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As noted earlier, in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus observed, “The body’s judgement is as good as the mind’s, and the body shrinks from annihilation.” Although it is true that the “body shrinks from annihilation,” it is also true that some individuals engage in behaviours that train the body to not shrink from it so much. Indeed, people develop the capacity to inflict unthinkable physical ordeals on themselves.
However, even those who are very resolute in the matter of their own deaths experience fear in the moment. The most common example of this phenomenon involves those who jump from high places and survive. Recall the example of Tina Zahn, who, in her memoir Why I Jumped, described her desperate depression and the urgent desire to die by jumping off of a high bridge. She did eventually jump, but the urgency of her desire to die waned in the moments before hand, which cause her to hesitate and gave a law enforcement officer the crucial few seconds he needed in order to catch her just as she jumped. Zahn’s fearlessness flagged in the seconds before she jumped, which saved her life.
There are others whose resolve decreases after they jump. Of those who jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, approximately 3 percent survive. The commends of two survivors, included in Tad Friend’s 2003 New Yorker article on suicide at the bridge, illustrate this phenomenon. One survivor stated, “I instantly realised that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable – except for having just jumped.” Another said, “My first thought was “What the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.””
A man who jumped into the water leading up to Niagara Falls in 2003 was one of very few to survive going over the falls. He said that he changed his mind the instant he hit the water. “At that point,” he said, “I wished I had not done it. But I guess I knew it was way too late for that.” The psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan described his interactions with several people who had ingested the very lethal substance bichloride of mercury. Sullivan wrote, “One is horribly ill. If one survives the first days of hellish agony, there comes a period of relative convalescence – during which all the patients I have seen were most repentant and strongly desirous of living.” The tragedy for these patients is that they almost never live to see their new desire for life realised; another phase of several days of agony later resumes, usually ending in death.
In a study on suicide in anorexic patients conducted by my colleagues, students, and me, one of the cases involved ingestion of a household cleaning product containing around 35 percent hydrochloric acid. The person drank twelve ounces of this product and then felt regret, at least as evidenced by her calling 911 soon thereafter. Efforts to save her were not successful; she died at the hospital four hours later from internal bleeding caused by the hydrochloric acid’s injury to her stomach.
A crucial implication of these cases is that the fear of death is universal and virtually unshakeable. It is so powerful that it persists even in people who have suppressed it enough to drink horrible poisons like bichloride of mercury or hydrochloric acid, to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, or to go over Niagara Falls. Therefore, it is a safe assumption that virtually everyone who desires death also simultaneously desires life. The suicidal mind is characterised by ambivalence, with competing forces tugging at the suicidal individual from the sides of both life and death. The fact that this applies even to the very resolutely suicidal makes the point all the more clear.
If, in the very moment preceding a fatal act – indeed, the very moments during the fatal act – a person feels substantial ambivalence, then it stands to reason that such ambivalence would be observed as well in the days and weeks leading up to the potentially fatal act. In this light, it is not only unsurprising that people often make plans for jobs, trips, and relationships in the days and weeks before their deaths by suicide, it would be surprising if they didn’t. Of course they do, because the “life” side of the struggle that they will eventually lose and that will eventually kill them is still active and still compelling them to plan for life, just as everyone else does.
This is a very simple truth that could save the family and friends of those who die by suicide a lot of uncertainty and anguish. Understanding a death for what it is and for what caused it and coming to some terms of acceptance is not easy; but it is easier than never coming to terms with a death because of lingering and in some cases festering doubts and ideas about the person’s cause of death.
Uneasiness about this topic abounds in those who doubt their loved one died by suicide, but it also occurs in those who have no doubt at all. In 2007 in Australia, two girls died together by hanging themselves in a remote area. though they had talked to others – peers – of their impending deaths, they did not talk to their parents, a pattern that evidently is common in young people; studies have found that few parents are aware when their child is having suicidal ideas. For the parents of the Australian girls, the deaths came out of the blue, leaving them stunned and deeply agonised. One of the parents said that her daughter often talked of future plans: “She wasn’t just someone who thought there was nothing ahead of her, she talked about what she wanted in the future, she had dreams.” The girl’s plans and dreams were real; it is just that their source, the will to live, eventually lost out in a struggle with the desire for death; and it is likely that this struggle continued until very near the time of the girls’ deaths.
A murder-suicide that occurred in 2007 in Atlanta also illustrates the fact that people simultaneously intend death and intend life (and this applies to murder-suicide just as it does to suicide). A man killed his wife and then killed himself. Associates of the couple were puzzled about the incident, because the couple had plans to sell their house and move to Florida, where the man had plans for a job, and where he could more easily combine his work with his main hobby of deep-sea fishing. The couple had bought a car in Florida and had just been there to test drive it. It is precisely this kind of planning – thinking ahead to a time when one can better combine work and leisure, buying and test driving a car in the future location – that perplexes those who are left behind in the wake of a suicide. The key is to understand that two simultaneous processes are occurring – one geared toward life, the other tending toward death.
The death of the Italian writer Primo Levi further illustrates the consequences of such understanding, or in this case, misunderstanding. Levi was a young man during the Holocaust, and he survived the concentration camps. His later writings are viewed as poignant and potent affirmations of life in the face of unspeakable cruelty and brutality. Levi died by suicide decades after his Holocaust experiences by jumping from the tall staircase in his apartment building. Notably, Levi’s grandfather also died by suicide, also by jumping from a high place. The totality of evidence points quite clearly to suicide as the method of death, but to this day, some harbour doubts, and the reasons for their doubts are instructive. The doubts take two forms: First, that the details of Levi’s death do not suggest suicide; and second, that the kind of person who wrote in the affirming way Levi did could not, in the end, decide to die by suicide. Both of these doubts are in error, the kind of error that keeps misunderstanding alive.
First, regarding the details of Levi’s death, the evidence adduced against suicide will be familiar by now: He left no note, yet he did participate in activities and leave behind documents that indicated engagement in day-to-day and long-term plans. For example, on the day of his death, he engaged in his usual activities, like receiving an injection from a nurse who would visit him daily. As this section and another in this book make clear, features like these are, if anything, more characteristic than less of death by suicide. Those who die by suicide usually do not leave a note; they usually do show evidence of planning for their future lives.
The idea that Levi the writer could not be the “type” for suicide includes numerous faulty assumptions. First, there really is no “type” per se – the fact that someone wrote about affirming topics at one phase in life is no guarantee that in another phase of life (or even in that same phase) the person won’t die by suicide. Second, and relatedly, there is an implication that beautiful writing (or more broadly, beautiful art) cannot be accomplished by those who later die by suicide. Even a cursory review of the history of poetry and literature settles this issue very quickly. Third, there is no requirement that a writer’s true personality shine through in his or her writing. Levi’s own biography shows that his melancholic temperament and frequent bouts of depression did not find their way into his writing.
Shneidman’s (2004) book Autopsy of a Suicidal Mind describes in detail the death by suicide of a man named “Arthur.” The night before his death, Arthur intentionally overdosed on lithium, but he threw it all up and survived (showing, incidentally, how the body fights). The next day, he went to meet a close friend, and went to lunch with his dad, having resolved to attempt suicide again that night, when he did in fact die. In the words of Arthur’s brother, “on the very day he killed himself, he had lunch with my father. He asked my father for money. He said “Dad, I just had to pay all my taxes and I don’t have much money left, can I have $500 to help me through the month?” And my dad said he was going to go home and write him a check and send it in the mail. The wasn’t a trick on Arthur’s part. There is no way in the world that he was trying to trick my father, but I think part of him wanted to go on” (p. 81).
I think the brother has this exactly right. There was a fight going on in Arthur’s mind (and his body had chosen sides, as evidenced by its refusal to die the night before). The fight was between death, which eventually won out in Arthur’s case that same day, and life, which motivated a sincere request for financial help from his father. In January of 2008, the president of a prestigious private high school in Atlanta checked into a downtown high-rise hotel. He left a suicide note in the hotel room and then jumped to his death. Hours before, on the very day of his death, he had given a rousing speech to people connected with the school as part of the kick-off of a new semester and new year. Within the school president’s mind, as in Shneidman’s “Arthur,” life and death forces were battling it out, and this battle can continue up to very near the time of death, leaving people confused about why someone would do something life-affirming one moment and then die the next. The only way out of this confusion is to recognise the deep ambivalence that characterises even the most suicidal person.
The death of actress Lana Clarkson puts a unique spin on this topic. There is little question of how she died (gunshot wound to the face), where she died (the mansion of music producer Phil Spector), or who was present when she died (Spector was there). The question is whether the wound was self-inflicted or perpetrated by Spector. Among much other evidence, Clarkson’s mother testified on the stand that Clarkson shopped for an purchased shoes the day before her death. Why, the prosecution asked, would she buy shoes on the day before she planned to kill herself? The prosecution believed that no one would do such a thing, and Clarkson must have died by homicide, not suicide. Buying shoes, however, has no probative value – people who die by suicide buy shoes and do other such things on the day before their deaths, as do people who die by homicide. (This, of course, is not a general defense of Spector, who was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009).
Those who die by suicide have two simultaneous mental processes unfolding. One is mundane (and yet in a way incredible) and is happening in virtually everyone (including those who deaths by suicide are impending): “Should I change jobs? What will I do this weekend? Should I get a new car? Should I ask so-and-so on a date, or to marry me?” The other is far from mundane, and is difficult for most people to even conceive of: “Why don’t I just die? It would be a relief. There’s an aspect to death that is comforting, even beautiful, people would be better off, why don’t I just get it over with?” Though it is difficult and uncomfortable to conceive of this last process, that does not change the fact that it is a true process that characterises the minds of suicidal people. It is even more difficult to come to terms with the fact that people can harbour this very unusual state of mind at exactly the same time that they are thinking of weekend plans, or mowing the lawn, or going to the grocery store. Again, difficulty in conception does not necessarily bear on the truth of that conception. It is hard to believe that people do this, but they do, and the fact that they do explains why those who are dead by suicide today had plans for the future yesterday.