The Noonday Demon

by Solomon, Andrew

  I first became acutely aware of suicide when I was about nine years old. The father of a classmate of my brother’s killed himself, and the topic had to be addressed at home. The man in question had stood up in front of his family, made some extraordinary remark, and then leapt through the open window, leaving his wife and children to look down at a body condensed into lifelessness several stories below. “Some people just have problems they can’t solve and they get to the point at which they can’t stand to live anymore,” my mother explained. “You’ve got to be strong to get through life. You’ve got to be one of the survivors.” Somehow I didn’t understand the horror of what had happened; it had an exotic and fascinating, almost pornographic quality.

  When I was a sophomore in high school, one of my favorite teachers shot himself in the head. He was found in his car, with a Bible open beside him. The police shut the Bible without noting the page. I remember discussing that at the dinner table. I had not yet lost anyone who was really close to me, so the fact that his death was a suicide did not stand out as much as it does in retrospect; I was confronting for the first time the fact of death. We talked about how no one would ever know to which page that Bible was open, and something literary in me suffered more about that foiled closure of the life than about the loss of it.

  My freshman year of college, the ex-girlfriend of my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend jumped off a building at school. I didn’t know her, but I knew that I was implicated in a chain of rejection that included her, and I felt guilty about the death of this stranger.

  A few years after college, an acquaintance killed himself. He drank a bottle of vodka; slit his wrists; and apparently discontent with the slow progress of his blood, went to the roof of his New York apartment building and jumped off. This time I was shocked. He was a sweet-natured, intelligent, good-looking man, someone of whom I had occasionally been jealous. I wrote at that time for the local paper. He used to pick up his copy early from an all-night newsagent, and every time I published something he would be the first one to call and congratulate me. We were not close, but I will always remember those calls, and the tone of slightly inappropriate awe he brought to his praise. He would reflect a bit sadly on how he was not sure about his career and how he perceived me to know what I was doing. That was the only melancholic thing I ever observed in him. Otherwise, I think of him still as a cheerful person. He had fun at parties; in fact, he gave good parties. He knew interesting people. Why would such a person slit his wrists and jump off the roof? His psychiatrist, who had seen him the day before, was not able to shed light on the question. Was there a why to answer? When it happened, I still thought that suicide had a logic, albeit a defective one.

  But suicide is not logical. “Why,” wrote Laura Anderson, who has battled such acute depression, “do they always have to come up with a ‘reason’?” The reason given is seldom sufficient to the event; it is the task of analysts and kind friends to search for clues, causes, and categories. I have since learned that from the catalogs of suicide I have read. The lists are as long and painful as those on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (and more young men committed suicide during the Vietnam War than died in action). Everyone had some acute trauma proximate to his suicide: a husband insulted one, a lover abandoned another, someone hurt himself badly, someone lost his true love to illness, someone went bankrupt, someone totaled her car. Someone simply woke up one day and didn’t want to be awake. Someone hated Friday nights. If they killed themselves, they did it because they were suicidal, and not because it was the obvious outcome of such reasoning. While the medical establishment insists that there is always a connection between mental illness and suicide, a sensationalist media often suggests that mental illness plays no real part in suicides. It makes us feel safe to locate causes for suicide. This is a more extreme version of the logic according to which acute depression is the consequence of whatever triggers it. There are no clean lines here. How suicidal do you have to feel to attempt suicide, and then how suicidal do you have to feel to commit suicide, and where does one intention become the other? Suicide may indeed be (as per the WHO) a “suicidal act with a fatal outcome,” but what are the conscious and unconscious motives underlying that outcome? High-risk actions—from deliberately exposing oneself to HIV to provoking someone to homicidal rage to staying outside in an ice storm—are frequently para-suicidal. Suicide attempts range from the conscious, focused, utterly deliberate, and purely objective-oriented to the most slightly self-destructive action. “Ambivalence,” Kay Jamison writes, “saturates the suicidal act.” A. Alvarez writes, “A suicide’s excuses are mostly by the way. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded, and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. They are like a trivial border incident which triggers a major war. The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.” “Newspapers often speak of the ‘personal sorrows’ or ‘incurable illnesses,’ ” Camus wrote. “These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.” And the critical theorist Julia Kristeva describes the profound randomness of timing: “A betrayal, a fatal illness, some accident or handicap that abruptly wrests me away from what seemed to me the normal category of normal people or else falls on a loved one with the same radical effect, or yet . . . What more could I mention? An infinite number of misfortunes weigh us down every day.”

  In 1952, Edwin Shneidman opened the first suicide-prevention center, in Los Angeles, and tried to come up with useful (rather than theoretical) structures for thought about suicide. He proposed that suicide is the result of thwarted love, shattered control, assaulted self-image, grief, and rage. “It is almost as though the suicidal drama were autonomously writing itself, as though the play had a mind of its own. It has to sober us to realize that as long as people, consciously or unconsciously, can successfully dissemble, no suicide prevention program can be a hundred percent successful.” Kay Jamison refers to this dissembling when she laments that “the privacy of the mind is an impermeable barrier.”

  A few years ago, another of my college classmates killed himself. This one had always been peculiar, and in some ways his suicide was easier to explain away. I’d had a message from him some weeks before he died and had been meaning to call back and make a plan for lunch. I was out with mutual friends when I heard. “Anyone speak to so-and-so lately?” I asked when a topic reminded me of him. “Haven’t you heard?” answered one of my friends. “He hanged himself a month ago.” For some reason, that image is the worst for me. I can imagine the friend with the slit wrists in the air, and I can imagine his body disintegrated after a jump. The image of this friend swaying from a beam like a pendulum: well, I never got my mind around it. I know that my phone call and lunch invitation would not have saved him from himself, but suicide inspires guilt all around it, and I cannot shake from my mind the idea that I would have received a clue if I’d seen him, and that I would have done something with that clue.

  Then the son of a business associate of my father’s killed himself. And then the son of a friend of my father’s killed himself. Then two other people I knew killed themselves. And friends of friends killed themselves too, and since I was writing this book, I heard from people who had lost their brothers, children, lovers, parents. It is possible to understand the paths that have led someone toward suicide, but the mentality of that actual moment, of the leap required to undertake the final action—that is incomprehensible and terrifying and so strange that it makes one feel as though one had never really known the person who did it.

  While writing this book, I heard about many suicides, in part because of the worlds with which I had been thrown in contact and in part because people looked to me
, with all my research, for some kind of wisdom or insight of which I was in fact entirely incapable. A nineteen-year-old friend, Chrissie Schmidt, called me in shock when one of her Andover classmates hanged himself in the stairwell behind his dorm room. The boy in question had been elected class president. After being caught drinking (aged seventeen), he had been removed from office. He had delivered a resignation speech that had received a standing ovation, then had taken his own life. Chrissie had known the boy only in passing, but he had seemed to occupy an enchanted world of popularity from which she sometimes felt excluded at Andover. “After fifteen minutes or so of disbelief,” Chrissie wrote in an E-mail, “I dissolved into tears. I think I felt many things at the same time—inexpressible sadness at the life cut short, voluntarily, so soon; anger at the school, a place smothered by its own mediocrity, for making such a huge deal about drinking and being so hard on the boy; and perhaps above all fear that I, at some point, might have felt capable of hanging myself in the stairwell of my dorm. Why didn’t I know this boy when I was there? Why did I feel that I was the only one who was so out of sorts, so miserable, when the most popular boy in school might have been feeling so many of the same things? Why the hell didn’t someone notice that he was carrying such a burden around with him? All those times, lying in my dorm room sophomore year, feeling desperately sad and baffled by the world around me and the life I was living . . . well, here I am. And I know I wouldn’t have taken that final step. I really do. But I came pretty close to feeling it was at least in the realm of possibility. What is it—bravery? pathology? solitude?—that can push someone over that final, fatal edge, when life is something we’re willing to lose?” And the next day she added, “His death stirs up and throws into relief all these unanswered questions—that I must ask these questions and that I will never get my answer is unbearably sad to me right now.” That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect. There is no one to whom one so yearns to connect as a person who has committed suicide. “If we had only known” is the plea of the parents of a suicide, people who rack their minds trying to figure out what failing of their love could have allowed such a thing to come and surprise them, trying to think what they should have said.

  But there is nothing to say, nothing that can assuage the loneliness of self-annihilation. Kay Jamison tells the painful story of her own suicide attempt at a time when her thought was as disrupted as her mood: “No amount of love from other people—and there was a lot—could help. No advantage of a caring family and fabulous job could be enough to overcome the pain and hopelessness I felt; no passionate or romantic love, however strong, could make a difference. Nothing alive and warm could make its way in through my carapace. I knew my life to be a shambles and I believed—incontestably—that my family, friends, and patients would be better off without me. There wasn’t much of me left anymore, anyway, and I thought my death would free up the wasted energies and well-meant efforts that were being sent on a fool’s errand.” It is not unusual to believe that one is a burden to others. One man who committed suicide wrote in his final note, “I have pondered it and have decided I would hurt friends and relatives less dead than alive.”

  Great misery does not make me suicidal, but occasionally in a depression something small will overwhelm me and I get a ridiculous feeling. There are too many dirty dishes in this kitchen, and I don’t have the stamina to clean them. Perhaps I will just kill myself. Or—look, the train is coming and I could just jump. Should I? But it’s in the station before I make up my mind. These thoughts are like waking dreams and I can see their absurdity, but I know that they are there. I do not want to die in these thoughts, and I do not want violence, but in some ludicrous fashion, suicide seems to simplify things. If I killed myself, I wouldn’t have to fix the roof or mow the lawn or take another shower. Oh, imagine that luxury of never having to comb my hair again. My conversations with the acutely suicidal have led me to believe that this feeling is closer to the one that most often leads to a suicide attempt than is the feeling of total despair that I had during darkest depression. It is a sudden perception of a way out. It is not exactly a melancholy feeling, though it may occur in an unhappy context. I also know the feeling of wanting to kill the depression and of being unable to do so except by killing the self it afflicts. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote:

  And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you

  All through my life?—sharing my fire, my bed,

  Sharing—oh, worst of all things!—the same head?—

  And, when I feed myself, feeding you, too?

  Nourishing your own misery can grow too wearisome to bear, and that tedium of helplessness, that failure of detachment, can lead you to the point at which killing the pain matters more than saving yourself.

  I talked to a large number of suicide survivors while I was working on this book, and one particularly frightened me. I met him in a hospital the day after his attempt. He was successful and attractive and fairly happily married, living in a nice suburb of an American coastal city, and working as a chef in a popular restaurant. He had suffered from periodic depression but had gone off his medication about two months earlier, believing that he would be fine without it. He had not told anyone that he was going to stop the medication, but he had appropriately lowered his dose over a few weeks before entirely discontinuing treatment. He had felt fine for a few days but had then begun to develop repetitive and explicit suicidal thoughts that were independent of other depression symptoms. He continued to go to work, but his mind drifted regularly to the idea of self-extermination. Eventually he had decided, with what he believed to be good reason, that the world would be better off without him. He tidied up a few loose ends in his life and made arrangements for things to continue after he was gone. Then one afternoon when he had decided it was time, he swallowed two bottles of Tylenol. About halfway through, he called his wife at her office to say good-bye, quite certain that she would see his logic and would not oppose his decision. She was not sure at first whether this was some kind of joke, but she soon realized that he was serious. Unbeknownst to her, he was taking pills by the handful even as they spoke on the telephone. Eventually, he got annoyed with her for arguing against his plan, said good-bye, and hung up the phone. He took the rest of the pills.

  Within a half hour, the police arrived. The man, who realized his plans were going to be foiled, stepped outside to chat with them. He explained that his wife was a bit nutty, that she did this sort of thing to cause him grief, and that there was really no reason for them to be there. He knew that if he could stall them for a further hour or so, the Tylenol would destroy his liver function (he’d done some careful research), and he hoped that if he couldn’t make them leave, he could at least distract them. He invited them in for a cup of tea and set the water to boil. He was so calm and convincing that the policemen believed his story. He did get some delay out of them; but they said that they really had to follow up a possible suicide attempt and would regretfully have to compel him to accompany them to the emergency room. His stomach was pumped in the nick of time.

  When I talked to him, he described the whole thing the way that I sometimes describe dreams, events in which I appear to have played a bewilderingly active role whose meaning I cannot distinguish. He was recovering from the stomach pumping and was very shaken, but he was quite coherent. “I don’t know why I wanted to die,” he said to me, “but I can tell you that yesterday it made perfect sense to me.” We went over the details. “I decided the world would be a better place with me not in it,” he said. “I thought it all through and I saw how it would free my wife, how it would be better for the restaurant, how it would be a relief to me. That’s what’s so strange, that it seemed like such an obviously good idea, so sensible.”

  He was enormously relieved to have been saved from that good idea. I would not describe him as
happy that day in the hospital; he was as terrified by his brush with death as the survivor of a plane crash might be. His wife had been with him most of the day. He said that he loved her and that he knew she loved him. He enjoyed his work. Perhaps something unconscious in him led him to the telephone when he was ready to kill himself, causing him to call his wife rather than to write a note. If there was, it was little comfort to him because it had so entirely failed to register with his conscious mind. I asked his doctor how long the patient would remain hospitalized, and the doctor said it would make sense to keep him until his flawed logic could be better explored and his blood levels of medication could be set. “He seems healthy enough to go home today,” said the doctor, “but he would have seemed healthy enough not to be here the day before yesterday.” I asked the man whether he thought he would make another suicide attempt. It was as though I had asked him to predict someone else’s future. He shook his head and looked at me with a pale, bewildered expression. “How can I know?” he asked me.