Die We Must, Noose or Not

There’s something freeing about death. Those who commit suicide have their reasons for doing so. Free at last! They can no longer fret themselves bemoaning what another man thinks of them. They also care little of what we may say of them after they are gone, they don’t have to. Disparaging comments from those around us, true or imagined, afflict living souls, but what is an insult to a corpse? It doesn’t mind your censure, neither is it perturbed by detesting. Living requires courage, conscious or subconscious, because you have at some point to face a sneer, answer to a slander, or face a provocation. Suicide demands more courage yet. Suicide means you are desperate enough to end your life despite not knowing what tomorrow has in store. Maybe there could finally be some emancipation, but surely, its likely to be just more of the same; suffering, pain, heartbreak.

When you have a 36-hour shift, and you spend every minute of it on your toes, delivering babies, attending to emergencies, administering meds, writing reports, losing some patients right before your eyes, and thereafter no one seems to be mindful of your plight but instead they opt for condescension and caustic remarks, maybe you can endure twice of that if some money comes with it, but when there is no compensation for all these woes, you lose your mind. And you make that decision that has at least the promise of freeing you.

Others do it for love. Everyday. When someone you love doesn’t return that love, with the same fervor and sincerity, when they instead love someone else, and maybe you catch them during one of their liaisons, which is probably the twentieth, is there a reason to go on living? Why go on living when you cannot have the love you desperately pine for? Dead people don’t need love, do they? Romeos do it for their Juliets, Juliet who it turns out was only asleep, and when Juliet awakes to find her Romeo dead, is their any benefit of one more minute in this vile earth. Till death do us part, only I will kill myself afterwards. What of the guilt that tails behind a mistake. One we cannot forgive ourselves, and so allow no one else to forgive us? When you have done a mistake, one that will not allow the world see you in the same light ever again, or so you think, despite however much they may try otherwise; when you cannot look at the eyes of another human being because of your sin, having your eyes shut forever feels like an escape. That same guilt and remorse hastened Judas to his suicide. What is more heartbreaking than the haunting consciousness that you have betrayed the Savior of mankind.

Some will do all that is in their power to stave off death for as long as they can, yet others actively seek its embrace. Give me something for the pain, and let me die. Jeremiah de Saint-Armour in Garcia’s Love in the Time of Cholera makes a vow against decrepitude. He cannot bear the inconvenience of old age, so he willfully ends his life by inhaling the fumes of gold cyanide. Dr. Juvenal Urbino finds him ‘bathed’ in the scent of bitter almonds. It’s a great way to start a novel:

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

With a suicide. But you are wrong dear doctor, it isn’t unrequited love; it’s a man afraid of old age. Maybe it is unrequited love after all, it is always unrequited love. Or maybe mostly. But what would we say of Flannery O’Connor, with a diagnosis that portends the knowledge that you are living on borrowed time? Many a mother will take a bullet for her son and a soldier for his country. Is that suicide? What of the rich man with a great harvest, with the intention of building more barns, only for the Lord to claim his soul that night. So whether I have a smile on my face today, or whether I have driven you crazy in love, or whether you party yourself stiff, or whether you eat a morsel of whatever for supper, or whether you are caught cheating in an exam and your face paints the web, one fate awaits us all. Some of us are accomplices with that fate, we get the noose and we buy the poison. Others don’t want to consider the thought that this world is not their home. But death is the wave that washes upon every human shore, whether we wish it or not. All men must die. And we are men.

I don't love my wife anymore

I am afraid, and I believe rightly so, of marriage. Love at first sight has been, for a while, something of peculiar interest to me. Though, finally, and for my own good I believe, I have come to the point where I no longer believe in such a thing as love at first sight. It is easy to love someone today, and tomorrow, but to love them everyday for the rest of our lives, that is something for which most of us are entirely incapable of as long as we continue to think that love is just a feeling, and nothing more. I agree with James Dobson that there is no way we can suddenly love someone we have just met. We can admire them, we can be spellbound by them perhaps, but we can never love them, truly love them, in the literal sense of the word. Love requires a kind of commitment that at times bids us to make sacrifices we never foresaw, and maybe that is why couples fall out of love, because if people can fall in love, it means they can also fall out of love. As long as we continue to misjudge, and misunderstand love, the divorce rate will go on rising.

Fiction perhaps expresses the idea of falling out of love more 'beautifully'. I tried it in my short story So This Is Love. In Garcia's Love in the Time of Cholera, Fermina Daza falls in love with Florentino Ariza, and then to our heart-rending disappointment falls out of love with him, only to fall in love with him again five decades later. Love! you protean thing.

Here's a passage from Jane Eyre, as Jane tries to explain to Mr. Rochester how he will go from loving to detesting her (I am not sure if it really is detesting, but I think so) and then perhaps he will like her again. Like her, not love her.

"For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,—a very little while; and then you will turn cool; and then you will be capricious; and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado to please you: but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps like me again,—like me, I say, not love me. I suppose your love will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a husband's ardour extends. Yet, after all, as a friend and companion, I hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master."

Or maybe Fermina Daza never loved Florentino Ariza a second time, she probably only liked him. We will never know.