The Forever Decision by Paul Quinnett   Chapter 5

ONE STEP BACK, PLEASE
Because of the way I have chosen to write this book, I am going to make another assumption about you; I'm going to guess that if you have been thinking about suicide, then you've also been thinking about how to do it.

Sooner or later, when any of us gets into this frame of mind, we begin to consider just how we would actually do it. Suicide is not only the ultimate and forever decision, it is also the ultimate "how-to" project.

But since I can't guess where you might be in your thinking, I'm going to have to make some educated guesses. I'm going to ask you to consider doing something -not for me, but for yourself.

Let me back up just one moment. It is not an easy thing to kill a human being. Even if you plan to do the job yourself, you have to give some thought as to just how you will do it. In my business we call this subject the method or means. And when we are working with a suicidal person, we will ask, "How do you plan to take your life?"

If the person says, "I don't know yet,” we consider the risk much lower than if the person says, "With a .45 automatic pistol on Friday afternoon at three o'clock."

In a word, the clearer the plan, the higher the risk for suicide. Since I can't possibly know what sort of plan you might be considering or where you are on a possible timetable, I have a suggestion that may sound a little screwy. (If you've always thought that psychologists were pretty screwy anyway, here's some proof.)

What I want to ask you to do, at least for now, is to take one little step back from the suicide decision. This doesn't mean you can't go ahead later, but for now, for today at least, take one small step back from the brink.

You can flush those pills you've been saving down the toilet or give your gun to a friend or throw the razor blades out or stop going to a high bridge or building while you try to think things through. In a word, do whatever you need to do to reduce the availability of the means by which you might want to take your life.

The reason I ask you to do this is simple: any of us can be tempted by a perfect opportunity. I know that when we are confused or unhappy or angry, it is even more difficult to resist temptation and so, if we put what is tempting us out of sight or out of reach, it is as if we have put a bit of time between us and our impulses. And, once you have taken one step back, sometimes you can see things differently. Sometimes you can't, but sometimes you can.

From talking with many people who have tried to kill themselves I know that once a suicidal person puts a plan in motion, it is sometimes very difficult for him or her to stop the forward momentum. I have even had people tell me that, at just the last minute before they tried to kill themselves, it seemed as if they had to go ahead and try.

"After all," one of them said, "I'd gone so far I couldn't turn back."

It is never too late to turn back.

So maybe it would help to think of things this way. None of us is going to get out of this world alive. The clock is ticking against all of us. It is never a matter of "if" you will die, but rather only a matter of how and when.

That statement may sound a little grim, but then it isn't like we aren't talking about serious issues here. Try as we might, none of us can avoid this business of dying. It isn't like the comedian Woody Allen once joked, "I'm not afraid of dying. ...I just don't want to be there when it happens."

No. Dying is the one appointment none of us gets to cancel.

Many people who are thinking about suicide have decided that, if they can control nothing else in their lives, at least they can take control of the how and when of their dying. This feeling of being in control is a good one, very much like the first time you learned to ride a bike without training wheels. And this sense of being in control of our own destiny is very important to us, so important that many people who take their own lives do so in order to reaffirm that, in fact, they are in control of at least something.

But the bad thing about suicide plans that have been put in motion is that they can sometimes take on a power of their own, a power over which the sufferer loses control. Suicide may be the ultimate exercise of personal power, but it should never become an obligation.

A young mother I knew once planned to kill herself on the same day of her daughter's death. Her teenage daughter had died of cancer the year before. The mother's husband had left her and she had been miserable and unhappy and had wanted to die for several months. In her thinking about dying, she had decided it would be fitting and proper for her to die on the same day as her daughter. But as the day drew closer and her life took a turn for the better, she felt less and less like killing herself. "But I promised myself I would do it on the fourteenth," she said. "And a promise is a promise." Luckily for her, she wasn't such a good promise keeper that she couldn't break at least this one.

And there was something else to this story. In the woman's private plans to end her life, she had promised her dead daughter she would join her on the fourteenth. When we talked this through, it turned out that when the lady put herself in her daughter's shoes, in fact, the daughter would not have wanted her to die. Relieved of this burden, the woman was able to remake a different kind of promise.

Please understand that I am not telling you to give up your plans to die or your thoughts about how to do it. That would be silly of me. I can't control your thoughts and neither can anyone else. All I am asking is that you back up a bit, give yourself a little breathing room and a little time to mull things over.

Somewhere in the rest of this book you may find something that will help you change your mind. Or, in the next few hours or days or weeks, something may happen that you didn't expect, something that will give you reasons to live. So, for your own sake, please take one step back.