Feeling about suicide

I have known several suicides...an uncle, a cousin, a close friend, and my favorite teacher. My uncle (mother's brother) was left by his wife. He worshipped her...the day the divorce was final, he gassed himself in his car.

My close friend was a runner training for the Olympics. On his way home from track practice, his Celebrity was T-boned by a drunk in a conversion van. He never walked again and required a near-lethal dose of painkillers just to function. His first words in the hospital were, "Please kill me." (Honestly, the kindest thing the paramedics could have done was to let him bleed out at the scene.)

My favorite teacher was accused of seducing two students...he sucked a shotgun a few months later. They made it all up because he failed them for cheating on a test.

My cousin was accused of molesting his daughter. That morning, he lost his marriage, his daughter, and the career (teacher) he'd been working toward since he was ten years old. That night, he washed down a bottle of sleeping pills with a fifth of Jack Daniels. It never happened: his wife made it up for leverage in a divorce.

Someone I work with just had his mother die of ALS...after seeing that, he says if he is ever diagnosed with it, he plans to eat a shotgun. Sometimes, suicide is a carefully-considered solution to an otherwise-unsolvable problem.