Suicide is Painless

I'm going to do something I pretty much never do on this blog and talk about something seriously for a minute. Suicide has been on mind since Sunday night... no, not committing it, although we'll get to that later... since Tony Scott, a great, talented director (seriously: True Romance, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, The Fan, Domino, Man on Fire, and of course, Top Gun... what a resume!), took his own life by jumping off a bridge. The reaction to this event I've seen most, aside from just sadness over a tragic loss of life, is confusion over how someone like a rich, world-famous director could throw it all away like that when he had everything.

Here's the thing. To us, on the outside looking in, sure, he had everything. We look at his life and think it had to be perfect. But we have absolutely no idea what's going on on the inside, what he might have been dealing with... him, or anyone else for that matter. Who knows what goes on behind closed doors? Maybe that's why the morning after the accident, one news outlet was reporting he had inoperable brain cancer, and that's why he did what he did. I'm sure we can all understand how someone might not want to go through all the suffering a diagnosis like that entails; as someone who just watched someone I love pass away after suffering through a year of his body and mind giving out on him slowly and painfully, I sure can. It seems, though, that that report was erroneous, as his family is denying it; still, maybe something else was going on health-wise that drove him to it, something his family doesn't even know about yet.

Or maybe there wasn't, and it was just a senseless, stupid act.

But that isn't for me to say. I think my point in this ramble is that it isn't for us to judge. I don't know. I've known people who have attempted suicide, and I've known people who, sadly, succeeded. Total honesty? I even considered it at one point myself, not seriously, nowhere near seriously enough to come anywhere close to actually trying it, but it did cross my mind when things were really, really low and a friend's best advice to me was to remember that things could always get worse. It was heartfelt advice meant to make me feel better, but all it did was scare the shit out of me. If things could get worse than they were, I didn't want to be here to see what that would be like. But I didn't entertain that notion long, because the flip side of that point is also true: things can always get better, and they do. The only time things can't get better is if you aren't here to see it.

So I guess the other point, the reason I'm writing this so that maybe someone will read it and be helped by it, at the risk of sounding like one of those "very special episodes" of an 80's sit-com, is this: if you're thinking about suicide, don't do it. Just don't do it. Talk to someone; a family member, a friend, someone you trust, or, shit, a complete stranger, for all I care. Just find someone who will talk you out of it. Just don't do it.

Things can, and will, get better.