Stay! an essay against suicide

The Boston Globe Ideas section today included a very moving essay by poet Jennifer Michael Hecht, adapted from a blog post she wrote at The Best American Poetry (The Lion and The Honey Comb). The Globe article in more polished and easier to read than the original blog post, though, so I recommend you go there. The Globe editors introduce the essay by explaining that Hecht wrote her essay in response to the suicide, separated by a few years, of two friends, both women poets, who met in graduate school. Rachel Wetzsteon took her own life on Christmas 2009. Boston poet Sarah Hannah had killed herself in 2007. Hecht made the blog post in January, 2010. Here are some of the most moving pieces, but I recommend you read the entire essay, which is not long!

So I want to say this, and forgive me the strangeness of it. Don’t kill yourself. Life has always been almost too hard to bear, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time. It’s awful. But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear. Hear me out.

In the West, in the past, the dominant religions told people suicide was against the rules, they must not do it, if they did, they would be punished in the afterlife. People killed themselves anyway, of course, but the strict injunction must have helped keep a billion moments of anguish from turning into a bloodbath. These days we encourage people to stay alive and not kill themselves, but we say it for the person’s own sake. It’s illegal, sure, but no one actually insists that suicide is wrong.

I’m issuing a rule. You are not allowed to kill yourself. You are going to like this, stay with me. When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community. One of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide. That means that every suicide may be a delayed homicide. You have to stay. (snip)

In thinking about the friends I’ve lost to suicide, and in my own dark times, I have found myself noticing that if I’m grateful that you haven’t killed yourself (even though the fact of it only recently came into my mind), then you are also likely grateful that I haven’t killed myself (whether consciously yet or not). I have found that thinking about this can feel like a multitude of invisible arms linking to support me. I can fall back into faith in humanity. We have to carry each other, like Bono says.

The truth is I want you to live for your sake, not for ours. But the injunction is true and real. Anyway, some part of you doesn’t want to end it all, and I’m talking to her or him, to that part of you. I’m throwing you a rope, you don’t have to explain it to the monster in you, just tell the monster it can do whatever it wants, but not that. Later we’ll get rid of the monster, for now just hang on to the rope. I know that this means a struggle from one second to the next, let alone one day at a time. Know that the rest of us know that among the faces we have met there are some right now who can barely take another minute of the pain and uncertainty. And we are in the room with you, going from one moment to the next, in whatever condition you manage to do it. Sobbing and useless is great! Sobbing and useless is a million times better than dead. A billion times. Thank you for choosing sobbing and useless over dead. (snip)

We are grateful. Best of all, practicing tuning in to your gratitude for others’ staying alive also tones up your ability to feel the gratitude that people are extending to you, too, you start to feel the support of it, the invisible arms. Don’t kill yourself. Suffer here with us instead. We need you with us, we have not forgotten you, you are our hero. Stay.