Waxing yourself

After finishing an extremely mediocre novel, A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, an annoyingly unfocused novel about the interesting topic of suicide, I was compelled to write an entry on the nuances and effects of suicide. Just to be clear, the novel could have been quite good if it had a focus instead of drifting all over the place like a meandering vagabond and even better if most of the cast wasn't entirely dislikable. It takes a leaf out of The Breakfast Club, only it's a lot less cogent. Book critic, I am not, so...

Suicide is a way out. The easy way out. The path of least resistance. When you're dead, you don't have to deal with the crap that life spits on you day after day. You kill yourself for different reasons - maybe the mailman who never missed a day of work for 30 years hung himself because he knew his life was unfufilling. Perhaps the depressed divorcee who never gets to see his kids ingests car fumes because he has nothing to live for. Whatever the case, it is entirely logical to want to kill yourself. Generally, you have a good reason to do it. In the case of the characters of the book, one of them is hated by everyone he meets, one of them has a catatonic son who is a drain, and the other two aren't interesting enough to even warrant a mention. Point is, unless you're a teenager looking for attention, people who contemplate suicide often have a good reason to do so.

Let's not lie - we've all had suicidal thoughts, even if jokingly and fleetingly. We all have days where's it's so damn bad that you just want out, never want to take another glance at that large pile of work, never want to talk to that asshole boss of yours ever again. I'm not going to deny it, I've had days so bad that I just want to throw myself off a roof. But we never go through with it. And the reason is because we have something to live for. It could be anything. Family. Friends. Wanting to see Christopher Nolan's sequel to The Dark Knight. Things like that, you know?

When I went to RYLA, a cabin mate of mine wanted to kill himself (nobody ever reads this blog, so it doesn't matter). What I remember of that day, and some talks in the cabin before that was that suicide was a very selfish thing to do. You leave behind all your friends, family, and people who care about you, without any concern for what pain they'll feel for you when you're gone. I don't think that's entirely true. Selfishness is a virtue, and assuming someone killing themselves is a bad thing, you don't know the whole story. They may have been crapped on all their lives, and whatever the problem is, it's unfixable. Obviously, if you can fix or at least try to improve whatever problem that person has, you should do all you can. But forcing someone to live a life they no longer want any part of is akin to not letting a terminally ill patient die. Death may be ugly, but that's entirely in your control. If you control your life, you should also have control over when you leave this world to go to the Great Gig in the Sky.

It's my opinion that life is worth too much to throw away. Many will disagree with that, but that's what I think. I wouldn't dare think of killing myself even if I were evicted from my apartment, had my funds seized, and my children died in front of me. I would be devastated, broken, dead to the world, but perhaps the human spirit can rise from the ashes like some sort of disfigured phoenix. Life is beautiful, but if you don't want to live it - if you've been trampled on your whole life, you can't get anywhere despite the best help in the world, you've lost the will to live, you're pretty much dead, that's fine. Let them do it. No matter what you do, nothing can improve their lives. Existentialism dictates that we make our own happiness. When we can't do that, life is no longer worth living.

What am I saying? Live life. Live every week like it's Shark Week. Live every day like you're going to be murdered the next. If you can't, do what you have to do. You'll hurt some people. You'll anger some people. But you don't have to deal with that any more. But please, let it be a last resort. I'm not advocating suicide, I'm only relating it to the worst case scenario, which I hope never befalls anyone.