One of the persistent questions following my daughter Mary’s suicide went something like this: “What was that moment of decision like for her? What must it have been like not to be choosing suicide one moment and then to be choosing it the next? What happened to Mary in that lonely and horrible instant of choice?”
In writing of her sister’s suicide, Jill Bialosky offers insight about the question.”[My friends] wanted a clear reason to explain [my sister’s] death. I didn’t know what to say. For those whose lives are secure and steady, it must be difficult to imagine the inner fragility of an individual who chooses to die rather than live with despair. I imagine that the thought of suicide was something Kim had held up to the light like a many-sided crystal, thought about, toyed with in moments for years” (History of a Suicide: my sister’s unfinished life. New York: Washington Square Press, 2011, p.13).
Having spent a good part of his career studying suicide notes, psychologist Edwin Shneidman reinforces Bialosky’s intuition about Kim “toying” with the idea of suicide: “Suicide is the result of an interior dialogue. The mind scans its options; the topic of suicide comes up, the mind rejects it, scans again; there is suicide, it is rejected again, and then finally the mind accepts suicide as a solution, then plans it, and fixes it as the only answer” (The Suicidal Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 15).
So at least I now have an idea about the process my daughter went through in arriving at her horrible instant of choice. Her suicide was not an impulsive act so much as a woeful wearing away of the ability to keep on living and an increasing attraction to suicide as the “only answer.” From what I read in her journals after her death, Mary’s wearing away took place over at least a two-year period. But recognizing that reality gives rise to another question without an answer: how could I, the rest of her family, her psychiatrist, and the many who loved her not have picked up a sign that she was toying with the idea of suicide for two years and intervened to help her?
