Quote:
Originally Posted by Angela  I think often when someone is feeling badly enough to consider suicide as an option, they're in a pretty self-absorbed state and the impact of their actions doesn't occur to them -- or their experience of it is badly warped. |
Speaking as somebody who has worked in a psychiatric institution, apart from the people with extremely severe psychiatric disorders (such as schizophrenia), people who kill themselves do it very often feeling that their life is a burden on others and that by ending it, they are actually doing those people a favour.
I've lost many people in my life to death and whether it's been an accident, cancer or suicide (I've lost one person to suicide), I've never felt that it was really a loss. This might sound odd, considering that I was raised atheist, but I feel all the people I've lost as though they're still with me. I've never worried about death (possibly having had a near death experience helps!), but I don't think of it as people having been taken from me, whatever the reason for the death. I feel the grief, the sadness that I won't see them again. Other than meditation, I'm curious about spirituality but not spiritual. And yet that's how I feel. I sense no loss. The friend I lost was the most selfless person I've ever met, a truly beautiful soul. It would have been incredibly selfish of me to demand that he live through the agonising pain he was in just because I wanted to see him around - not to imply I'm glad he's dead, at all. I don't see them as still around in the sense that a medium might. But they're there in my heart. I don't demand that they be physically in my existence for me to be okay.