Six Cornell University students have committed suicide since the start of the school year. Two of the six took their lives earlier this month.
This has placed the issues of suicide and depression as topics of national conversation — a rarity, given how the mere mention of those words in everyday conversation often yields discomfort, a tense hush and a hurried change of subject. This is a terrible reality, given that few topics could benefit more from open, honest discussion than those two.
Consider that some of the cruelest and most vicious forms of depression don’t make you feel too weak to get out of it, they make you believe a way out of it doesn’t even exist. Depression doesn’t make you think that the supposed “selfishness” of suicide is justifiable, it gets you thinking that you’re such a burden to the people you care about that removing said burden is the most selfless thing you can do.
By no means am I trying to romanticize suicide. Few would ever seriously suggest that there’s anything romantic about the emotional writhing that prefaces a suicide attempt or the heartbreak that’s born from it. Fewer still would have attempted it themselves, or has held the hand of someone they love who had attempted it, or had to say goodbye to someone they love who completed an attempt.
I am suggesting, though, that some compassion and understanding is called for — or, at least, something more than the accusations of weakness, cowardice and selfishness that sometimes accompany a discussion of someone taking their own life.
Is the idea to mitigate how tragic suicide is by framing it as a moral failure? That doesn’t work — ask someone who has lost a best friend, a child or a significant other and see how much mitigation actually occurs.
Or is the idea to make suicide such an embarrassment that nobody does it? That doesn’t work, either — you can’t shame the hurt out of someone, and adding a layer of “feeling bad for feeling bad” does little more than further isolate someone who already feels alone.
It’s not contingent upon any of us to take ownership of anybody else’s happiness. It’s an unfair responsibility to place on oneself, and it’s unfair to place an expectation on somebody to “get better” on someone else’s terms or timetable.
However, we do have a responsibility, in whatever way we can, to make it clear that we are here for each other. That feelings of loneliness, frustration and fear are universal and bind us together in a sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful sort of way. That failure is an entirely natural part of living, and it’s rarely final or irrevocable. That the love we offer each other is not dependent on any artificial, quantitative measure of success — and more importantly, that our love is offered not just when it’s convenient or easy to do so.
And that it really, honestly is OK to talk about it aloud.
I don’t pretend that tossing around words like love is some automatic, magical solution. Suicide is a complex problem for which there are no simple answers. And it’s inappropriate to use the deaths of six students to draw presumptuous conclusions while their loved ones and their campus are all still mourning.
But if nothing else, the tragedy in Cornell is a reminder, however awful, that everybody has their own stuff going on — their own private battles that they’re quietly fighting, their own personal hells they’re enduring without any outward sign that something’s wrong.
When we speak of love, I have to imagine that that in part means acknowledging this and giving each other the dignity and decency of treating each other accordingly. And cynicism or fear of triteness aside, I really don’t think we can be guilty of having too much love.
Joe Dellosa is an advertising senior. His columns appear on Tuesdays.
