There, but for, go I, etc.

One of my colleagues, one whom I never met, is a colleague no longer. Having received notice of her hiring rather late, she skipped get-to-know-Springfield week and went straight to the intensive training for new attorneys. Thus, we never met in person. We heard an interesting anecdote from our boss and got some personal/professional details, but that was it.

Now she is dead.

Suicide and I have had an interesting relationship. Like most of my relationships, there was always a dearth of primal connection. I confess to fascination, indignation, philosphication, dramatization, and even a bit of novelization. But I have never known anyone personally who has taken that road, at least, not all the way. I've known quite a few near-misses and a few more likely candidates. I do not wish to cast aspersions on either the living or the dead, but from the living I've received virtually no insight or useful information about the process or the state of mind surrounding the phenomenon. And so, my relationship with suicide is one of abstract thought.

I think about it a lot. I've gone well past the point of the will I/won't I bullshit, and after an exhausting near-decade of mulling it over I've come to believe that nobody should talk tough about suicide unless they've done it. As for me, I kept my opinions to myself, and I ultimately concluded that my internal wiring was solid (enough) and that I would never be able to do it. It was difficult to concede the point. It meant that I lacked courage and conviction. It meant that my irrational fear of the unknown was paralyzing. It meant that my sense of free will was nothing more than an ignorant delusion, and that I was a prisoner in my mind and my body alike.

It was so hopeless that even thinking like that wasn't enough to push me over the edge.

Most people who defend the practice rest their argument on some notion that if a person makes some sort of rational decision that they'd rather not be alive, then who the hell is anybody else to stop them, or judge them after the fact? Well, that's all well and good. It really is. I've made that decision plenty of times, and then unmade it, and made it over again. I never did the deed, or even tried. This is because it's also beyond dispute that the overwhelming majority of suicides are linked with pretty serious mental illnesses, addictions, and other things that have an observable and (to a certain extent) predictable impact on a person's bio-circuitry. In other words, there's more than a grain of truth in the stereotype that suicidal people are broken. There's something "wrong" with them, whether you want to use the word "wrong" to denote defective hardware or connote something more normative.

I for one try to take the middle road. I'm sure J.S. Mill would back me up. As a society, or even as a micro-community, we should not delve too deeply into the business of preventing people from doing harm to themselves. If we become comfortable with that role and assume that power and authority, we've dealt the basic conception of liberty a crushing blow. Our biological circuitry prevents a good chunk of the world from cashing out even if, from a rational perspective, suicide might be a valid option. Isn't that enough?

Socrates and Rousseau might give me some love too: why belabor the issue of a person who abandons their loved ones and their responsibilties and obligations? We do not enter this world by choice, and we come into it shackled down to the internal wiring that prevents most of us from killing ourselves. Oh, we'll kill others, surely. And we'll die by the thousands in pointless conflicts if our grand society (be it family, city, or nation) deems it necessary. Both murder and suicide are perfectly acceptable if the powers that be give the order. We just give them different names to make ourselves feel better about being replaceable cogs in the giant machine.

The worst part of this experience was dealing with the classic responses of some of my other colleagues. How did they feel about it? How do they feel about the issue in general? Even the colleagues who mentioned it being a fascinating and deep philosophical issue managed to get on my nerves. There was this sense permeating the room, this awkward awfulness: let's talk about it now that someone is dead. Fucking unbelievable. I'm not sure I can articulate my displeasure any more eolquently than that, at least not tonight.

I think, perhaps, that my next post will deal with just why it is I have such deep hostility for the feel-o-centric hegemony of my office.