tip critically, but being miserable generated the theory that life isn't always worth living. The trick to that equation is the element of dehumanization. For example, just like a bedridden cancer patient who is kept alive less by flesh and blood than by sterile hospital equipment, a depressed person is stripped of that which makes them human: happiness, love, empathy, feeling, spirit. What's the worth of life without humanity, the simple rhythm of the heart and breath? Humanity is what we cherish above all else. Life isn't inherently beautiful; life is a constant gamble between happiness and unhappiness, and happiness is a gift.

Evidently, I've been able to get close enough to this suicide story to be able to bash my head on it rather thoroughly. This is partially due to the absence of comforting degrees of separation, and also to a new sensitivity which I attribute to my experience with debilitating depression. Eerily, sickeningly, I feel closer to this girl as a suicide victim rather than a living acquaintance, having watched her reach the end of a track upon which I barely set foot. While her friends are struggling with feelings of alienation from her, I've had the shock of realizing that we were probably much closer than I thought: and now that I'm suddenly so attracted to her, she's been permanently deleted from life. As I watched her be buried, I tilted my head for a perpendicular perspective and thought "There goes someone I should've known". I suppose this potently strange sort of loss is just another card to be dealt in this endless game of five-card-stud we play... Some fold, condemning the cards in their hand to impotence, isolation, and eternal mystery.