MAINA: What makes death such a clear choice for one so young?

In these anxious times, it is easy to become exiled from life. We can become religious fanatics. Join extremist groups. We can drink too much alcohol. Others may take to drugs and a few might even escape to philosophy. And yet the young will perhaps feel even more radically exiled than their parents. PHOTO| FILE

What you need to know:

  • In short, when things such as these occur in our midst, we lack the mental and spiritual tools to deal with them.
  • When we talk, it is usually to whisper behind the backs of devastated and grieving parents; suddenly noting how insensitive they always were to their kids; how unloved we thought the kids always were; and how troubled their marriage always was.
  • That is called denial.

This is not a story. This is real. It is not logical. This is stream-of-consciousness… it will be jerky, hesitant, meandering even. I know because I am feeling rather than thinking it.

Last week, a friend lost a teenage son to suicide. He was travelling abroad when it happened. When I heard the news, I felt myself slip in and out of an in-between world of light and shadow. I was puzzled: What makes death such a clear choice for one so young?

WRENCHED BY MORBID THOUGHTS

As a parent, I was wrenched by morbid thoughts of what was going on in my friend’s mind over that interminable flight home. Did he perhaps blame himself for missing the signs? Did he blame someone else? Did he guiltily wish he could trade places with his son?   I, too, am the father of grown-up children and there are times – perhaps too many — that I feel I don’t really know them; that their anxieties, fears and terrors are always close to me but somehow also always beyond my grasp and understanding. That whenever I try to reach to them when they hurt I am too stoic to be of any comfort to them; that, perhaps, they think me stronger than I am and even less fragile and weak than I really am. That maybe many of the terrors that they face are a response to anxieties that I myself have created for them.

I remembered the story of Gary and Lisa, parents of a 16-year-old who killed himself on November 30, 2015. They explained in a heart-breaking web post that their son had left a note saying that though he had led a good life, this life "just wasn't for him" and lamented having made mistakes that he could not live with and, most poignantly, explaining that “he couldn't ever live up to his own expectations.”

COULD NOT LIVE UP TO HIS OWN EXPECTATIONS

In that last line, I found a small hook on which I felt I had some little purchase: the young man said he could not live up to his own expectations. We have expectations of our children but they have expectations of themselves too. Our expectations might shape theirs, but who they are what they want to be and how they want to become who they want to be lies somewhere in the unreachable recesses of their own hearts.

In these anxious times, it is easy to become exiled from life. We can become religious fanatics. Join extremist groups. We can drink too much alcohol. Others may take to drugs and a few might even escape to philosophy. And yet the young will perhaps feel even more radically exiled than their parents. Life can become too much to bear. The answers my generation offers to their children can be too pert or too curt. The choices we and our children face can become too complicated for either or both to untangle.

Even those who have suffered more profoundly than the rest of us over the years can yet find life suddenly unbearable. I recall how the end came to one of my favourite writers, Primo Levi, holocaust survivor, ardent chronicler of its horrors and great celebrant of the triumphs of the human spirit. He was once described by an admiring writer as one of the most serene people that writer had ever met. Levi committed suicide in 1987, prompting Ellie Wiesel to remark with characteristic poetic insight, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later.” His masterpieces, especially If This Is a Man, were seen by most as the most exquisite celebrations of the strength of the human spirit in adversity and an uplifting chronicle of that spirit’s ability to triumph over barbarity. How could Levi, this triumphant spirit, have lost out? The clue is in a letter that Levi wrote to a friend, Dr David Mendel, a British cardiologist nearly two months before he jumped to his death at his apartment building.

"I have fallen into a… serious depression; I have lost all interest in writing and even in reading. I am extremely low and I do not want to see anyone. I ask you as a 'Proper Doctor' what should I do? I feel the need for help but I do not know what sort."

The sense of being overwhelmed by life; the promise of a serene and final deliverance that death might seem to offer; the sense of not being understood by those around oneself; the inability to express in tractable words and gestures the turmoil and darkness that inhabits the heart behind our sunny dispositions and the social censure and stigma that societies like Kenya place on those who make this ultimate choice: all these block conversation about suicide, about what impels a person to make a decision to irremediably harm himself.

‘THE ONLY GENUINE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM’

Albert Camus once said that suicide is the only genuine philosophical problem. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he poignantly noted that “judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards.”

“Living,” Camus says, “is never easy.” In contrast, “dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively…… the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation” and “the uselessness of suffering.” If we come to feel that this life is useless, suicide suddenly becomes the only serious question. Rather than recrimination and censure — the instinct of most Kenyans — the question to ask is what forces bring a young person to this terrible pass where he or she feels that they must voluntarily opt out of life? I cannot answer that question for any parent, but it seems to me it must be confronted.

When parents are buffeted by the loss of a child, they might find solace in their faith but sometimes faith in itself can deepen one’s sense of fatalism, especially if it is united to feelings of guilt, as it often is. Sometimes religious leaders can be callow: unable to offer either condolences or relief. A priest that spoke on one of the wake days for my friend’s son was strangely insensitive. He had no message for the siblings, who are probably more devastated than the grieving parents. He had no message for the many parents gathered there, many of whom I know for a fact, have teenage children. It was obvious to me that he clearly did not have counselling experience either. He did not understand the ways in which grief can turn in on itself, poisoning family relations and destroying love in the process. Not having enough counselling experience meant that he had no real message for the parents.

In short, when things such as these occur in our midst, we lack the mental and spiritual tools to deal with them. When we talk, it is usually to whisper behind the backs of devastated and grieving parents; suddenly noting how insensitive they always were to their kids; how unloved we thought the kids always were; and how troubled their marriage always was. That is called denial.

A NATIONAL CONVERSATION TO BE HAD

There is here a national conversation to be had. There is stigma to be addressed and there is a truth to be faced: There is not one of us who knows enough to prepare his or her children for life. Life will throw difficulties and problems at them and at us that no one ever prepared us for.

That is why I am wrenched at my friend’s inexpressible loss. I am implicated in it.

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