My first 217 suicides

Painful or painless, suicide’s never pointless

Image: Screen grab of video released by Ukrainian military.

The first time I ever fainted was at age 17. The school arranged a series of careers presentations by professionals and, this Friday afternoon, we were honoured with a visit from a Home Office pathologist. No forewarning was given, we were simply sat down to see a collection of the gentleman’s favourite slides. The first, I recall, was a man who had shot himself with a crossbow. There was a second one, whose details I no longer recall. The third showed a man who had sliced his own head off with a knife, or, more accurately, half off, before the endeavour had caused him to expire. The rest I didn’t see; I was aware only of being hauled from the floor by my fellow schoolmates. The experience proved to me beyond question that I was not cut out for medicine. But I believe it was irresponsible of the school not to have advised of the nature of the presentation beforehand. For missing this guest visit, I was even upbraided by the second master, whose shin I could happily have kicked in the moment, had I not been feeling so nauseous.

The first time I ever saw suicide portrayed dramatically and half-way convincingly was the 1997 Steven Spielberg film Amistad, which loosely tells the true story of a slave ship in 1839, on which the American-bound slaves revolt and get taken in by an American naval vessel. At one point, a young slave woman with her child in her arms (played by Ingrid Walters) edges slowly to the rail of the ship and simply leans backwards into the void, mother and child together. The casual manner in which suffering and death are inflicted upon the slaves in that narration of history is thereby contrasted with the quiet dignity with which a woman elects death for her and her child before a life of forced servitude.

The 2002 Stephen Daldry film The Hours, starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, is a complex film telling about three lives interconnected by Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. Streep plays one scene in which she visits a friend, Richie Brown, played by Ed Harris, who is dying from AIDS, in which, while conversing with Streep, Harris moves nonchalantly to the open sash window, sits on the window ledge and, like Walters in Amistad, simply leans back into fresh air. The shock is riveting.

Der Untergang, a 2004 German film about Hitler’s last days in the bunker, contains a scene showing Joseph Goebbels (played by Ulrich Matthes) and his wife (played by Corinna Harfouch) murdering six of their seven children (played by Julia Bauer, Gregory Borlein, Laura Borlein, Amelie Menges, Alina Sokar and Charlotte Stoiber ) and then committing their own suicides in the bunker, as well as Hitler (played by Bruno Ganz) and Eva Braun (played by Juliane Köhler) likewise committing suicide; even supposing the historical accuracy of the events and even as drama, their mass portrayal (ten actors, all expiring on camera within minutes) is revolting.

2001 was the first time I ever saw a real suicide committed, albeit via television, as around 200 of those trapped in the towering inferno of the World Trade Center launched themselves from the conflagration rather than be consumed by its flames. These suicides (autokabalesis) weren’t played at all. As I watched horrified, these poor people hurtling themselves from the burning building, I was inevitably confronted by the great quandary: what would I do in a similar situation? Abandon all hope or hang on till the last, until all possible hope was proved forlorn? It’s one of those situations for which one surely cannot predict how one would react: the rationale and calm in which we ponder the situation in the here and now would be so utterly absent in the conjectured hypothesis, such that, who could say?, in all probability, we’d likely act in entirely the opposite manner.

Soon after I arrived to live in Brussels, I was out one Sunday night at a club and had come out to my car to drive home at 3 a.m. As I fiddled with the belt, the door opened, and I simply thought, This is odd. I looked to my left and saw the barrel of a gun pointing at me, accompanied by something I didn’t quite catch. I have a stentorian voice, which I’m well able to project to the back row of a theatre, and central Brussels that night became my Royal Albert Hall. I projected an expletive at the holder of the firearm and did not abate till he’d high-tailed it down a side street. Whereupon I shut the door quickly, started the engine and sent my Audi Quattro careering outtathere. I didn’t stop till I was home, and didn’t stop shaking for a week afterwards. It was on the way home, I mused at what the assailant had said, and finally, it hit me: reste calme. Stay calm. Not doing so could, I suppose, have got my head blown off. As it happened, I hadn’t twigged what he said and he was bluffing anyway. That time. Would you have given him your last 2,000 francs? Before you answer that, wait till he asks.

The Kyiv Post has put up some astonishing footage. It’s only nine seconds long, but it is astonishing, and a little shocking, all the same. Three Russian troopers sit in a triangle to the front side of their armoured vehicle and two of them shoot themselves—dead. It’s not for the faint-hearted and, wherever your sympathies lie in the Ukrainian/Russian war, it doesn’t really matter what one conjectures as being their reason for ending their lives in this way. The tragedy is that they felt the need to end it. For, their quandary was likely as palpable as any of those described above.