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Why suicide isn’t an act of cowardice

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Chinki Sinha
Chinki SinhaMar 31, 2017 | 08:40

Why suicide isn’t an act of cowardice

“To be, or not to be: that is the question:  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,  And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;  No more; and, by a sleep to say we end  The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks  That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation  Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;  To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub.” 

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―  Hamlet

On many nights, I stood at the window of a high-rise checking out the view — a chimney billowing out smoke, a river in the distance, rows of houses and underneath a street and in between me and the street at least 20 floors.

And standing by the window and listlessly looking at the snow fall in the wee hours of the morning, I would think of the writer David Foster Wallace and his writing — “Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

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This was in Philadelphia in 2012 when I had been staying in a suite in an alien city trying to forget this other life. I had undertaken the journey to forget the atrocities of the past but then the future had seemed like an unkind voyage given that I had my first dinner at a restaurant all by myself on my first day here trying to get used to the expansive loneliness that lay before me.

I had been wondering about suicide, and if you read Wallace, who committed suicide by hanging himself after his long tryst with depression, you’d know his argument that a person who chooses to end his life doesn’t do so because death seems suddenly appealing, but because “invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise".

I decided to step away from the window. I was scared of the infinity of it, of thinking whether I’d be able to hear my own skull crack as it would hit the gravel. 

But I have thought about suicide often. 

It has been almost a decade now. 

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'When people spoke about death, it unsettled me.'

I often think about my uncle and his mysterious death. They say he died of sunstroke. 

But long ago, when he was battling depression and schizophrenia, my mother had locked us into a room in an old house, where my grandfather had retired and often sat in the verandah brooding over what would become of his youngest son. We hid under the bed.

Outside my uncle raged with a stick in his hands smashing windows and we could hear my grandmother crying. I remember my mother unlocking the room and I remember my aunt holding her head from where blood gushed out.

I remember almost running to the hospital in Arrah where they bandaged her head after stitching it up. That night, the silence in my grandfather’s house was unbearable. My uncle sat in the room muttering to himself. We hadn’t ever known what happened to him but he would lock himself in for days on end.

He was a doctor but what led to all of this nobody knew. They took him to the asylum in Ranchi. He was there for a few days. Then he was taken away to my uncle’s place after my grandfather died. And a few years later, while they were away he had died in his room. They say he had forgotten to switch on the fan and the heat did him in.

I don’t know if he killed himself. I had once seen his room. It had a lot of books and he had been writing endlessly on pages that had been scattered everywhere. He had never let anyone in the room. Dust had formed in thick layers. It was an unsettling place. It was also an unfinished space.

I know now that it must have been unendurable. I also know that he couldn’t have articulated the pain, the misery. That itself must have led to more pain. I know now that if he had decided to end it all, it was a brave act. 

In a story called “The Depressed Person” Wallace wrote about the unlovable and self-absorbed girl who shuttled between friends and therapists, and his wife Karen Green rewrote the ending where the depressed girl is cured. 

I wish such endings could be rewritten. Like my uncle’s. 

​***​

In 1994, the Supreme Court had not only decriminalised the attempt to suicide, but also observed that the "right to life" includes the "right to die" and as it made that observation, it observed that all fundamental rights have negative connotations as well. 

The new Mental Healthcare Bill that decriminalises attempt to suicide and bans use of electric shock therapy for treating children with mental illness was passed by the Lok Sabha this week. And under it, IPC provisions cannot be invoked in case of an attempt to suicide and since the person attempting suicide does so in extreme mental stress, it can’t be criminalised.

A lot of people view suicide or an attempt to end one’s life as an act of cowardice. The world demands of you to be brave. It asks you to face its ruthlessness. It tempts you with hope. But to cross over demands courage, too. And if you have the right to live, you must also have the right to end this life. That alone is a reassuring thought. 

I have been thinking about death. I want to be in denial. But it scares me. I always hated talking about death. I couldn't grapple with final farewells. I never cried in funerals. Even when they cremated my aunt, and I know she had once told me she saw people in her apartment where she lived by herself.

Her sons lived abroad. She hadn’t sought help. She was depressed. She passed away in her apartment one night. What I remember is a sight I didn’t witness. I imagined it. But I know it was closest to the truth. I saw her crawling to the telephone in her apartment at night. But she didn’t call anyone.

I have only written about such things in private. 

When people spoke about death, it unsettled me. Growing up, I saw too many deaths. I was too young to understand them. It made me fear loneliness. Most of these people died because they had been lonely. 

I know that life betrays us when we looking the other way. 

My heart is weak. I always said that.

I felt everything. I felt it all very intensely.

We live solitary lives. 

Have you ever thought of how others feel when you leave them all alone? 

They die. Or they try to. 

I woke up this afternoon, and felt the same sadness. The unexplained, unearned, and unbelonged kind of sadness that you know will fill your evening. 

I started to think of a million things at once — the unfinished book, the unedited, unwritten stories, the deadlines that I had missed, and more and more. And then I thought of how we lost people.

Remember the night when you stared at the cloudless sky, and cried and asked for death. I remember it. But what did I do with the wish? I uttered it to the sky and the lone star, and returned to my desk to write about the agony of others.

***

“Résumé Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, Acids stain you, And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful, Nooses give, Gas smells awful. You might as well live.” 

― Dorothy Parker, Enough Rope

In April 2011, I had walked into an ICU unit chasing a story of two sisters, who had shut off the world, and suffered from what is medically referred to as shared psychosis.

The rescuers had to jump on to the terrace of the first floor apartment to break into the house. Through the glass, they saw one woman lying on the couch, and the other screaming, growling at them.

“She will die,” the younger sister had screamed. 

The voices told her so. They come to her in the oddest hours, cajoling her, abusing her, threatening her even.

“But doctor, I don't speak to them anymore,” Sonali Behl had said as she stared into the space as the doctor stood next to her.

Ten days after the two sisters were brought to the Kailash Hospital from their Noida apartment in a malnourished state, the doctors told her that her elder sister had died. The two had locked themselves in their apartment for around six months.

Anuradha Behl, the elder sister with whom she shared almost all her experiences, passed away the morning after the two were rescued from their Noida home.

Over time, the sisters, locked in their apartment, had overlapping experiences, and their minds became the repositories of voices and visions. Each reaffirmed the other's paranoia, making it a shared experience, erasing doubts that it could be hallucinations. It was an unreal world full of their own prophesies, or insecurities, their losses. But then, we are looking from outside and views are limited or infinite depending on the vantage point.

They suffered from shared psychosis. For many months after I had written the story, I had wondered about what leads to such a self-inflicted prolonged suffering.

The elder sister had suffered a disfigurement on her face and she had undergone a cosmetic surgery. She never married. Nor did the younger sister.

I remembered her telling me about the voices. Always scared of the voice, they shut their ears, even their eyes.

But it followed them, screaming in their ears.

“Don't go outside,” it said.

And they obeyed. Often Anuradha would scribble about these experiences on paper but tore them up, or burnt the testimonies of their lives inside the apartment.

When I asked her whose voice was it, she said it was an old woman's voice, husky and commanding. It floated around the rooms. There was no escaping it. 

It told them to stay indoors, draw the curtains, shun the world.

They shared their experiences, compounding the horror of it through this act. 

They stayed indoors narrating to each other the demons they saw. In time, they began seeing the same things.

The elder sister even maintained a diary, an account of the voices she heard, the visions that consumed her. 

This was a case of induced psychosis, a state that is often referred to as Folie à deux, a French term, according to the doctors at the hospital.

The disorder was first analysed in 1651 when a case of phantom pregnancy associated with induced psychosis in two sisters came to light.

In their restricted world, assailed by the voice, the sisters lived in a space that nothing could penetrate. Not even the light. Not the neighbours, not the police that knocked on their doors several times after the neighbours alerted them about the two sisters. Their space remained out of bounds. 

It was a timeless space. But then, who invented time. Who can measure it? Even seasons were kept out of their apartment.

When Sonali was rescued, she had been wearing three layers of woollens.

“Of course their losses in terms of their parents' deaths and their brother moving out after his marriage acted as a catalyst,” a doctor had explained. 

Lying in her bed in the hospital, Sonali had whispered.

“It has been a long time since I stopped talking to the voices.”

***

When they tried to break open the door, Sonali finally let them in.

She even took out a diary and gave the police and the RWA member Col H Sharma their brother Vipin's number.

The siblings had lost their parents a decade ago. The father, a former army officer, died in 1992 in a car accident and the mother passed away in 1995. The family dog died six months ago, and when the losses piled up, the sisters shut themselves in.

But those were the facts of the case. I had wandered around their neighbourhood trying to reconstruct the off-bounds life they lived in an apartment complex. I was afraid of the narrative.

I have lived by myself for years. After my aunt passed away many years ago, I thought I could see her. I dismissed these visions but for many weeks, I slept with the lights on. They call it sleep paralysis. I don’t believe in ghosts anymore. 

A hand would sneak out, grab the packet of grocery and the door would shut, they told me. 

Once the delivery man, Birpal, peered inside but he could see nothing. He couldn't trace the hand to a face. Birpal from Maha Laxmi Store in the nearby Ganga Shopping Complex, always took the same items to the sisters — milk, bread, biscuits, butter, tea. 

They sent the cheque by the 9th of every month. The bill usually amounted to Rs 2,500 for a month, they said.

Last he went to drop off the items was on February 16 of 2011.

The sisters never called again. The phone connection was cut off. The outstanding bill was around Rs 400. The electricity bill until December 2010 was around Rs 10,000. All this I reported in my story.

In the neighbourhood, somebody had ransacked their mailbox, but it only contained a few uncleared bills.

On one of the windows, the bees had started to make their home. The dust had accumulated in layers. Nobody hung out any clothes to dry on the terrace that looked out on the main road. Nothing ever happened in that apartment. 

Isolated in their time warp, the younger sister had once asked a neighbour what time it was. Again through an opening in the door. 

***

By the end of my time in Philadelphia, I had adjusted to a life of loneliness. In fact, I was actually looking forward to it. Pain, agony, suffering are personal. If you felt emotional isolation, you were feeling the flames. I did, too.

Once a friend spoke to me about his attempts to end his life. He wasn’t successful. There were a series of family problems, abandonment and a failures, etc. We both laughed looking at the sunset knowing that we both understood why it isn’t an act of cowardice. Suicide involves a lot of strength. And just as we choose life, we must also be able to choose death.

Wallace once said in an interview, “Writing fiction takes me out of time. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get."

Maybe that’s why we write. Maybe we write in order to live.

I am afraid of heights. I feel dizzy with images. I feel the absence of time and seasons, too. Often, we forget stories we have written. This stayed with me. I have often wondered about abandonment, betrayal, love and loss. 

Often I have had encounters with those that have spoken of suicide as ultimate deliverance. The pain is unrelenting as William Styron, the author of Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, wrote. 

Once a person in the grip of depression had told me how he felt like jumping from the New York high-rise he was living in at the time. He had to lock himself in the bathroom to ensure he doesn’t do it. For months, he grappled with this. We went to hospitals seeking counselling and help.

I hope he is well now, but it was a lesson in how the world expects us to be brave at all times but we all have breaking points. It’s important to reach out, talk and be around and not judge. We can only empathise. That’s a limitation we must admit to. We can only imagine the pain and not feel it. 

I don’t know if others standing by that window in a high-rise in Philadelphia would see the same infinite expanse of nothingness that I witnessed night after night. 

In other cities, I looked out at the city, the lake and the silhouettes of trees in the moonlight. The cold wind rushed in, and I stood there a long time thinking. In another city, icicles had hung from the parapets, and snow covered the roofs outside my window. I wasn't a lover of the gold leaves, or the rose gardens. There was only one thing I wanted to understand. The air had felt heavy the last time. 

When I was watching the clouds in another place where mountains surrounded me, a man asked me if I could sense the storm within. I said I could. All I remember from that night is the sound of the muezzin and the glow of the cigarette.

But that's not important. I know that stories heal. I am not a psychiatrist. I am only a writer trying to understand what can never be understood. We can only observe and remain faithful to the stories. And we can go beyond and become a stranger that people could confide in.

I have had many people writing letters to me about loss. One was from a writer as he boarded the plane to attend his mother’s funeral. He had written he had missed the deadline. I have always responded to calls of distress. It is not easy. We don’t understand the darkness. We are finding our way out, too. But we can always do it together. 

Last updated: April 02, 2017 | 21:18
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