70: The Question of Suicide

70

The Question of Suicide

“There is only one really serious philosophical question,

and that is suicide.”

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

Albert Camus

It never crossed my mind to write a spiritual musing on suicide until I heard Anna Maria Tremonti’s conversation with the twenty-six year old managing editor of The Walrus magazine on the CBC radio show The Current sometime after three o’clock this morning (I’m an insomniac); but it wasn’t what Graeme Bayliss had to say about his diagnosed clinical depression and thoughts of suicide, but what he didn’t say that inspired me to jump out of bed when the program ended and boot my computer to write today’s spiritual musing.

Suicide’s been in the news lately, not only because of the new right-to-die legislation that the Canadian government has just proposed on physician-assisted suicide, but because of the alarmingly high incidents of teenage suicides in the Northern Ontario First Nations community of Attawapiskat; but not once in all that I heard and read on suicide this past few weeks has anyone dared to bring up the subject of soul and the afterlife, as if there is nothing more to human life than our physical body; that’s what I found off-putting enough listening to Graeme Bayliss talking about his depression and suicide to write today’s musing.

It wasn’t that I didn’t feel for him, nor that I didn’t respect what he had to say about the government’s legislation on physician-assisted suicide not going far enough (he wants it to make provisions for the mentally ill also); but something about his whole attitude on suicide rubbed me the wrong way, and I had to take up his challenge of facing the nullifying void that comes with death because it went against everything that I have devoted my whole life to—finding the inherent meaning and purpose of our existence.

What’s the matter with this modern world, anyway? Are we afraid to bring up the word soul? Are we afraid to speak our thoughts on the afterlife for fear of being laughed at? This emerging dialogue on suicide has been force-framed within the paradigm of our mortal life, not within a framework large enough to include the possibility that we may just be more than our mortal physical body; and at the risk of putting myself out on the proverbial limb that will be sure to roll a few eyes, I have to share my thoughts on suicide that come from outside the spiritually suffocating little box of conventional thought. But where to begin?

The thought of killing yourself is terrifying, but I’ve had the good fortune to not once entertain—no, that’s not true; I did entertain the thought once when I was very low, just to see if it would take hold of me, but it didn’t. I guess I just wasn’t desperate enough to want to kill myself. But some people are, as Graeme Bayliss tells us when his clinically depressed state of mind pulled him down into a corner so dark that he felt there was no way out but suicide, and he seriously tried to kill himself “with an X-Acto knife and too much gin.” But he failed to see it through because he wasn’t serious enough to overcome the pressure of his primordial survival instinct, and he tried again another time as he tells us in his essay “Canada’s Assisted-Suicide Law Fails the Mentally Ill” in The Walrus (April 14, 2016): “Once, on my lunch hour, I walked down to a frigid Lake Ontario, there taking off my coat and shoes with the intention of taking a terminal swim. I backed out in part because, had I failed, I would’ve had to return to work and tell my colleagues why I was sopping wet,” which, no doubt, is why he loves the coy little poem “Resume” by Dorothy Parker (1925) that he discovered when he was 17, the same year that he was diagnosed “with a variety of mental illnesses, including clinical depression”:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

            And drugs cause cramp.

     Guns aren’t lawful;

                                                         Nooses give;

   Gas smells awful;

            You might as well live.

Was it his prevaricating nature that rubbed me the wrong way? Either you’re going to commit suicide or you’re not; you can’t have it both ways. But clinical depression can be nasty, and one cannot help but feel like taking their own life when despair overwhelms them, as it does Graeme Bayliss; that’s why I have to explore my thoughts on suicide in today’s spiritual musing, because there has to be another reason why this precocious young man’s attitude on suicide chafed me—which, ironically, I felt I knew but feared to explore.

When I jumped out of bed this morning bursting with the idea for today’s spiritual musing, I had a fleeting glimmer of what I had to say; and when I stepped into my writing den I reached into the bookshelf by the door and grabbed Jungian analyst Barbara Hannah’s book Striving Towards Wholeness, because I knew that what she wrote in the first paragraph of her book on man’s inherent teleological purpose was my entry point into my musing on this daunting issue of suicide that has gripped the Canadian psyche:

          “In earlier days it was self-evident that every living creature was striving to complete the pattern of its existence as fully as possible. In our rational times, however, with this ever-increasing demand for specialization, this fact seems to be almost forgotten, although in the unconscious the urge towards wholeness appears to have become all the stronger for being repressed and forgotten” (Striving Towards Wholeness, by Barbara Hannah, p. 1).

C. G. Jung, the Swiss psychologist and founder of Analytical Psychology whom Barbara Hannah studied under and wrote about in her intimate biographical memoir Jung: His Life and Work that I read twice while researching the origins of Jung’s psychology of the self and shadow, said something in an interview that expresses Hannah’s theme of man’s inherent teleological purpose with analogical clarity: “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man becomes what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” and it was Jung’s goal in life to help people get unstuck so they could complete their journey to wholeness; and the question that Graeme Bayliss’s attitude on suicide that howled like Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream became painfully clear to me: why am I stuck?  And this, I hope to answer in today’s spiritual musing…

“Do you fear it?” Tremonti asked Bayliss.

“Yes. It's a terrifying thing. Again, it's getting over that hurdle of that instinct to survive. I mean, I fear pain as much as anyone else does. It's just a question of weighing one kind of pain - the physical - against another kind of pain, which is the emotional, the sort of unlifting pain that depression often leaves you with. Suicide remains a sort of taboo topic. It's still something that we speak about euphemistically. It's still something that the news doesn't like to report on. And it's still something that in many ways in literature and movies and so forth is romanticized, which is not true. It's grisly and horrible. But it is very much something that needs to be talked about…But one of the things that people talk about when they talk about suicide is the idea that it's cowardly. And that bothers me a lot. Because as I've said, suicide is a terrifying thing. To sort of commend yourself to nothingness is one of the most terrifying things I can possibly imagine. So the idea that it's cowardly to do that is, I think, extremely insulting and short-sighted…”

“Commend yourself to nothingness,” said the clinically depressed young man who’s been in therapy and on medication since the age of seventeen, inadvertently revealing his core belief that this life is all there is. No wonder death terrifies him, be it by suicide or whatever means. I’d be scared as hell too if I believed that when I die I’ll be sucked into a nullifying void of eternal nothingness; but that’s just what Bayliss believes. It doesn’t mean it’s true.

Sartre believed in man’s ineluctable nothingness, as did Albert Camus, and they spent their life trying to posit philosophical purpose to man’s “absurd” existence; but as much as I respected them for their intellectual probity when I studied them at university, I could not buy into their nihilistic philosophies, and I spent the most creative years of my life garnering the purpose and meaning of life from the world’s literature and my own life experience, which I’ve written about in books like Healing with Padre Pio, The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, and The Pearl of Great Price and need not expound upon here..

Of course, proving that we have an immortal soul that does not die when we shuffle off this mortal coil and returns to life again to complete our journey to wholeness is another matter, as is the mystery of why we get stuck in the non-being consciousness of our shadow self that fosters feelings of hopelessness and despair that can drive one to suicide, but that’s for another musing on the redemptive art of dying before dying; all I wanted to do today was offer another perspective on suicide that may help relieve some of this social anxiety.

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