Nosebleed

A thousand people are `officially’ dead of suicide every day, but they are not the only ones who are faced with the constant choice between life and death. We all are….We might lack the nerve to commit the final act, and we might not recognize our `sinful’ tendencies for what they are, but day in and day out we confront the problem of our innate attraction to self-destruction.

We live in a world that encourages the small daily acts of negation that prepare us for the great one. There are meanings of suicide that neither the courts nor the dictionaries admit, but that make it impossible for us to regard those thousand people a day who do themselves in as very different from us.

They are not necessarily `sick’ or `sinners’, but simply our sisters and brothers. And who are we? We are the resigned housewives, the compulsive playboys, the despairing priests, the addicted teenagers, the reckless drivers, the bored bureaucrats, the lonely salesmen, the smiling stewardesses, the restless drifters, the walking wounded….It may be nothing more than the steadfast commitment to sameness.

The simplest form of suicide is the act of refusing the adventures and challenges that offer themselves to us every day. `No, thanks,’ we say. `I prefer not to,’ we murmur, like Melville’s Bartleby, preferring to stare at the wall outside the window. Preferring, as I do on especially bad days, to stay in bed.