what is courage?

Well, now that Mary has declared me funny in print, I will be contrary and write a morose blog instead. If you’re here for the first time looking for funny, then please come back tomorrow or go back to yesterday. There’s nothing for you here.

The topic du jour is suicide.

In the darkest days of my adolescence, I often indulged in the comfort of what the pros call “suicide ideation”—I thought about killing myself. On a pretty regular basis. It seemed like a pretty simple solution to all of it. Maybe I was a miserable teenage girl, maybe I was just a teenage girl. Dunno.

A couple of things people said kept me hanging on.

When I was about 13, Julie, a slightly older and equally melancholy friend, said that she thought the idea of “attempting” suicide was bullshit. “If you want to kill yourself, you don’t fail,” she said. We were on the hot back seat of the 104 bus, rumbling down Broadway. She stared straight ahead into her bleak future as she said it, and I knew she was right. I lived in a 12th floor apartment. If I really wanted to die, nothing stood in my way. Her words embarrassed me, forced me to acknowledge that as much as I found solace in the thought of dying, I clearly was not committed to the concept.

Many years later, I was hanging out in the Stromboli pizzeria on St. Mark’s Place, where my friend Steve worked. Steve was from a small town. “You know why I would never commit suicide?” he asked, leaning on the counter like a bartender. “There was a guy in my town who killed himself. It was terrible and all that, but after a while, everyone forgot. He probably wanted to make some kind of big point, but everyone just moved on.”

Yikes. That’s not an appealing thought, either.

Eventually, I memorized Dorothy Parker’s “Resume” and got on with my life. (Julie lives on, too. I think she’s a doctor or something.)

And as I got on with my life and moved past the bleak terrain of adolescence, I started understanding that the real problem with committing suicide is what it does to the people you leave behind. That is the immorality of suicide.

I’m on the topic because we just had a high-profile murder-suicide here in Dallas--a couple of movers in local politics.

I feel deep sympathy for the family and friends of the couple who decided their troubles were too much to bear. My heart breaks especially for their son, a senior in college, to whom they bade good-bye to in a phone call.

But because I did not know this couple, I feel free to indulge my anger towards them.

Perhaps more will be revealed over time, but according to newspaper reports, the Shaws were evidently driven to despair by life’s “turbulence,” according to a friend—much of it self inflicted. They had run up huge debts and Mrs. Shaw allegedly forged a letter from the Dallas County district attorney to avoid a debt and was facing a criminal trial. Mr. Shaw had prostate cancer, although friends said they thought treatment was working.

Yes, it sounds like they were having a rough time of it--I'm not being facetious when I say that. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is a guy standing in an hour glass that has the word "Life" written on it. Instead of grains of sand, bricks fall on this guy's head, one at a time. Bonk, bonk, bonk.

That's life.

Were the tribulations of the Shaws life really rough enough to justify what they just did to their son?

How self-absorbed. How cruel. How unnecessary, selfish, childish and cowardly.

In a way, I almost hope something really terrible in their lives comes to light, something that might somehow in some way justify this action, something that will let their son know that only the most dire circumstances would cause them to visit such a terrible tragedy on him. Debt? Unethical behavior? Hey, you were tough enough to do it, buck up and face the consequences.

When I was suicidal, I thought not committing suicide was cowardly. Now I understand that the reality is the opposite. (Except in the face of mortal illness. I have known people who have chosen suicide over an unavoidable and unbearable physical decline. I understand and respect that.)

I am also annoyed at James Ragland, who tried to be poignant about the Shaws but ended with a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar about the faces slaves wore to please their masters while inside they were in agony.

Slaves? C’mon. As far as I can tell, the Shaws were slaves only to their own aspirations. There is, of course, tragedy to their story, but they are not victims. They made choices to the very end. The analogy insults Americans’ mutual history.

P.S. This afternoon, a woman threw her two sons off a highway overpass then jumped herself. They all lived.

P.P.S. Required reading for all people contemplating suicide: Tad Friend's New Yorker article, Jumpers, about people who jump from the Golden Gate bridge. Not all of them die. One of my all-time favorite magazine articles.