Before You Choose Suicide...

Hi, let’s start this article by telling you a bit about myself. A very small bit. On my arm I have a tattoo of a semicolon, for years I was plagued by depression and thoughts of suicide. I still have a problem with depression. I always will, it’s how I’m hardwired.

I’ve been reading lately that suicide is not a selfish act, that it is a choice that we make with our bodies. That depression is a disease, that sometimes the only escape is through that black door of death. And it may do just that, give you release. Let your pain go away. And that’s really nice for you, princess. Now the rest of us are left to deal with the mess that you left behind.

On television, they alway show death to be clean and tidy, but it’s not. If you use a gun the bullet will embed itself into a wall covering that wall and the floor with meat and bone. The average human body holds over a gallon of blood, which will do what liquids do. Drain into the carpet. Ever drop a gallon of milk onto a carpet?

That’s if you don’t live through it. I had a friend who tried using a shotgun, a few months in the hospital with half a face didn’t help his depression.

Do you know that the living has to clean up that mess? Crime scene cleaners are very expensive, most families can’t afford them. So that leaves your loved ones, or your building manager, to scrub out the blood and brain matter.

Then, you add in the cost of a funeral, which is at least three thousand sometimes up to ten thousand, depending on bells and whistles.

So you want to use pills? That doesn’t leave a pretty corpse, either. Besides the fact that you will probably survive and give yourself a life time of liver damage if you do end it with pills you will be leaving a vomit covered corpse.

You see after you pass out your body will kick into survival mode. Meaning that it will try to purge itself of what is killing it. So it’s vomiting and explosive diarrhea. And more of that long clean up.

Hanging is just as bad, it takes several minutes of legs kicking and clawing at the rope before you pass out for lack of oxygen. Then the neck starts to stretch from a weight hanging from it. If the rope is too thin it can cut the head completely off.

I can go on for pages covering how messy and ugly death is. I will cover that with one statement. When a body dies it relaxes all the muscles. Including the rectum. There’s no pretty way to die. When you die you begin to rot right away, like meat on the counter. The body turns blue and splotchy, then it starts bloating. In the heat, it can take about twenty-four hours for a body to swell enough for the skin to split and pop.

When I started writing this I had a plan of giving you beautiful words telling you how much pain you will cause your death. The trauma of finding your body, the bills of disposing of it, the years of therapy. The lifetime of the rest of us saying, “I wish that I could have one more hug, one more conversation. I wish I could tell them that I love them”

Because that is the truly selfish part. When someone commits suicide they end their pain. But we, the living, that’s when our pain starts.