Left Behind Killing Yourself Won’t Help Anyone Understand You Better

My father tells a story about a sad incident that happened during the Depression years in northern Minnesota. It seems that a young man had fallen head over heels for Uncle Clive’s 16-year-old daughter, who was also my father’s cousin.

The smitten fellow drove a Model A Coupe which, even more than other cars, was rare in that area during the hard times. He was 22 years old. In that place and time, their age difference was not the shocking disparity that normal people might consider it today, but it did trouble Uncle Clive sufficiently to one day forbid further contact between his daughter and her older beau.

That was also a sad day for my father and his cousins since this was their first opportunity to observe and even touch - and possibly ride in - a Model A Coupe.

A few mornings later, Uncle Clive was stepping off the front porch on his way to milk the cows just like he did every day when he noticed the Model A Coupe parked down the road and someone tangled in the fence next to the front gate. Upon closer inspection, that someone tangled in the barbed wire turned out to be the forbidden suitor with a pistol clutched in his dead hand.

My father’s astonishment at the whole episode was still evident in his recounting of the suicide years later, when he concluded by shaking his head slowly and lamenting, “There were so many 16-year-old girls around there and so few Model A Coupes.”

As long as self-murder doesn’t occur among those we care about, most of us, like my father, are so frustrated with the absurdity of the act that we don’t give a lot of analytical thought to it. How do you think about something that’s unthinkable? It’s even a murky consideration for trained professionals.

A man named George Colt spent 10 years conducting interviews in putting together a book, “The Enigma Of Suicide,” and concludes that it’s impossible to know exactly why people kill themselves.

“It’s the hardest thing to understand,” said Colt. “There’s a point where you decide that there is no alternative. People think it’s selfish to kill yourself. What about your family? Well, it’s like you’re in an arctic blizzard. You can’t see your family. There’s 40 feet of snow between you and your family.”

Not long ago, I attended a funeral for a friend of nearly 40 years who got caught in that arctic blizzard. We went to grade school and high school together in Spokane.

I felt sorrow but also felt a kind of resentment, different from the anger about the hurt family and friends that he left behind. If you’ve ever been a member of a heartfelt crusade or maybe a close-knit religious or political group, you may have felt a certain resentment toward individuals who quit the organization (or maybe you’ve been the object of the same resentment). That was what I felt toward my departed friend, that he had betrayed our common cause (living life) and rejected a principle that we once held dear. And as with heretics and believers, we probably couldn’t have been really good friends ever again even if the obvious didn’t make it impossible. I can’t forgive him.

Almost anyone can understand (although some may not forgive) the pain-racked terminally ill who elect to go gentle into the good night. And self-destruction by the truly insane may be almost expected if not understood.

Melancholy is not insanity. Even if depression magnifies troubles out of all proportion to their true measure, and shadows become monsters, that kind of anxiety rarely leads to the drastic action of my dead friend.

But these infrequent acts are powerful contradictions to the rest of us and apparently pretty much unfathomable to even the trained minds that deal with the topic. Maybe the only comfort in the whole thing is that suicide is rare.

So screaming, “Get a grip! Find something to live for!” at potential suicides is probably useless since according to what little understanding there is of the subject, you can’t even consider an alternative when you get in that self-destructive funk.

But before you slide into that dark pit and decide to quit us, consider this: We who are left behind will understand you no better than my father understood that love-sick swain tangled in Uncle Clive’s fence.

MEMO: Darin Z. Krogh is a Spokane-based freelance writer.

Why do people commit suicide? Two writers ponder the question and come up with different conclusions. See related story by J. Autumn Banks under the headline: Left behind \ They thought they knew her; but victim kept pain inside