Reflections on Suicide: The Game of Risk
"The agony of existence weighed against the horror of non-being"
Reflections on Suicide The Game of Risk
In a world and life of sin, it is easy to become blind even with perfect eyesight. For what good is perfect eyesight if what you see is nothing but deception? Smoke and mirrors can make the smallest path seem long and exhausting, but to only glance and surrender at such a daunting image is only to surrender at the mercy to yourself. Death escapes us all some days, and yet sneaks up on us some nights. Some nights more so than others. Maybe we have made stupid risks for little or no reason, or maybe there is great benefit to be weighed into accepting such a stupid risk - a challenge, if you will, that may end with attaining such a sweet prize or losing everything to humiliation and suffering and death. The odds of losing are high, but so are the stakes. Perhaps that is why these risks seem so appealing: the excitement from the risk, the challenge of creating a strategy, and the satisfaction of executing your strategy. Everything to gain and nothing to lose, or so it may seem there is nothing to lose, because the ultimate price to pay is life, and life takes a value beyond all prize. So here I am, lying in a pool of my own blood. I can taste the iron in a broken jaw that I can barely feel. If I could only feel the pain in my body over this numb feeling of fear and death. All my bones are broken and I am being swallowed by cold and darkness and pain. Maybe suicide was in it's own way a stupid risk. I sure fell a long way, and I sure as hell hit the ground hard, but I'll be damned that I can lie here, cold broken and bloody, but still alive. So I guess I was making a stupid risk; maybe I should have gone just a little higher - jumped a little further. Maybe I shouldn't have jumped at all. Why did I jump anyway? What was there to gain? Liberation from an exhausting life and a chance to get some rest? What was there to lose? A life of pain and sorrow and suffering? Maybe I was being selfish, to think only for myself and what I have to gain or what I have to lose. I did not consider that maybe there would be others that would lose me - that I would have taken myself away from those who need me the most: mothers and fathers; brothers and sisters; friends and colleagues; even neighbours and enemies. For I realize now that my greatest enemy lies within; I am my greatest enemy and only I can take myself down, as I have just now fallen these few stories to my anticipated but failed death. Now all I have are broken bones, none of which can do me this favour anymore of self-liberation - especially now that I want it; that I need it the most. Marriage is a contract of God - until death do us part. But in a way the soul is also married to the body - until death do us part. What a beautiful thing I have just wasted: life as a human being, the most magnificent and amazing of all earthly kinds. What a beautiful thing I have just ruined: the human being, the most stunning and skilled organism created in the Universe. No more can I appreciate the things I once learned to hate; no more can I love what I once had no interest in. For now I see what I truly have lost: an appreciation for life, not only my life, but the lives of others who depend on me. No longer will the couch be a place of rest but of incarceration; no longer will the television be a freedom of choice but an oppression forced upon my limbless body - a body I once had the opportunity to enjoy had I tried just a little harder - had I tried to survive, to accept the challenge and take the risk of living, that I could be proud and shout," Rejoice! For I have chosen a path of life to show that I am not a coward as those before me who have fallen on their own swords!" Now I lie here, a victim to myself. Even the thieves have pity upon me here in these damp and filthy alleys as they try to help and cry for help. Today I realize something, a lesson learned with the price of my own blood: never am I to let anyone take my life, especially when that person happens to be myself.