SUICIDE -- THE ULTIMATE REASON NOT TO COMMIT SUICIDE

I write on Quora as Maria-Elisa Vetia. This is the question that was sent to me, and my response is an argument against suicide that almost no one knows or has ever heard. It will stop ANYONE from committing suicide, I truly believe.

After this essay, I've posted (in a separate post below) another essay answering a reader who asked me if I was still suicidal. 

Here is the question I received:

Why shouldn't I commit suicide? I've tried all the therapy stuff, all of the meds, and all of that other suicide help stuff. Why shouldn't I just kill myself? And no, don't say that my family and "friends" would miss me or that I'm selfish.

Maria-Elisa Vetia, Doctorate Law & Poverty Law, University of Wisconsin - Madison (1991)

Answered Aug 26

There’s often just ONE remaining answer, once all other answers are analyzed and found insufficient to stop suicide.

It’s because the odds of success of all suicide attempts in non-elderly are 100 to 200 to ONE that you will fail (Institute on Suicidology. Google it.) Elderly people fail only 4 to 1, meaning the vast majority of them fail but they’re better at it than non-elderly). Even a gun to the temple, or in the mouth, or hanging, or whatEVER—the vast majority FAIL.

Then….you thought your life was screwed up before?

Here’s you after a failed suicide attempt:

Half of your face is blown off. Very attractive. You live in a mental institution. With lunatics pointing and laughing at you for life. You are given a hole in your side through which nurses (who can’t talk to you because you have no mouth any more) squeeze this horrible brown goo to keep you alive.[ Cruel or what? To keep you alive like THAT, when you didn’t even want to live when you were a regular human and not a MONSTER?]

YOU WILL TERRIFY CHILDREN if they come thru the nuthouse and see you thru a glass window.

If the bullet bounces off your skull (and even a .22 does that often!) and goes down thru your body and effs up your intestines? Oh NOW you have a POOP TUBE in which all your brown poop runs all day, into a CLEAR BAG, visible to all, and some nurse comes in and CLEANS OUT THE TUBE AND THEN SHOOTS IN WATER TO WASH YOUR INTESTINES EVERY SINGLE DAY FOR ONE HOUR.

Think THAT smells good?

So now, you’re a half-headed monster, fed goo thru a tube, you can’t talk, your sh*t is played with for an hour a day stinking up the room, and….wait for it…it gets better……………you lose half of your brain!

Hanging isn’t something that people always do right the first time, nor carbon dioxide in a car, not even shooting yourself or poisoning yourself.

ALL OF THOSE remove most of your intelligence and turn half of your brain into sludge.

Now your arms and legs are jerking around all the time, so you’re tied down. You’re having seizures (tied to a table), your eye, if you still have one, is rolling around and can’t see anything, and mucous, spit, and other grotesque pinkish goo is being caught by a gauze bandage that never gets changed often enough ,so you are now soaked with mucous goo dripping out of what’s left of your FACE.

READY FOR THE FUN PART?

THIS IS YOUR LIFE NOW!

NEVER TO BE FIXED, AND THEY CANT DO EUTHANASIA, AND YOU CAN’T COMMUNICATE because you are pretty much of an earthworm now in slightly human form.

And you thought you wanted to die when your body was perfect or even partly perfect.

Think again, my friend.

Read the stats on failed suicides and then GO TO GOOGLE IMAGES AND SEARCH “FAILED SUICIDES” for pictures of what you will look like.

Oh, your problems won’t look so bad after you do that.

How do I know all this?

I was right where you were psychologically, when I happened to run across one photo of the face of a person who had failed. Then I researched that, and damn if I’m not alive today, and even tho I’m still a walking argument for Jean Paul Sartre’s NOTHINGNESS and existential meaninglessness, I’m so glad I wasn’t in the majority of human monsters who FAILED at suicide.

SUICIDE. HOW I BECAME SUICIDAL: A NARRATIVE OF A DARK LIFE

I write a lot on Quora, under the name Maria-Elisa Vetia. Below is one of two essays I wrote on suicide. The first (post above this) is the best one. 

The essay above WILL STOP ANYONE from committing suicide, and it's no reasoning you've ever heard before. I'll post that next. 

Below is the story of how I myself became suicidal and invented a fail-proof method of dying fast, and was often within minutes of going to the selected spot and doing it.

I wrote the below essay in reply to a reader who wanted to know if I was OK or still suicidal. 

It's an anecdote of how I BECAME suicidal. It won't make total sense unless you read the one I'm going to post above, which was a reply to a  kid who asked on Quora, "Why shouldn't I commit suicide?" The post above this one is my reply to that young man. Again, the below is my reply to a nice man who wanted to know if I was still suicidal.

Maria-Elisa Vetia

Aug 28 · 1 upvote from John Galan

John, you are so kind to worry about me! I am completely fine, and I hope you are too. Two years ago, however, my husband died of cancer in a horrible way, and I was there for all the horror plus hovering over him for 7 years since he got the diagnosis.

It really did bad things to me psychologically.

Mixed with the trauma of our 2 adult children deciding to abandon us just about a year before he died, and we never found out why, and I wasn’t recovered from that, and never will be, when HE died, leaving me completely alone.

We were in a new town where we knew no one yet (just moved), and NO ONE came to help. It was bizarre.

I was in some kind of denial thru his whole illness, and the minute he died, my defense system failed. I suddenly got 2 weeks of amnesia and yet had to function in horrible ways, with not one soul helping. Things like pick up his ashes (freaky!), file papers at the courthouse (no idea where to go), change title to his car (a nice man helped me find that place), and then take over all the bill paying, and the whole house and yard while I wanted time to curl up in a dark cave and recover!

Not one person even sent us FLOWERS! We were horribly isolated, but in our prior town, had a zillion friends.

So, I went into a weird depression where I could sleep 30 hours in a row, wake up for food and water, 30 more hours of sleep, etc and no one checked on me or knew I was in this descending flight pattern.

It went so deep that it became clear to me that suicide was the obvious next step. My whole view of life changed, and I saw its absurdity and pointlessness of all the effort we have to put out.

I saw my husband’s stunning career (a best-selling author and professor emeritus) go into cardboard boxes to the landfill. Entire semesters of how to teach Milton, every reference note and textbook: landfill.

And I never did (still never have) shaken the view of how awful it seems to me that parents, wishing to have “fun” with a little family and some cute little kids, just bring children into the world. They don’t think about how the parents will die way before the kids, and the kids, then adults, will be left fending for themselves in a world where you know the end of the story is that you lose, but you aren’t even given the courtesy given to serial killers: to know when and how you will die.

And for me, it will be alone. I was an excellent mother, devoted, nurturing, never spanked, and they were the highest happiness of my whole life. Then out of nowhere, a mutiny, and all the children gone. They won’t come back. All the books I’ve read say that after 3 years, they never come back because it’s all too weird.

Anyway, there was the idea of suicide which seemed so logical and such an OBVIOUS way out, to avoid the descent into old age, ugliness, and alone-ness, possibly dementia, ALS, who knows?

And I spent many months researching how to commit suicide. I couldn’t even share that pain with anyone because if you mention it, they have an obligation to tell authorities, and you HAVE to go to a mental institution and usually now, get shock therapy (it’s back in style). So because of THAT rule, I couldn’t even ask a counselor, or ANYONE for help.

But I’m a great researcher and after months, years of research, I DO know how to commit suicide without any chance of failing, but I won’t tell that. Ever.

And I won’t do it because I have foundational Catholic thinking that makes me fear hell. I just will NEVER do it.

But there isn’t a day, even at my happiest, when I wouldnt give all I have to just vaporize. Mainly to have never been born. That is my greatest regret, that in that one minute of fun for a married couple, decades of labor fall on me, and all these bad cards drawn.

But I was also strongly persuaded against suicide when I came across a discussion about failed suicide attempts. The more I read and saw, and the more statistics supported each other, that the failure rate is SO high, and that if you fail, you end up much worse off than when you were JUST suicidal.

So when I hear or read someone’s talk about suicide, I know from long experience of wanting to die but balancing it out so that I didn’t, even though I was VERY often within minutes of undertaking it. I know how stupid every argument sounds when you just want out.

And I knew that the “failed suicide” information scared the crap out of me and I THEN knew absolutely that I will never attempt it, even though I think I know a way, but I’m not even sure I remember that, because suicide is something I just refuse to consider as an option any more. EVER. I decided to stop thinking about it and by act of will, to refuse to consider it ever again, and I am now completely free from the danger of doing it.

I still wish I had never been born, not because I’m sad—my life is actually absolutely perfect except that I lost my whole family haha, so not THAT perfect—but otherwise, it’s everything I ever wanted.

But I know that everything I do is ultimately pointless. No one will read the hundreds of diaries I’ve kept. They’ll be in the landfill, maybe near my husband’s life work of teaching and authorship. No one will want my paintings, or to hear tapes of the songs I’ve written and performed, or care that I sang opera and Mozart for 100 Catholic funerals, or what I looked like, who I was, all my credentials that I worked to hard to attain—television, radio, Juilliard, syndicated column in the NYTimes Syndicate, a ridiculous # of talents that I developed one at a time, all the way to the top of each field—even writing jokes for late night comedians!

I used to think, “Wow. I have really assembled a LIFE!”

But when I saw the rusty blue pickup truck taking all the cardboard boxes of my husband’s life to the landfill, I was epiphanied. I can’t unsee or unthink or unrealize all that I’ve seen, thought or realized now.

So don’t feel sad for me. I did what Dylan Thomas said. I raged, raged against the dying of the light and will not go gentle into that good night (goodnight). I achieved great success in every endeavor I wanted to.

So that’s what the story is, and I hope you don’t worry or feel unhappy in any way. The fact that you cared enough to ask, and that you are reading all the way down here at the end of this LONG commentary, makes me happy YOU were born. Thank you for asking, my friend.

Reply