Suicide has been on my mind for some time—not committing it but wondering about those who are unsuccessful at it.
It ought to be embarrassing to fail at suicide since many of those who try it do so because they believe they have failed at life or life has failed them. They must think, “I can’t even commit suicide successfully. How pathetic is that?”
The immediate hook for today’s post is the revelation by Ruth Madoff, the wife of the Ponzi scheme pasha Bernard “Bernie” Madoff, that they tried to end their lives on Christmas Eve, 2008, soon after he confessed to his crimes. That they did not succeed is self-evident.
They both swallowed handfuls of what they thought was Ambien in order to overdose their way to death but merely ended up what The New York Times calls “a long drug-induced slumber.” I checked about the side effects of Zolpidem, the primary ingredient of Ambien, and was struck by how many it has. Drowsiness is listed as one of the side effects, which is ironic because I would think that drowsiness would be the main purpose of this drug for insomnia. Another side effect is diarrhea. So you would be sleepy and diarrheal at the same time. That is terrifying.
I am no advocate of suicide as a means to an end but it may seem like a reasonable option to consider in the face of a relentlessly cruel or unmanageable life. It is not particularly unsettling that people want to take their own lives because they are convinced that it is their only way out of whatever it is that they are getting out of. It is a bit self-serving, I would think, but ultimately effective if carried out successfully. I am not sure if it is cowardly as many people think of it as because for most people it does require a great deal of resolve and even courage to end their own lives.
Those who survive their own suicide must be feeling fundamentally altered because whatever device they employed to achieve that goal they would have done so thinking it would work. I am thinking that surviving it would not be part of their contingency. In fact, why would they have contingency at all if they were determined to end it all? The contingency, if any, would be for their immediate family. In the case of the Madoffs, for instance, they mailed jewelry and other gifts to those they cared about before they took what they thought was their last step. As it turned out they survived and Bernie Madoff ended up in prison on a 150-year sentence.
In my much younger days I thought I had the gift to make frighteningly accurate predictions about random people. I would say my success rate was eight out of ten at the peak of what now increasingly seem like bogus powers. I remember having asked a fellow student in college out of the blue why she had tried to commit suicide recently. She was stunned by my question, but as the directness of that intrusion wore off she admitted that she had indeed tried to do so because she thought she was ugly (“Kadrupi” was the Gujarati word she had used). I asked her what she thought of herself post-unsuccessful suicide attempt. She said she no longer cared about such things. In a sense she discovered a new life after failing to end the old one.
P.S.: I apologize if all this is morbid for some of you. I look at it in a detached manner.
