Suicide is heartbreakingly lonely.

One suicide note left at the Golden Gate Bridge reads: “I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.”

One bridge survivor, Kevin Hines, recounts his moment. He was eighteen. He took a bus to the bridge. He had a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles. He paced back and forth, sobbing for half and hour. “No one asked him what was wrong. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. “I was like, ‘Fuck this, nobody cares.’ So I jumped.”[1]

After an unsuccessful suicide attempt by self-immolation, Ariel Wilson recorded six tapes, which were sent to Dr. Shneidman:

So I took the toaster to these friends’ house and they were home. I remember just walking in and walking through the house and by this time I was sobbing again. And not one word was said to me by these people …

And I just walked through the house, put the toaster on the kitchen table and walked right out. And nobody touched my arm, nobody asked what’s wrong, nobody even gestured, and it upset me even more that this was sort of the end.

I then drove to a gas station and bought a gallon of gas.[2]

The flames consumed her but she lived, pulled out of her car and extinguished by a passer-by. She died three years later, at age 22, of heart failure.

In the prologue to Why People Die by Suicide, suicide researcher Thomas Joiner writes:

My dad rose from bed … He walked past the room he had shared with my mom, and then past my younger sisters’ room, where they lay asleep … He went downstairs … He walked outside, got into his van, and drove a half-mile or so to the lot of an industrial park. He prepared no note. At some point before dawn, he got into the back of the van and cut his wrists. His self-injury escalated from there — the cause of his death from his autopsy report is “puncture wound to the heart.”[3]

Suicide is committed upon family and friends, a kind of inhumanity to others if not to oneself. It is a bad death all around.

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[1] Tad Friend, “Jumpers,” New Yorker 79, no. 30 (2003): 48–59.
[2] Shneidman, The Suicidal Mind, 42.
[3] Thomas Joiner, Why People Die by Suicide.