(WriterWorkshop) Suicide [And-Darling]
2007-06-05 -- 10:40 a.m.

My first brush with suicide, a concept at that time I was unaware of, was when I was five years old. I suppose you could say that at the age of five I had experienced more than the average toddler would ever have. My grandmother died, my mother returned from leaving my father, his side of the family went into a scavenger frenzy over the estate, and while I was trying to comprehend death of a human being for the very first time, my mother tried to kill herself.

I remember it clearly. The screaming had brought my attention into the white-tiled kitchen, and the lights were off. Peering around the corner, I could see my mother—her face ruined with tears and that certain ugliness you witness when someone is in complete disparity. Her body was tense. I could see the ligaments and veins pop out as though she was anticipating pain. And she was. Inside of her hand she had the blade of a kitchen knife pressed up against her wrist. My father held her other wrist and attempted to calmly resist her goal of pressing the blade into her flesh.

It’s not clear as to whether I screamed out her name, but it seemed like an Ayian thing to do. Scream out her name and watch her meet my eyes and stop. I was piss scared and confused as I watched my mother in the kitchen, papa holding her shaking body close. My mother had disappeared for a good year or so and failed to talk to us—when suddenly she came back out of the blue to replace the mother who had replaced her: my grandma.

This wasn’t the first time my neurotic unstable mother had wished death upon herself. Often enough through my childhood I had seen and heard her mumbles of wishing she’d die. One time she outright said it to my brother and I when we were driving her mad. "If you hate me so much, then I’ll just go and kill myself". The thing of it is, though, we never did hate mommy. I was just a really really angry five year old who couldn’t understand why she left us the first time.

So my thoughts on suicide are negative. I don’t see it as an escape or a release, not even a blessing to those who that individual may have thought didn’t want them around. To me, suicide is the weakest point of a person’s life, not the strongest. It does not show the will of a person to brutalize themselves—to put an end to their suffering, because it is their ability to cope with the suffering that gives them strength. There is nothing powerful about ending it by dying. There is nothing strong about giving up.

Those who leave this world because they couldn’t handle the life they were given are not only disrespectable in my eyes, but they are also selfish bastards. No matter what, someone will always miss someone. Someone will always love someone. And the ignorance of that resulting in a lonely death is anything but majestic, but pure, and truthful. A suicide does not take into consideration the reactions of others and the hurt they may experience. A suicide is selfish, low, and wasteful. It does not appreciate mourning. It does not deserve sympathy.

My mother, without consideration for her husband or her five year old daughter and two year old son, had wanted to die the day she found out my grandmother had passed away. Not only couldn’t she handle the death of Popo, but she couldn’t handle her marriage or her children. Perhaps it was in due to Papa being an angry and mean man at the time, but what did her five year old daughter do that somehow managed to muster up such immense amounts of suffering, that Nico would rather die than live to raise her little girl. Even now I don’t get it, and I don’t ever bring it up. They all think I’ve forgotten.

When someone threatens that they’re going to kill themselves, I tell them they should do what they want to do. It often stops them in their tracks because it’s some silly cry for attention and they’re puzzled as to why I don’ t seem to care about their well-being. I do care, but not in the sense that I’ll bend over backwards for someone who could so easily toss out their life on a line waiting for an unsuspecting fish to nab it. No body has died due to my words, and if someone ever did, I’d shake my head wondering why a person was so easily led by verbal communications and no gun to their head.

A suicide is the weakness of mind and soul.

I’d be a dead man if that weren’t true.