Dying Can Be Such Sweet Sorrow

When I was a little girl, about 7 or 8 years old, I thought of dying, I actually wished for death… Till date, I have not been able to talk to anyone about it . However, I had made no attempts to kill myself, only wished, fervently, that I was non-existent, nothing, invisible. Like, wasn’t it possible to vanish???

When the news of the suicides of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade hit the internet in early June, the general consensus was ‘so the rich also cry?’. There seemed to be a general agreement by most people on social media that their dying must have been in some way connected to depression. Many opined that all the time that they were living and looking like everything about their lives was perfection, they were, in fact, camouflaging sadness and yes, depression. A few people begged to differ and I am one of them.


Granted, depression accounts for a high rate of suicides but I do not believe it accounts for all; I speak from a very personal perspective. I am not the happiest person but I know that the good days are better than the bad ones. The first time I had felt like leaving the world it was because I had been involved in something that hurt almost my entire family. I didn’t know better but the disappointment on my mother’s face had been too much to bear and the shame I had felt almost dragged me beyond but I had been more scared of dying without knowing what lay on the other side than dying itself. I also didn’t want to “gnash my teeth in hell.” So I fought with everything I had to leave home to a boarding school; Anonymity made me feel better and it worked, for a while.

In the past few years I have felt so weary of life that I just want to up and leave. I think of the struggles, which never seem to end and the vanity of it all. I hear horrible stories and mistakenly watch horrifying videos that make me feel so terribly assaulted that I usually felt that it was better to be gone than to live with the knowledge that such heart-rending things happen on a daily basis and to people like me- humans. Intermittently, life doesn’t make sense and sometimes, I just want to go over because dying appears a better option to living.

I am usually not depressed or sad, but many times, I am weary. Sometimes, the death of persons, even from natural causes, tips me that way because I question the point of life itself “What is the meaning of all of these?” “When does it end?” “Why?”


Thinking about Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade and their suicides, I observed that they had some similarities which gave me a thought or two on the possible causes of their suicides. They both were similar in some ways, amongst others-

Wealthy
Famous
Successful in careers
Professionals
Admired
Good-looking

They had almost everything that was supposed to guarantee Happiness or some form of contentment but none did. Everyone assumed depression did it. Maybe it was depression, maybe it was something else. Somehow I think they got tired of chasing yet another goal and succeeding and yet another and succeeding and still striving to find yet some new purpose to life.


The unending barrage of those “What next?” expectations they had of life might have finally pushed them over because when you reach the zenith and there is no where else to go but down, some people would rather hurl themselves over the cliff than climb down back to earth because they can find no justification to start all over again? They might wonder, “What is the purpose in all that?”

So dying becomes a sort of sweet relief for the weary soul who finally, maybe, finds rest and inexplicable sorrow for the loved ones left behind who are burdened with guilt and must blame themselves for not knowing or not noticing.

Dying Suicide can be such sweet sorrow.