> Why am I writing about all this, and perhaps going into more detail than necessary? Because I know people who have contemplated suicide, and I recently learned that another friend of mine had also considered it. That accident from yesterday is still in my mind, and that family is tugging at my heart. I heard about this friend who contemplated suicide, and images from recent accidents flashed through my mind. In two weeks, we've had eight people die on local roads, and any vehicle accident is pretty sobering. When you're there on the scene, and you see the skid marks and the mangled vehicles, and sometimes even the bodies, it's even more sobering. And I'm not related to the victims. I'm a bystander, but I'm still affected. How much more painful is it for the family members and friends who just lost a loved one?
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> For any of you who think of ending your lives, please think of your families. Think of your friends. Life may be extremely difficult for you right now, but imagine that multiplied ten-fold. Permanently. Your friends and family would never truly get over your death. People who lose loved ones want closure, just as this 25-year-old girl I spoke with wants closure. But that never really comes, because there will always be a hole. Please think of those who care about you, and let us never need to find that closure.


Thank you for this post, Ellmyruh. This is a topic I've thought about for some time now, ever since being involved in the recovery of the body of somebody who killed themself by jumping from a bridge. There are some thoughts which have stayed in my mind from this, about how people perceive their death when they decide to do something like this, and how far that is from reality.

I have been told that people who chose to die by jumping into the sea at night do so because they think it's a clean removal. They vanish into the night, the water takes them away, nobody sees, nobody knows. They're not erasing just their own consciousness, but every trace that they've even existed, and perhaps somehow that makes it easier for them to justify their action. None of this is true. There's no clean way to die, but there is hardly any way I can think of which is LESS clean than this one. You don't just vanish into the night. Somebody has to go and find the bits, and pull them out of the water, perhaps after they've been there for a long time. And then your family, although they almost certainly won't be allowed to see the remains, are going to have to deal with thinking about what you probably would have looked like.

Suicide is not romantic, it is not dignified, and it is not clean. You can't remove yourself without a trace. Somebody has to deal with the mess. After the initial trauma of dealing with this incident had left me (which took professional therapy, the only time in my life I've ever needed it), what it left me with was a profound sense of disturbance at the lack of dignity of what I saw. A person should not look like that in death -- it violates their humanity in a way more fundamental than the mere fact that they died.

At first I wanted to know who the person's family was, how they were coping, what the reasons were for it all. Now I realise there is nothing I could have said to them which wouldn't have made things worse.

Although it was impossible to tell for sure, I feel that this person was young, much younger than me. I thought back to problems I've had in my life, around that age, and how terrible they seemed to me then. Then I think of all the things I've seen and done and thought and felt and found, since that time, and it shocks me to imagine that I might have experienced none of it. It saddens me that some people have so little realisation what wonderful things might happen during the rest of the life they were supposed to have.