Regarding that double-suicide in Etobicoke
where the elderly couple jumped 18 stories to their respective deaths together because the wife was in severe pain and didn't want to live anymore, and her husband didn't want to live without her, so they jumped from their balcony together.
I wonder how they felt.
(Euphoric? Scared? Filled with regret?
-Hopefully not the last one.)
I wonder if they cried.
I wonder if they held hands.
I wonder if I would do it, if it were me.
As morbid as it is I've thought about suicide a few times -not in the immediate future, but what it would mean for me as someone who will get old and whose body won't always be kinda nice to look at kinda work the way that it's supposed to.
It also makes me think about what it would mean for other people, and why they would make that decision.
It also makes me think about how we, as a society, view suicide.
It bugs me that most people look at it as something that only fucked-up people do. Remember that guy Martin Manley from a few months back who took his own life and put up a website about it? I read a mirror of the site when the news exploded and he seemed like a pretty level-headed guy. He knew what he was doing. But still we had (have?) this urge to paint everyone with the same brush because it's easy -I remember reading boatloads of comments about how he just had to be fucked in the head to even consider suicide as a viable option.
I think we have this reaction because death is scary and I think we're scared by the fact that people can look at death head-on and think
"yeah, I'm okay with this."
That doesn't make it brave, or noble, or any of that shit. But I don't think it makes it cowardly, or selfish, or any of the other things people call it, either.
It's just a thing that some people do that makes us sad.
Mostly because our society doesn't really give us the tools to cope with it. We see it as some sort of giving up, as rejection of life, which is something that we should always want.
But we don't always want it, and we shouldn't always have to.
It's fucked up, but by and large that's how life is.
Fucked up.
