Suicide
The Soul Knows When It's Time to Go
Personal Perspective: Reflections on suicide and other torturous thoughts.
Posted December 18, 2024 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Trying to make sense of suicide is a fool’s errand, and I’ve been that fool ever since my son Rob died. Losing any relative to suicide is traumatic, but it’s particularly devastating for parents, who feel like a failure in the most important job of their lives.
I tortured myself for the better part of two years, asking the same questions over and over again—is there anything we could’ve done to prevent Rob from doing what he did?
In the days and weeks after his death, the answer seemed obvious: yes! For God’s sake, I was with him the day before he killed himself. Shouldn’t I have picked up on warning signs? Shouldn’t I have asked him if he was depressed, how he was sleeping, or if he was still going to AA meetings? Shouldn’t I have offered to give him money, get him meds, or take him to the emergency room like I did previously? Shouldn’t I have done something? Anything?
Shouldn’t we have been able to nip his mental illness in the bud when he was a little boy and get him on the right combo platter of drugs to smooth him out? Shouldn’t we have thrown him into rehab, where he could’ve received proper treatment, and then maybe he would’ve turned his life around? Shouldn’t we have done more? How could we have let a thing like this happen? Did we fail as his parents?
Shouldn’t I have done something? Anything?
Fast-forward six years, and the definitive answer to that question is no! In my heart of hearts, I know we did everything we could’ve done. Woulda, coulda, and shoulda can go f--- themselves.
We couldn’t save Rob because Rob didn’t want to be saved. He took his own life, accidentally on purpose, in an impulsive moment, and if it didn’t happen then, it would’ve likely happened in the future. With all his close calls in the past, it was kind of amazing that it hadn’t already happened.
I don’t think we could’ve prevented Rob from taking his own life. Nobody could’ve. He had made up his mind. He was determined. He wanted the pain to stop. He was out of here. His soul knew when it was time to go.
My therapist Katarina and I were talking about suicide one night and she told me a story about a man she met who had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. He told her that he had regretted it the moment he leaped, like when Wile E. Coyote looked down and realized that the cliff he’d been running on was no longer there. In that split second, the man knew that he wanted to live. He miraculously survived and now helps other people who struggle with what the pros like to call “suicidal ideation.”
Rob often leaped without looking, but I don’t think he had planned to kill himself that night. Whenever I try to piece it all together, I always come to the same conclusion—that what he did was both opportunistic and impulsive. Shooting yourself with two other people in the room whom you’ve been drinking and playing video games with all night is just not a premeditated act. To say nothing of leaving behind Biscuit, the cat he had rescued and cared for with all his heart.
We’ll never know what he was thinking in that horrible moment when he pulled the trigger, and I’m not saying that he hadn’t contemplated taking his own life—I’m pretty sure he had been thinking about it for some time. I’m just suggesting that, like a lot of Rob’s plans, this one played out differently than he’d thought.
What he did was both opportunistic and impulsive
I’ve heard that people who are suicidal commonly have blinders on. They can’t see past their pain. They can’t bear feeling the way they feel. They just want it to stop. They don’t think about the people who love them. They don’t think about getting help. They don’t think that anything can ever change. They see only one way out. Rob—drunk, depressed, desperate—saw an opportunity, grabbed it, and that was that. As Kay Redfield Jamison, perhaps the foremost expert on bipolar disorder, wrote in Night Falls Fast, “Suicide . . . is the last and best of bad possibilities.”
Unfortunately, there’s no going back when you put a gun in your mouth. There’s no cliff edge to hang on to, no chance of surviving a fall into San Francisco Bay. It was one and done, which reminds me of another classic Looney Tunes cartoon.
It’s the one where Bugs and Daffy perform vaudeville acts, and they’re going back and forth, trying to top each other, with Bugs always getting the better of Daffy until we get to the end. Bugs has just finished juggling and the audience is applauding when Daffy runs onstage and says, “I hate you! Now you’ve forced me to use the act I’ve held back for a special occasion. Just try and top this one!”
He proceeds to consume nitroglycerin, a good amount of gunpowder, and some uranium 238. Then he lights a match—“Girls, you better hold on to your boyfriends!”—and swallows it. Kaboom! He blows himself up (I remember loving this so much when I was a little kid) and the audience erupts in applause.
“That’s terrific, Daffy!” says Bugs. “They want more!”
“I know, I know,” says Daffy, who is now a ghost, “but I can only do it once!”
And then Daffy rises toward Heaven right before the closing credits music kicks in, accompanied by the famous words, “That’s all, folks!”
That’s what I imagine Rob saying right before his soul left the building.
If you or someone you love is contemplating suicide, seek help immediately. For help 24/7 dial 988 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
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