26 October 2006 - quarter to twelve o'clock p

I removed the entry below from the messageboard I originally posted it on. The people I was talking to already saw it, so there's no need for it to hang up where anyone not involved in the discussion can see it.

I don't bring my personal baggage online. It's nobody's business. To say that I don't know what I'm talking about when I accept the validity of [insert name here]'s feelings is collossally presumptuous. I know exactly how she feels, but I don't care to disclose such details, and I don't need to when the principles speak for themselves. When rational people are discussing principles, there is no need for emotions to get involved.

I'll tell you something right now. I am killing myself. No discussion. I don't like this world, and I don't want to live in it for one second longer than I have to. It is my choice and I demand it be respected. I have come to this decision after much consideration. However, I have a lot of responsibilities. My mother is still alive, and it would drive her over the edge. I have a roommate who needs my help to pay rent. Burial is expensive, so I'm saving my money, and looking into life insurance policies. As my roommate says, "Don't make any messes you can't clean up". However, I have ensured that there are no friends to miss me, I have successfully estranged myself from the rest of my family, and I do not establish relationships with my coworkers.

I have a history of long-running deep emotional problems that run in my family. You want full disclosure? My mother is paranoid delusional. My aunt, her sister, is paranoid schizophrenic. Both have been confined to locked facilities. My great-grandmother died of Alzheimer's disease, and my grandmother is currently in its intermediate stages. Every member of my father's family is chemically dependent, alchohol mostly, but also cocaine. There is a high probability that the anxiety and depression I experience will be passed to the next generation, not to mention the uncontrollable rages and tendency toward physical abuse I inherited from my father. So marriage and raising a family is out of the question. Should I marry a man, and subject him to an empty and pointless matrimony yielding no children and living with a hopeless and perpetually despondent mate with violent mood swings, who runs hot and cold between misery and rage? Or shall I drug myself into deluded contentment and simply live with the side effects of the assorted medications, the breakouts, the muscular tics, the sleeplessness, the hallucinations? Is any life, regardless of the quality of that life, better than no life at all?

I don't think [insert name here] should "off herself" just because she gave it some thought, although as [opponent in debate] pointed out herself, if you stop what you're doing and take a moment to think about it, the frantic compulsion usually passes after a few minutes. I'm talking about long-term consideration. About burying your hatchets, making your arrangements, doing the paperwork, figuring out logistically and reasonably the cost of funeral expenses and corpse disposal. About ensuring that there will be nobody to care or to mourn, ensuring that no heart will be troubled by your passing. Ensuring that future generations will not be disrupted, that no children go parentless, no pets be left masterless, that no nasty stains be left on the carpet. If you want to commit suicide, by all means do it, but only when every one of those elements has been tended to.

This requires years of preparation, of collecting funds, and making arrangements. Decades, even. So I live, miserably dragging on my existence until the time to do so is right. What this does is give time. I have as long as my mother lives to change my mind. I have as long as it takes for my roommate to find a comfortable place of his own, so I can quietly slip out of his acquaintance, to change my mind. I have as long as it takes to earn enough money to purchase a coffin, a marble slab, and a plot of grass in the cemetery, which will come to tens of thousands of dollars, to change my mind. If anyone wishing to end their life wants to do so properly, the time it takes for them to ensure that no one will be inconvenienced by doing so will furnish years of living before the deed is done, so that if some miracle drug be discovered by that time, if someone comes into their life that makes it all worth living, then they have abundant opportunities to change their minds.

As for firsthand contact with suicide, I've attended two funerals and visited one gravesite with yes, a close friend -- the man buried there was her boyfriend. The sense of loss in each case was balanced with respect for the departed. For those of us who cannot accept that others may experience the same thing with different perspectives, there's your pound of flesh.