Do You Just Disappear?
My Perspective
This is only my personal reflection, thoughts and ideas about suicide.
Successful suicide can leave family and friends distraught, devastated and angry. It can leave an impression that can drastically change the lives of loved ones and friends, and the even the lives of the people around those survivors
Death
Death alone can cause irreparable changes. As a child, I experienced my grandmothers grief at the loss of her son. I was four years old at the time, and my uncle was 13. His death was purely an accident. But this left my grandmother with a palpable expression of grief. Throughout the years, no matter how good a front she would put up, it was as if I could feel it coming from her very pores.
This was not all my grandmothers doing, as I was a very empathetic and perceptive child. I never felt sorry for my grandmother, I just felt her grief and her loss. There was not a day that I was with her that I did not sense how much she longed for him to be back with her.
An Expression of Anger
I had someone tell me once, "Suicide is the ultimate F you."
It can be. As a 911 operator I have taken calls in which people have taken their lives directly after an argument. There have been suicides committed in front of people, and even in front of children in which the experts state they are sending a clear message of anger.
But I don't believe this is always the case.
Murder Suicide
I have heard and imagine some people may be so distraught with the idea of living without another person that they would consider this option.
Or what if someone angrily and impulsively murders someone, and then reacts with suicide. There's no way to really know.
¹ In a research specifically related to murder–suicide, Milton Rosenbaum (1990) discovered the murder–suicide perpetrators to be vastly different from perpetrators of homicide alone. Whereas murderer–suicides were found to be highly depressed and overwhelmingly men, other murderers were not generally depressed and more likely to include women in their ranks.
¹ 1999. Journal of Criminal Justice, 27(4), 361-370.
Missing Them
I had a childhood friend take their life as a young adult. Years later, his brother married my sister. My friend was my age, and all these many years later, at any family function or event involving my sister and brother in-law I would feel as if someone was missing. This feeling was fleeting, and It took me years to realize that if he was still here, he would probably be at these family functions also. I was missing him!
At a reading with a psychic medium, he came through. The psychic simply asked, "Is there someone missing in your family?" I knew this was him. The continued details of the reading confirmed this. Not to mention there is no one who is actually missing in my family.
Despair
Many people cope with feelings of despair in many different ways. I guess life can become so overwhelming that they see no other option, absolutely no other way out. But I wonder if they think they will disappear.
Studies on people who have attempted suicide have thoughts such as, "The world would be a better place without me." or " I am a burdon to my family and friends."
So people despair over finances, their personal relationships, dysfunction and substance abuse, to the point they just wish they weren't here.
Disappear?
Will they just disappear? I don't think so. I have read and studied with mediums and psychics who recount those who have committed suicide and instantly regretted it. They fight tooth and nail to claw their way back into a body that can no longer function.
This knowledge is what leaves me with the most sadness. Rather than disappear, they must continue on. Albeit not in the physical body for now, but they must attempt to learn lessons on an ethereal plane that they were supposed to have learned while on earth. They also have to prepare to come back to earth, just to do it all over again.
Ongoing Problem
I have often wondered, when someone has issues regarding suicidal ideation, if this isn't something they've struggled with in previous lifetimes. So that one of the lessons to learn in this go round is to find a life of fulfillment and contentment without focusing on this option.
Why?
So the real problem, for me is the why. Why? How do you ever find the answer? We can research the thoughts of those who have attempted suicide, but that doesn't answer the why for my loved ones.
It's unfortunate that I have known more than one person to take their own life. I imagine the why was different for each of them.
Of course I will never know.
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Comments
AUTHORHaha - Oh JamaGenee if I go before you may experience the same thing, loud screaming and Why? Thank you for reading my hub.
A very thoughtful and thought-provoking hub, hankscita. Unless we can meet and talk with loved ones who took the last, final step and ended their lives, we'll never know the "why".
Interesting that we never consider long-time alcohol addiction "slow suicide". I only bring this up because a friend climbed into the bottle in his twenties and never came out. His death at 52 was ruled "accidental" after falling onto and breaking a glass cofee table in a drunken stupor, whereby a shard punctured a lung, but I've never considered it an accident. If at some point in the future you hear a female yelling at somone in the Great Hereafter, that will be me, giving my friend a long overdue piece of my mind for not sticking around to share our "golden years".
- AUTHOR
Thank you for reading my Hub Au Fait. Suicide can be confusing. Unfortunately, as many times as I have asked why, there are just no answers.
Very interesting. I really think most suicidal people give clues that they are considering suicide but no one wants to be bothered. Lots of people say they would do anything they could to help change that person's perspective if only they had known, but in fact they are too focused on themselves to even catch those clues.
People choose suicide because nothing is working. They lose hope that things will ever get better than they are and have always been. They look around the world and see all the selfishness, arrogance, mean spiritedness, and worse, and they just don't want to be a part of that anymore. Everything looks hopeless and it is losing hope that is the last straw.
The people around them make it just too hard to get out of bed and face the world. It's always the same petty crap day after day. What do we learn from that? What lesson is in that garbage that is so important?
The Bible gives examples of what the hereafter will be like. As many times as I have read the Bible I have never found anything that indicates what happens to people who kill themselves. I'll have to try and focus on that next time around and see if I've been missing something. It never fails that I discover and learn something new every time I read the Bible.
- AUTHOR
Thank you so much nighthag! I consider that quite a complement. Thank you for reading my Hub.
I love how you write about these subjects with such careful thought and in such a way that invites the reader to not only learn but to truly consider the deeper aspects of life without confronting pre established beliefs ...
I am so glad to be following your writing
- AUTHOR
Thank you to both of you for reading my Hub. Unfortunately it was a recent even that spurned me to write about this. I don't often express my spiritual beliefs to the everyday people I come into contact with, but for some reason I'm feeling more and more comfortable doing it here. Thank you again.
Wow. Yes this is a very interesting hub with deep thinking involved. From my own perspective, There is another life after this one and in between all of them and many of them, in many places and situations. I did not die, but I did have a profound experience of a NDE in nature. I saw things that many do not see or understand. Suicide is horrible after they take their lives. You are correct about the lessons but they only come back to finish the lessons that they abandoned when they chose to end their life here. Everything is a choice here and well all have consequences to those choices, but at the same time we have a lesson that we wanted to learn prior to coming here in the first place. Just like in school, you cannot just give up a lesson...without consequences. It is the same no matter where we go or if we are in a body or not.
Sandy.....This is heavy stuff.....but an excellent query. We mortal humans simply do not know with absolute certainty....the what, where or why of "Afterlife."
We certainly can choose from the thousands of speculations which have been discussed and offered throughout time.....or in fact, I imagine we can each create our own belief....and decorate it as gloriously as we choose.
Sadly, I have known of numerous suicides. I may not have known the person really well, but for the relatively small area I hail from, IMHO, we've had more than our share. ONE suicide is too many.
Those despondent individuals who reach the point of total desperation......I truly CAN relate to getting there......but then "somehow" there are those of us who STOP short of actually ending our life.......and go on to much greater lives than we could have imagined in those terribly "dark days."
You have given your readers something very somber and profound on which to think long & hard. Thank you, Sandy.....UP+++
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