My sister Caty
committed suicide ten years ago this week. She was eighteen. I wish she had known
the bigness of the future, the way that feelings and circumstances change, people
forgive, and love reenters. I’d like to remember Caty by insisting that our
lives reach much wider than we can acknowledge at any given moment. This is a
distillation of Jennifer Michael Hecht’s secular argument against suicide in
her recent book Stay (you can listen
to an interview with Hecht here and read articles by her here and here). The argument
goes like this: We should choose to live rather than to die. We should do so for
each other and also for our future selves.
More Americans
commit suicide every year than die of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, or homicide.
In 2004, the year that my sister committed suicide, 32,000 other Americans also
did, including more than 4,000 other young people under the age of 24.
Globally, about 800,000 people took their own lives in 2004. The global suicide
rate has risen over the past decade. Soldiers and veterans of recent American
wars abroad are more likely to kill themselves than to die in combat. It is
untrue that nothing will stop a person with suicidal thoughts from killing
themselves. Most people who kill themselves can be deterred; they often waver
and express ambivalence in their decision even in their final moments. Psychiatric
interventions and the stable presence of a community prevent suicide, as does
curbing access to lethal means, especially firearms. A gun kept in a home is 11
times more likely to be used by someone to attempt or commit suicide than it is
for self-defense.
Suicide causes
immeasurable pain to family and friends, but also to people who barely knew
the victim. Suicide has an influential “cluster effect” or a “contagion
effect,” which means it causes other suicides. It is best understood as an act
that is socially formed and will reverberate back into the social whole, often
by provoking other people to kill themselves as well. To see suicide as purely
a question of an individual life-- or individual will or agency-- is to fail to
acknowledge the ways that we are shaped by and connected to other people. None
of us are completely alone. Hecht summarized this part of her argument in a
2013 Chronicle of Higher Education article: “Suicidal
influence is so strong that if you want your niece, or your fellow soldier,
your sorority sister, or fellow poet, to make it through their dark nights, you
have to make it through yours. Those who have suicidal thoughts must know that
resisting them is an act of generosity equal to that of running into a burning
house and rescuing a child.”
This is not a condemnation of suicide victims but a celebration of those who struggle with the idea and ultimately do not commit suicide. The decision to live
is a decision to keep others alive. Likewise, to remove the option of suicide
is to refuse to commit violence against an entire web of people who need and
will need you. I implore all of us to remove the option of suicide. Most people who make it through their dark nights will never
earn notoriety for their courage.Yet they refuse to give into their one, most
destructive self, and I think that’s courageous. I think we should all decide to
live.
It’s difficult to
speculate on who Caty Lewis would have been at age 28, but she probably would
have been different than she was at 18. Few of us would say we are the same
person than we were a decade ago. Catie probably would have been someone she could
live with, and perhaps even someone she liked. Time changes us.
Grieving over the
past decade was not ultimately good
for me, nor did it provide me with extraordinary strength or wisdom. Catie’s
suicide provided insight into a kind of pain that I would have preferred to
avoid. I find solace not in asserting an ultimate plan or goodness in what
happened, but in the reminder that love never ceases and I have been given the
great privilege to exist. We all have the opportunity to remind other people
how important their lives are through our work and our relationships.
