Clareified

The other day I was stuck in traffic on the BQE with a couple of friends from college and, for some reason, we got to talking about how we’d commit suicide if we were so inclined. Both of the other women said pills, proving the old adage that women do pills. I said I’d just take a hard left off the FDR into the East River, while Poddy played Bohemian Rapsody. Yeah, if I go, I have to take my car and my ipod with me. Oh, and my suicide note would be a verse from Cat Stevens that I’ve always thought contained the best lines in all of music (All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside/Its hard, but its harder to ignore it./If they were right, I’d agree, but its them you know not me./Now theres a way and I know that I have to go away./I know I have to go.) And I’d be wearing…okay, okay, enough details. Of course, none of us thought we could ever actually kill ourselves when push came to stepping on the gas pedal. It’s all I can bear to actually accept that I am probably going to die someday. See? I’m still only at probably — which, by the by, is a step up from the “unlikely” that I was rocking just seven years ago.
But there are people who do kill themselves and I know the politically correct thing to say is that suicide is wrong and bad and no one should, but I’ve just never believed that. Obviously, as a Catholic, I was raised to believe that it was a mortal sin —in fact, the only wholly unforgiveable sin, because once you’ve done it, you’re no longer around to ask for forgiveness, but I spent many a Sunday getting nasty looks from Sister Francis with my incessant “but if God didn’t want them to die, they wouldn’t have. And if God did want them to die, then they were doing his will by jumping off that bridge,” until she’d throw her hands up and tell me if I wanted to know more I should go talk to the Monsignor because she knew I was deathly afraid of him.
I’ve never known anyone that killed themselves, I mean, I had an aunt that drank herself to death, but she did it over twenty years and died of liver failure, but suicide has never…hmm…well, except for that partner at Old LLP, but I figure if you’re problems or circumstance are so bad that you can aim a weapon at your head and pull the trigger, who are the living to judge you weak or a foolish? Yeah, dozens of people can send in postcards to postsecret about how happy they are that they didn’t off themselves, but the people that are glad they did, no longer have access to stamps. It’s not like I condone suicide, it shouldn’t be anyone’s Plan A — probably — but how did it get to be this taboo?
When there is enough shame or pain on the line, why isn’t death one of the options? It’s always heroic when Shakespeare writes about it or when Buffy takes the header into the abyss. But in real life we throw “permanent solutions to temporary problems” slogans at the suicidal.
Anyway, the suicide issue came up today —and yes, it was totally related to being stuck for twelve days watching ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ —when Karol mentioned that people were coming to New York, in order to kill themselves!

Recently, however, researchers stumbled on a striking fact about suicides in New York: A surprising number of people who kill themselves in the city come here from out of town, and many appear to come expressly to take their own lives. In a report published last fall called “Suicide Tourism in Manhattan, New York City, 1990–2004,” researchers at the New York Academy of Medicine and Weill Cornell Medical College found that of the 7,634 people who committed suicide in New York City between 1990 and 2004, 407 of them, or 5.3 percent, were nonresidents. More strikingly, nonresidents accounted for 274, or 10.8 percent, of the 2,272 suicides in Manhattan during that time (the numbers did not include college students, who were considered residents for the purposes of the study). The researchers didn’t look at comparable data from other cities, but, says the study’s lead author, Charles Gross, “One in ten people that commit suicide in Manhattan don’t live here. That’s a big chunk.”

They’re all, I heart NY and I hate my life…Geronimo!
I thought this was so curious, unlike the high rates of suicide during the Thanksgiving through New Year’s time period, which has always made sense to me. I mean once you’ve made it away from the sadness that is anywhere other than New York, to New York, aren’t you just imbued with hapiness and optimism that would make you want to live again? It’s New York!
Shoulder shrug.
I also liked this part of the article:
The George Washington Bridge, on the other hand, is heavily patrolled and monitored, and call boxes connect with Port Authority police. But none of that changes the fact that the barriers are low and relatively easy to scale. “Whatever security they have, it’s not good enough,” says John Barrachina Jr. “I can tell you from experience.” Kevin Hines has similar feelings about the Golden Gate Bridge. The failure to build higher railings at a place where some nineteen people kill themselves each year is, he says, “maddening, amoral, and disgusting.” .

Yeah, totally. We should also tie everyone together with ropes, like kindergarteners on a field trip.

He’s so crazy. Oops. I mean…um…here the number for a suicide hotline. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800-273-talk)

I mean prevention.

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 12:19 am and is filed under News & Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.