An American Suicide

A Story Problem:

You have multiple problems as you approach middle age: crippling arthritis; an artificial hip that confines you to a wheelchair; you have a history of clinical depression; you are laid off your job at Meier & Frank’s Department Store after 18 years due to downsizing cut backs, and you can only find temporary jobs that do not provide health insurance, so your savings are drained to pay for health care and prescribed drugs. You are living in continual exhaustion. You are being evicted; your van is repossessed and you file for bankruptcy. That’s certainly enough to cause one to miss out on ‘having a good day,’ but you are a resourceful independent person surrounded by wonderful support from family and friends.

Solution:
A week after having your role celebrated as a family member at Thanksgiving dinner, you “choose” to kill yourself.

There is a suicide every 17 minutes in the United States. One senses that behind and beneath the tip of this bare statistic lies an iceberg that could pierce the hull of that fragile Titanic of the personality everyone is traveling on. The indecipherable variables that result in anyone taking that fateful voyage are unknown, often even to the voyagers themselves. It is an uncharted territory, and the reports from those who take that voyage are sketchy at best and ultimately inadequate in give a satisfying account for such an enormous event.

The suicide statistic entered my awareness around the time I happened to run across an article on a local suicide in our state's prominent mainstream newspaper, and I found myself prompted to read it with a more focused attention. Using the article as a springboard, I decided to look into the subject and the story closer suspecting that no suicide 'is an island entire unto itself' and thus might contain clues to commonly shared ingredients between other suicides. In addition, the treatment in this article's coverage rang some immediate alarm bells that seemed to go beyond the customary sound bite that attends many newspaper stories, indeed after digesting it, I decided that it inadvertently begged deeper questions and stimulated the need for further probing. In fact, the article even provided added impetus to the need for such inquiry through its own lack of journalistic inquiry amid its rather vulnerable assumptions.

These reflections are dedicated to the real people who every 17 minutes will make a premature departure.

“The deeper you go in researching the causes of the ‘Homeless,’ one discovers the same story over and over again. You begin with an ordinary life; then an event occurs which is traumatic or even catastrophic to that person’s world--smaller events follow which he or she would have once been able to handle or successfully negotiate but now are unable to, and more importantly, are also unable now to explain this inability satisfactorily to themselves, thus starting a slow erosion into the sense of self that had formerly supported them and from there into varied degrees of shame, silence and withdrawal. But what you are struck by continually in your research is something unique to American life, the absolute isolation involved. In what other culture would there be such an absence or failure of real support from familial, social, or institutional sources?”

‘Helping and Hating The Homeless’ Peter Marin

“Your red blossoms amid green leaves are drooping
beautiful geranium but you do not ask for water.
You cannot speak. You do not need to speak.
Everyone knows that you are dying of thirst,
yet they do not bring water.
They pass on saying, ‘the geranium wants water”

Edgar Lee Masters ‘Spoon River Anthology’

Imagination is our fundamental moral faculty. It is central to grasping the nature and meaning of a significant event and as the American poet Richard Hugo pointed out, “our great failure is our inability to imagine the suffering of others.”

This was the headline on Nicki Dyer’s suicide in the Sunday Oregonian in December, 2004:

“Independent to the end. In pain and jobless, but refusing to lean on family or friends, Nicki Dyer chooses death.”

It pushed every button in the mind's 'proper behavior ' patriot act. The headline had all the qualities of a star-spangled American anthem, including the stoic oath of silence. All it lacked was musical accompaniment. The article presented us with a real trooper - the “dignified resignation” and “self reliance” and finally “choosing” the stiff upper lip of death. Something seemed buried above ground in this tragedy. The article would have you believe that self-reliance and pride in the self is expressed in choosing to kill yourself, -that independence of spirit is manifested as suicide-that somehow it was her strength of character that destroyed her. With such strength who needs weakness?

According to the article Nicki Dyer possessed the character traits of independence, self reliance, and pride and was also surrounded by a wealth of family and friends. These are the ingredients for buoyant optimism, an American recipe for having “a nice day” and a nice life to boot, not for suicide. In fact, suicide would be a non-sequitur. This article was not covering a quaint problem, something that could be addressed by attending a motivational seminar, like Nicki's failure to adapt to a style of living different from one she was accustomed to. As extreme and unusual as suicide is, it is not an anomaly, it is a transgression of human limits and the hidden terror of this article is the truth it conceals while reporting the facts, the truth that she dissolved in plain sight, in front of everyone. Pride is about what you value, what you want to display. Suicide is antithetical to pride, it is the polar opposite, it is default control, it is the individual's powers being inadequate or insufficient to meet one's needs. It is about the soul not receiving its due.

It was the kind of article my mind just couldn’t move on from. There seemed to be a nonsensical kind of sense that challenged credibility in the treatment of this painful story, matter and antimatter dancing an American do-si-do of tragedy, pushing the limits of common sense beyond human sense into a gradual tsunami of reason gone mad and where the crucial accuracy of language had been turned back into a stone tool. The purpose in all of our 'purpose driven lives' is being alive, living. As disturbing as the article’s spin was on this suicide their license to do it unchallenged in mainstream press, the loudest loudspeaker and largest smoke signal, was even more so.

The truth is that pride and self worth are deeply connected to outside influences; we’re all hard-wired to avoid the rejection of losing face, of not living up to the standards of those who have the power to withhold love and caring or effect self esteem. No one’s comfort zone extends too far beyond 'safe.' Ultimately we’re all kind of pansies; nobody climbs Everest naked and pride and independence can serve as barricades against fear, failure, complexity, despair and death, just as suicide can.

The place where we are most equal is in our fundamental powerlessness. In his book 'The Soul's Code' the author James Hillman observed that, “The very ground of relationship is dependence, not independence; it is the very ground and motive for what authentic relationship requires.” Limits and areas of incompetence are not a darkened showcase of our personality failings, but more accurately the personality’s psychological “fault” lines, the Achilles heel in us all that makes us human, and where that protective version of pride and independence is not needed, where shame is irrelevant and has no function.

Contrary to the article’s headline, “Independent to the end” Nicki was dependent, like every one of us; dependent on a necessary measure of comfort and safety, a sanctuary that enables us to feel that life is worth living. She was surrounded by support that was inadequate or insufficient to meet a need that all her independent determination, and self reliance was also unable to provide. In fact she was dependent to the end—on someone to actually Get The Message—that she was in real trouble. The irony is that we’re all dependent to a significant extent on others for our autonomy.

We tend to think that we are the sole author of our thoughts, opinions, ideas and feelings, that they come out of a nowhere somewhere inside of us, emerging by magic from a 'self', but the facts of the reality are that they, like the impulse to suicide or the complex layers underlying 'character' do not happen in a vacuum but are produced out of the context of a huge webbed network of relationships with history and society, including one’s biology, race, personal history, family, friends, community, country and culture. Even in that last ‘Alamo’ of psychology, behavior we have less control over who we are and how we think of ourselves than we think we do.

Underlying all ethics and morality is the sense that we matter, that what happens to you as an individual matters and that leads, by some hidden mechanism, to a truth in the head and heart that others also matter. We send messages to each other all the time even if we don’t want to or aren’t aware of it, and much of how we value ourselves comes from the messages we receive from friends, family, community, and country. What is ultimately allowed to happen to us can be one of the strongest messages conveying if and how much we matter, often driving us to insist too strenuously that we do matter, sometimes with too much distorted pride or independence.

Nicki couldn’t afford health insurance. The deeper irony is that nobody really needs health insurance. All they need is health care. But she was given the message she wasn’t worthy of it, that her health and welfare were not of intrinsic irreplaceable value, a message coming from a culture and community existing in a human ethical coma.

It’s easy to understand how society's recruiting officer for “self reliance” and “independence” is so successful when there is such a deep and legitimate desire for autonomy in all of us— who doesn’t want to lace his own shoes, butter his own bread? It is easy then to make the leap to thinking we are, or certainly should be, in command of our own fate.

It is curious that we ever buy into such an untenable position when it is obvious that the three wolves of nurture, nature, and economics whose formidable powers are ultimately beyond the control of the individual, can huff and puff and blow our coherent, orderly, straw houses down, a fact which should by itself call our simplistic concepts of ‘choice’ and ‘independence’ into question. It’s not just a leap of faith but a leap of ignorance.

The disturbing questions move in like a weather front hanging over everything about Nicki’s story, but the largest and loudest is the absence of anger about what was happening to her. Where is the outrage, the indignation from those who knew her and loved her? It is not only the overall absence of any trace or feeling of it in the article, but chillingly, even from Nicki herself (excluding her one stressed outburst at work). Why wasn't anyone refusing to consent to what was happening to her? This was not 1933 Berlin.

One of our most important critical faculties, maybe our most important, is the ability to distinguish between what is inadequate and what is sufficient, and suicide points to a profound absence of hope. What if the source of hope or optimism is limited to oneself and one’s resources as being the only really acceptable place to seek it? Imagine carrying such an overwhelming burden of hopelessness and pressure in your psychic backpack that you wanted to end your life and then not being able to fully reveal it to those closest to you (closest!)?

Nicki's refusal to grasp whatever ropes or lifelines were actually thrown to her begs the question of why she did not reach for and grab them, which the words “choice” and “independence” do not supply but instead point back to the question... to what was really said and offered at those private exchanges between her family and friends, and in the context of what personal life histories between the participants. What were the lifelines that were actually thrown to her, how close were they thrown, were they not thrown close enough for her hands to grasp, were they too thin to do any good, or thrown too late?

When in quicksand you can’t throw yourself a rope or lifeline, someone else must do it, and that deepens the drama with fear’s complicity. We seldom jeopardize our own survival. The survivors in the Titanic’s lifeboats rowed away from the people in the water not toward them. But even aside from that there are excellent reasons for being hesitant to ask for aid. To reach out and really ask for help is to call enemy fire onto your own position. To even consider being deserving is to invite a direct hit of that criticism, of the shame and fear that is reserved for anyone with the scarlet “V” on their forehead, anyone who is viewed as a 'victim,' or who has failed the self reliance test. And this, despite the fact that Nicki had contributed to the best of her ability, carrying obvious physical and mental disabilities. Add in those hidden attendant messages usually surrounding requests for assistance from friends, family, community, and country, the silent and not so silent messages that really dampen the courage to ask for help ( “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” ).

It can create a lot of confusion when all the correct dots are connected (the birthdays remembered, the cards and calls, Christmas and Thanksgiving invitations) and you still find yourself with insoluble problems so isolating that the only solution seems suicide. Even a clear signal of indifference to her welfare would have allowed her to get a more accurate bearing on her position than the illusory ones she was getting. In such a culture, our innate need for autonomy and self reliance are turned against us, creating a painful isolated reality others can’t or won’t acknowledge or really care about, and where we must endure and face too many difficult situations and conflicts in solitude.

Nicki’s story is not only a celebration of independent determination, which is there to be celebrated, but also an indictment of an invisible virus in our culture which seems intent on encouraging self destruction in order to salvage an acceptable sense of self.

While it can be said that there are many causes for suicide, that no two are alike, it can also be said that are all alike in that they are all a need and a tool for release. Suicide is a response to intolerable circumstances by someone who feels powerless. By casually suggesting that Nicki “chose” suicide the article assumes unrealistic properties of autonomy to her mind, especially someone experiencing her pressures and circumstances. If you have a healthy apple in one hand and a diseased one in the other and choose the diseased apple, doesn't that suggest something is amiss, Watson! Suicide usually reflects (excluding the legitimate assisted suicide issue) the opposite of choice, the absence of alternatives. People don’t commit suicide, suicide commits them. The act’s awful power is that you don’t go to it, it comes to you. It is what you lean on when you can’t find anything better to lean on.

When “choice” is looked at closer it becomes more complex. Do we choose to choose what we’re going to choose? Actually 'choice' is more a concept than a fact, and a fuzzy one. You draw your bath water for what is comfortable to you. You did not choose to want that certain temperature, rather you choose the temperature you want. We are not radically free.

The term “choice” is too often used to dignify where we have landed or to blame others for where they have landed, as a tool for manufacturing a plausible and rewarding narrative about reality, life, self, and our place in the universe, which helps us lessen and tolerate the insecurity and chaos of life, to avoid awareness of the variety of trap doors we’re all standing on.

Serious brain research is revealing how mood affects and our emotional states change the way the brain processes information; we think differently under the sway of different feeling states and it is beyond the farthest reaches of reason to assume Nicki was feeling anything other than emotionally feral, buried alive on either the day of her death or the weeks (months, years!) leading up to it.

Actually we don’t think, so much as we feel, and to live without an income adequate enough to provide basic vital human needs is to live in a continual running emergency, which becomes a drip torture form of terror.

It is easy to imagine how it could take far less than the significant sustained stress that Nicki endured for life to change from a promise to a threat, to make one lose the small degree of actual freedom and self sufficiency that we do possess, to feel there’s no place outside of the ‘independent’ self to really turn to.

When we cannot adequately respond to an assault on our dignity it deepens the indignity and indignation. If we put ourselves in Nicki’s place, we can see how difficult, if not impossible, it would be to permit herself to even feel anger, much less voice it, to those who were always there at the edge of the swamp with condolences and praise for her “independence,” whose support, however inadequate, was well intentioned and consistent with the external forms we are told to recognize as representing support.

Instead of feeling free to respond with honest feelings of fear or frustration or even anger, it’s easy to understand Nicki feeling compelled to show gratitude, to acknowledge the gesture’s thoughtfulness rather than its inadequacy. It is hard to scream, “where is the lifeline?” even when it seems obvious that when you’re going down in quicksand support has no right to appear in any form but a lifeline.

All of this is not even to mention the hidden anger one harbors for being made to turn the arrow of blame back at one’s self. Neither Poe nor Kafka could have devised a torture as clever and subtle as having the victims of cruel circumstances victimize themselves by accepting entire responsibility.

It is unfortunate that anger has become so suspect in our therapy age. There is much interest and counseling on how to control and dampen anger, how to disarm it, detour it, talk it away, reason it away, educate, meditate, pray, love, or medicate it away, even gene-therapy or taser it away-anything but how to allow it or listen to it, much less validate it.

And what is the 'red badge' of self reliance anyway? What is it about “unable” and “disabled” we feel so compelled to disgrace, to reserve for the cellar of shame? We all have limits in a surplus of varieties - psychological, emotional, social, sexual, and financial so why do we insist on avoiding them, as though the human spirit is somehow excluded from functioning within anything resembling limits?

The pendulum that swings in our lives between independence and dependence is regulated by a sense of trust, in feeling comfortable and confident that our own efforts can be effective in meeting our needs, and that should we fail, others can be relied upon to assist with or help provide for our needs, to preserve the integrity of the self. We live in a country and culture where that pendulum is stuck, rusted into a dangerously unrealistic position of self reliance that socially engineers tragedy.

It doesn’t take a global positioning satellite to locate the dead end of Nicki’s life. She was a victim of repeated doses of devastating bad luck and crucial disappointments. How was she to believe she had innate worth and value outside the proud, reinforced confines of her own mind, to feel she was more than a human hub cap, when all the efforts of her life’s checks were returned for 'insufficient funds.'

A Human Being, an American, One of Us, was destroyed through acts of omission and commission, in a culture we have created and continue to sanction. Nicki's tragedy offers us an opportunity to alter the culture we are creating. Her story demands and deserves to be looked at closely because it points back to the heart of our culture, the health of our social values, our way of life as “the greatest nation on earth.” It is not just another story of someone falling through the cracks, failed by the system. It is a story of an individual's free fall through the system itself, revealing it to be one big wide open abyss, waiting for anyone who falls into it.

By itself, Nicki’s death asks the question “Is there really a social contract that exists outside the criminal justice system, that covers the welfare of the village inhabitants? Or does it respond only to those suspected of misbehaving?” Community or meaningful connection is only possible when we can openly share our lives with safety. Shutting the door to that only distances us further from the intimacies and fragile security which we are genetically driven to need, increasing our separation, as well as our anxiety, mistrust and suspicion.

There are many ways I could justify and rationalize the Oregonian article's point of view on Nicki Dyer’ suicide, but I can't accept or excuse it, or give it my consent. It is too important to be framed in the ‘serenity prayer’s lame plea for help in accepting those things we cannot change, or to be viewed in the sanitary pastime of a moral debate, or as an ethical or political lapse of judgment where it can sneak in under the radar clothed in the respectable convention of traditional values, which do not trigger the mind’s defenses or draw the gasps of shock or horror that tanks or teargas or terrorists bombs would. For me or anyone to sanction this kind of spin gives a pass to a laziness of sympathetic imagination that impairs our humanity.

The thinly veiled hysteria that surrounds our love of “independence” and “self reliance” is a fool’s gold brand viewed through a carnival mirror, a deadly recipe whose ingredients would only be chosen if one were coerced by harsh circumstance and the absence of support alternatives. There are cruel illusions involved in overestimating the degree of control we have over our lives, while ignoring and discouraging any examination of the overall systems in which we live our lives, those forces outside of our control which directly and irrevocably affect us. Such faulty nearsighted assessments only result in our targeting ourselves as the primary source of our own failures and pain.

The Oregonian's article inadvertently evokes comparisons with Rachael Carson's classic 'Silent Spring' or even Jack Finney's 'Invasion of The Body Snatchers' by illuminating the slow but growing erosion of that elusive something which is central to what it means to be a human being, the silent subjective center of experience. We began circling the mind's wagons with the advent of the information age, the assault of relentless information on our senses along with the more visible urgent threats to our well being, but the circumference of the wagon circle is becoming too small to meaningfully include what most deeply makes us (even those inside the circle) 'us,'.

When something as central to our humanity as the weight and validity of our psychological and emotional experience begins to erode, we lose the ability to include what is most vital about us to play a role in how we perceive and treat one another, we lose touch with those things that make our individual and collective importance possible, such as the relative measure of comfort and safety we require to feel life is worth living. We forget that we need to face human size problems, situations where we feel our realistic efforts can affect our circumstances for the better. It is a situation that seems in synch with our digital age.

In 1769 Philip Thickness, a British military officer with a social conscience published a horrifying account of 4 people who were starved to death in a poor house in England. It brought an emotion new to politics-sympathy-an overwhelming feeling for the victims of injustice, poverty, and suffering.

As a culture we seem to be going in the opposite direction. In our present climate of moral vertigo we should be very reluctant to open the door any wider than it already is to our casual habit of neglect, not to mention our philosophical and even celebratory acceptance of death and dying. If we can advance the concept of death with dignity, why shouldn't we begin to explore the complex of tangibles and intangibles that constitute life with dignity?

We have become a warp drive super speed digital culture of high tech rationalists and realists whose batteries are too weak to show us the way, to illuminate the darkness that surrounds us—with the result that we too boldly and too courageously accept and explain away other’s suffering and in the process cheapen our sensibilities as a culture, reinforcing a “better dead than disabled” mentality. This is not just about a 'political' position we can 'agree to disagree' on, If we cannot learn to think and see and feel and act outside of this dark empty box, we’re all going to die inside it.

The search for certainty and answers in this tragedy are complex but it must ultimately fall back on the truths buried in the heart of human nature and the nature of the human heart. It really doesn’t matter what flag you wave or what anthem you sing, if the critical needs of the people in a country don’t come first, the needs of the country do not deserve consideration. They are not worth even a backward glance.

Our concept and use of money –for it is a concept and our use of it is arbitrary and not absolute and the uses we have adopted for it guarantees we won’t all be in the same boat—it amplifies our perception that we share radically different fates rather than the ultimate root ones we all share. Nicki Dyer's story is finally about the cost to everyone of accepting the unacceptable. Suicide is a choice to the extent that it is a perception that dying is safer than living. It is when the untenable really becomes untenable.

When looked at closely and honestly, Nicki’s suicide has to be called an American suicide, one that happened in the quicksand of the public sector as well as the private sector, a landscape with no human sector, where it is better to run out of life before you run out of money. This is about abandonment—and not only of Nicki Dyer. It is about an abandonment which is systematically woven into the fabric of a culture that has surrendered the idea of anyone being of intrinsic and irreplaceable value. To try to rationalize and explain away her tragedy is to explain away our own humanity, to further add to the shredded remains of what little is left of our social soul in an environment where we are often little more than social lab rats with a social contract that is not worth signing.