The Suicide Tsunami
Irrational forces and seismic energy that rips a hole through the lives of others
Ed. Note: Today’s original post on grief as a gift has been rescheduled due to a more timely topic that has arisen.
Theirs not to make reply
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do and die.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson
Tsunamis are one of nature’s most powerful phenomena. An earthquake strikes on a fault line and the tectonic action pulls all of the water towards it. For miles, water rushes towards this rupture, in some instances stripping beaches and shores.
Then, without much call or warning, the water returns. Wave upon wave of water courses towards the void. There’s the absence of water and then the first crushing wave speeding towards you with nothing to stop it. Ordinarily, water by the shore would provide resistance, not unlike how waves crash the beach on a sunny summer day. There’s certainly greater wave force further away from your blanket, but the miles of water between those swells and the wet sand where children jump into the tide absorbs that energy.
Not with a tsunami. There’s nothing between it and land, so that first wave comes rushing in with unchecked speed. It may not be the furthest reaching or the strongest blast, but it is the first wave to come ashore and the raw energy rips open a wound that it will be flooded by more and more waves. There’s no rule of thumb or prediction model for how long they last. The 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which resulted in the Fukushima nuclear disaster, battered the Japanese coast for hours, but also sent waves as far away as Chile. Seven years earlier, a tsunami in the Indian Ocean devastated islands in Indonesia within minutes. The waves would also kill people on the shore of Somalia, some 3,100 miles away.
All of that destruction because of an earthquake, caused by the random movement of tectonic plates deep below the earth’s surface.
It’s Wednesday and my wife is at a funeral as I navigate this wordy metaphor. She was hit by what in my estimation is the third wave of a tsunami caused by a(n apparent) suicide.
The raw, unabated power first wave has a solitary impact on the person or people who discover the body. The second wave smashes in on the family — immediate and extended. They’re the people who loved them most, who held them closest, and who depended on them.
Friends and family of choice take the brunt of the third wave, which is why my wife, sister-in-law and mother-in-law were in a car before sunrise this morning. This was an Italian cousin1, someone she grew up with and spent holidays with. I’m somewhere on the 10th or 12th wave — did you hear that blah blah blah from high school2 died? — and am home to juggle the kids.
Like a tsunami, after the first wave hits, the destruction widens. My wife got an ominous “I need to talk to you both now” text on the group thread with her mother and sister last weekend. By the time she looked her phone, the FaceTime called was underway. She rung in to find them both crying hysterically. There were not details other than the deed had been done and she had just received a call informing her.
Tectonic plates and seismic energy
My areas of pop culture expertise are The Golden Girls and M*A*S*H3. In the fifth season of the latter, occasional character Sidney Freedman4 comes to camp for a poker game but never leaves. Freedman, a psychiatrist, reveals that he was hiding out at the 4077th after losing a patient:
Actually, the straw that broke my back was this one kid who heard voices telling him to kill himself. I spent a lot of time with him. One day he was very calm, relaxed. Sometimes that's a signal they’ve made a decision. Only somehow...I missed it.
And that night, after I went to sleep...that sweet, innocent, troubled kid...listened to the voices.
Those tectonic plates rubbing together, finally releases seismic waves of energy. The ground moves and, as Newton taught us, for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. The water pulls in, then slingshots back.
Suicide is an irrational act arrived upon with irrational thinking. The hopelessness and lack of value felt in living; an unbearable pain that seems as if it could never end under any other circumstance; the desperation for a cure from that pain; and the feeling as if the world would be a better place without you. It’s glorified depicted casually in the film It’s a Wonderful Life, as George Bailey goes from the depths of bankruptcy to standing on the bridge ready to end it.
Clarence appears and gives him the Dickens treatment, turning him around and helping him see the light.
Except that in real life, there is no Clarence. There’s no angel that emerges at the last minute to distract you. The best we can hope for is that the person contemplating the act thinks to call 988 or is discovered before taking their last breath.
As you read this, the real tectonic plates are moving, far below the earth’s surface, like your car’s suspension on a bumpy road. The earth is in constant motion and we experience about 50 earthquakes each day; most are some small they aren’t felt. Similarly, your brain is churning through thoughts, 99.9% of which are perfectly harmless. Work stuff. Home stuff. Love stuff. How much you dislike your ex. How disappointed you are in a family member. It’s all fine. It’s life.
I am one of the millions of people in America dealing with mental health challenges. The cards dealt to me were clinical depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and panic disorder. For me, those tectonic plates caused my brain to dredge up thoughts of uselessness or hopelessness. Years of therapy and medication helped me understand where those thoughts came from and how to manage them. I know that I’m lucky. I know that there are others in far worse places.
I never had the surge of energy from the tectonic plates to cause my own earthquake or bring me close to a tsunami. I don’t understand why people take that next step but I do understand how they get there.
And then there’s the other thing…
I know that calling suicide a selfish act is wrong because the person doesn’t necessarily choose to kill themselves as an act of free will. They don’t choose to have a mental illness. There are hundreds of thousands of Google hits when you search “suicide and selfish act.” I’ll let you sift through them.
It’s tough, though, not to go to jump to this. Yet, it’s a natural reaction.
I think about Sue Litera for a moment. Sue’s husband was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and died 10 days later. I have to imagine she would have liked an 11th day with him. He didn’t choose to die of cancer.
But, here was someone my age with multiple children, a sibling and a mother, and extended family. So many people around him that did, in fact, love him. So many people that depended on him. So many kids that are going to require a lot of therapy to cope with this loss. So much pain for a mother who is going to bury a child. So many things abandoned because he pushed the eject button. Because he decided life wasn’t worth living. Because he let the voices win won.
So, it’s an easy thought to have. Just as it is to wonder if he was enabled. If the decay of mental health was evident, why wasn’t he in treatment or medicated or in a facility?
Or were the voices simpler stronger than the will to fight back?
We pass judgment in situations like this to fill the space where the facts should lie, but do the facts matter?
The reality is that he is gone and it will be years before the tsunami waves stop crashing into shore.
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Final thoughts on finality…
“Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?”
— Henry Travers, as Clarence, It’s a Wonderful Life
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning. Dirt Nap is free and we simply ask that you subscribe and/or share with others.
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The Italian cousin is something from a previous generation, when you had friends so close that your children called them Aunt/Uncle So-and-so. Their kids naturally became your cousins. We have this relationship with some of our friends but have forgone the titles to prevent confusion between who is blood family and who is family of choice.
I did, in fact, go to high school with him. There are a lot of weird coincidences of relationships between my wife and me. She and I are probably related, which would explain why our children behave the way they do.
I’m unimpeachable on both.
Played by Allan Arbus, Sidney was the subconsciousness for Alan Alda’s Hawkeye character.