Armchair Psychology

Whenever someone famous dies, everyone becomes an expert. I've read many theories this week -- presented as fact -- about why people commit suicide or what depression is. I'm pretty sure most of the people whose writing I've seen on these on these topics have no real authority or credibility, but that doesn't stop them from jabbering away. Of course it's sad when anybody's life is cut short, whether by his/her own hand or by other means. Nothing you or I can say will make that loss any harder for the deceased's family to bear, and may in fact make it more difficult. Much of what I read and heard about Robin Williams' death and the circumstances surrounding it was by accident. It was hard to avoid. Two stories stood out to me: one about his daughter having to delete her social networking accounts because of criticism regarding her having an "inadequate number of pictures of her father" on her social media, and another about suicide not being selfish.

The first is wrong for obvious reasons. The second -- and I will say up front that I am not a psychologist, in case you don't know that -- bothers me because I have seen the effects of suicide on those left behind, and I don't mean only the "what could we have done" kinds of effects, although those are horrible too. I mean those that result from a close friend of family member finding the deceased in a pool of blood with half of his/her head missing from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I understand that life can sometimes seem overwhelming and hard, and I can't imagine (although I can empathize and sympathize) how bad it must be to feel that death is a better option that life. On the other hand, I know no fewer than four people -- a small sampling, to be sure -- who have taken their own lives and left the mess (literal and figurative) for others to clean up.

Several years back, a close friend of mine came home with her mom from a weekend in Orlando. She called me around 10:00 in the evening, which was odd; she rarely called that late. She was so distraught I could barely make out what she was saying. I finally understood only that her stepfather was dead. I told her I would get there as fast I could. When I arrived at her house, six police cars were out front and my friend and her mom were sobbing on the porch. One of the officers told me that my friend had gone inside and called out to her stepfather. When he didn't answer, she had gone in his room. He was dead in the floor, and had probably been there since the previous night, lying on the blood-soaked carpet. She had kept her mom from going into the room, but my friend was never able to get that image out of her head, and her mom was never the same. She aged twenty years in a month, and died two or three years later. Maybe that would have happened anyway, but I believe her husband's death played a big role in pushing that along.

My knowledge of the other people's experience's I've known about is less up-close and personal, but they all shared with me the impact that suicide had on their lives. There have been times in my life when I thought that getting out of it might be a good option, but I always worried about what it would be like for those I left behind. Would they have questions? Would they think it was their fault? Who would find me? And I had those questions before I knew people who had been through it. I'm not making any judgments, only observations.