Suicide is painless

Preventing it is best done by being thoughtless

Image: The 1970 film M*A*S*H (it stands for “mobile army surgical hospital” and is about a US field hospital in the Korean War) skirted the offence that resides in the worst aspects of “swearing like a trooper”; but it did make frequent use of the expletive “damn”, which raised concerns from the US censor. A poster was distributed in response to the rating administration’s rejection of the notion that a picture about the army, set in times of war, should resort to a key expression of human frustration. It is copyright-free.

This article was first published on LinkedIn on 15 August 2022.

My next-door neighbour is an elderly widow. When I moved in 20 years ago, her husband was still alive but, over the years, his mental state declined to the point that he needed to be admitted to a nursing home, where, his mind still partially in this world, he made the very hard decision to turn towards the next. It was a fraught enough time for me, the guy next door; for the family it was something none of them could have prepared for, and the expression of the wish starts a lengthy process of consultation and preparation. Saying “Condolences” is easy, because you know there’s nothing you can do about the circumstances in which they’re said; but knowing what to say when you learn of a euthanasia yet to be performed … will it maybe be covered by Debrett’s guide to etiquette?

Euthanasia is an act of compassion: by both him whose life is ended and those who will be left with its aftermath. The doctor is the man in the middle and, like an executioner, is the one with no axe to grind but who’s left breaching the sixth Commandment. We all know that we will one day depart this mortal coil; and, while some have a greater sense of foreboding, no one knows exactly when destiny will call for them. With euthanasia, all know: the euthanised, the relatives and the euthaniser – it’s a practice whose emotional baggage is heavy for the medics who do it; not simply “Please don’t go”, but “Don’t go, I swore to keep you here.”

The 1970 black comedy M*A*S*H announces the darkness of its humour in the song that plays over the opening credits: to a soulful but sing-along tune, we hear the lyric “Suicide is painless.” Though it comes over initially as almost cynical, it is true. Suicides shock: what moves people who are rich, famous, celebrated, to end it all, to snuff their flame? Internalisation of the wish to commit it happens in that turn-about moment, in which the question switches from “What is there to live for?” to “Why not just end it all?” to which there is, inevitably, but one answer.

The unseeing may regard the two questions as synonymous, and conceptually they just about are; yet, they are the meeting point of two roads that converge from quite different directions. The act leaves those who are left to ponder at the vacuity of it: where was once someone is now nothing. It is a vacuity which the victim of the act has arrived at before the observer ever pondered it. It is a nothingness that is already someone’s reality, and if Covid-19 made me appreciate anything, it’s that nothingness is no state in which humans can thrive. Monks fill their void with devotion, service, calling, self-actualisation and prayer. The elderly fill theirs with beetle drives and canasta, snapshots and memories. And the forlorn have few means to fill it at all.

Jean’s euthanasia was painless in body, if not in soul and mind. Suicide, on the other hand, is painless, full stop. When it comes, not as a cry for help, but as a resolution to an untenable human condition, it is welcomed, gladly and with open arms. It is yearned for and it is sought after. The bereft ask what they could have done to prevent it — how could we have known? Shakespeare’s King Lear says, out of nothing can come nothing. That’s right, so does a thought of suicide come from nothing? Suicide is a brink to an abyss that few have visited, even fewer contemplated and only the fewest have broached. It is painless because the pain experienced on that brink drives the victim forward in the act. It is painless because it’s fulfilment of the wish, one which no distractions on Earth can detract from. Saving the suicidal is no easy task, if saving is even what it is.

They say that a potential suicide is at their most precarious at precisely the moment their outward appearance takes on calm and serenity; this is hard to comprehend, but true. Just at the time when one believes the danger is passed, it has in fact taken its ultimate mortal root, the die is set. The die in which the suicide’s hopelessness and their will to resolve it converge, the meeting of those two roads; it brings palpable relief and satisfaction, as the will just to die forms their sole reason to live.

This October, there is every chance that Ukraine will still be engaged in its war; I wonder, of all its losses, how many Ukrainians took the path to eternity felo de se. And, yet, how hopeful is its foe’s future? The gas taps may be screwed down ever tighter; real wages may continue on a decline; many will abandon warring politics and switch to political warring; others will abandon hope and even baulk at Kipling’s fortitude, ceasing to hang on when there is nothing in them but the will that says to them “Hang on.” I am no fortune-teller, but there is no reason in my mind to suppose that the suicide rate will fall.

Wherever we are, there is much we can do to prevent suicides, even if we don’t actually know of anyone who stands on that brink, and fill the void, be it that of someone we know, don’t know … or even our own. This article is just a small gesture that may help that realisation along. Perhaps a beggar you pass on the way to work; perhaps your brother; or perhaps even the guy next door; in the play, many who are close to him defy King Lear, and each of us can join that throng, can make of nothing something.

In fact, I have faith that many suicides are averted by not even trying, because whoever didn’t try was unaware that suicide was in the offing. The studied specialism of some counsellors is to treat the suicidal professionally. For others, it comes naturally: an act of kindness.

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