Why Suicide? by Rohit Mukherjee

Why Suicide?

I was bathed with anxiety, coated by the charm of impending death that she gleamed on my vessel, I stood next to her soaked in fear to question, “Why is it that you no longer find the will to live?” An improbable reality for most, yet a visceral experience for her. I sat, watching willfully, as she soundly slept with rails containing her hands to prevent her from suffocating her own breath. Masking what she felt inside, hidden from those around her condemning her to the term “behavioral disorder.” Her label drew me to her, as I dealt with labels growing up in a classist society which stigmatizes against emotional fallibility and glorifies the social prowess in masculinity. Lingering by her, I waited through several passing moments which yearned through the rotation of earth around our sun and hung to the wake of dawn. Deafening silence had entrapped her room, thrown across the walls, reverberated and nested in my ear drum. Placed under the spell of uncertainty, I grew resistant to the hold of slumber and stood resolute to receive a confirmation. Confirmation, you might ask? Yes. I desire to understand what fills one’s heart with contempt and drowns its peace with an ocean of regret and uncertainty as the end of life draws near. What predisposes the soul to the act of injuring “god’s greatest gift”? What tirelessly sheds away the thick cover of a mother’s tender sweet love, a father’s bravery, or selfless camaraderie to a stage of anomie. What colors this normlessness, is the truth I wish to understand. Later that night, the sun peeked through the window, displacing its ray through the door which croaked. Finally, her eyes parted as the grasp of night loosened. She misread my demeanor, misjudged my tone, and grew fearful of my presence. “Who are you! What do you want, just come and kill me.” Surprised – “Kill you? That’s quite extreme, I rather wish to understand, why one wants to be killed.” She addressed my concerns with “Why does it matter to you?” I anxiously responded, “What you feel is a reflection of how one feels toward you, whether you emit love or hate, one should expect the same in return. What makes you so hateful? What makes one so helpless?” She extended her neck to see the sun and said “I haven’t seen the sun for over a week, I’ve been forced to sleep, cut open, tubes shoved through me, restrained, and told ‘your cancer is terminal, I’m sorry.’” She continued, “I’m a civil engineer from Poland, traveling from Krakow to here I’ve experienced the gifts of a lavish life, and comforted by the birth of two beautiful children.” She paused, her vascular fists tightened, her mandible clamped, and tearfully she muttered, “Whom were diagnosed with autism and blindness.” They weren’t able to see their own mother, whose love for them endlessly leaked out of her. They could not feel nor understand the complexities of life nor perceive the very notion of their family. She quit her job, and became what she noted a “victim” to their fate. Growing to dispel her qualms about becoming unequipped to help her children thrive after her diagnosis, she yearned to escape. She felt that death encompassed liberation and expelled the sorrow she felt day to day. She could no longer wait, and thus, came actions which resulted in her imprisonment before me. I asked her, “What would you change, if illness wasn’t your reality?”

A calm entered our atmosphere: “I would love more, and always choose to love, even when I faced such drastic defeat.” In that moment, I learned, something I never expected to learn from entering the room as her monitor. She had never wished to leave her children nor her own life. She sought to free herself from the stigmatization brought to her and her children based on disposition. She longed to feel that her children were “typical” and not “abnormal.” These words which characterized her own and her children’s lives masked their happiness, imprisoned them with helplessness, enough so that she would have grown to hate and cease to cling to her existence. As she continued to share beyond her insecurities, I felt that the paint of the walls had changed. As I looked around, I had a revelation. Walls once covered with fear and anguish, now seemed to be colored with the liberation of freeing oneself of fear with love. Compelled by her strength, I finally told myself, “Death can wait.”

Rohit Mukherjee, BA, EMT-B, BLS, MHFA Research Assistant, Rutgers Tobacco Dependence Program Rutgers School of Public Health