Suicide.....

What drives one to take one's own life? What are the thoughts that frequent the mind of a person before the fatal decision is made and executed? How disconnected and alienated does one have to feel to want to sever all ties to this world, and step into the unknown?

Suicide, the act of killing oneself, has always intrigued me, it has held a strange and eerie fascination, a kind of deathly attraction, a forbidden aura. What is that place, the eventual domain of no-return, once entered a person cannot come back to the world of the living, for I believe, with whatever meager and scant understanding I have of the act itself, suicide begins long before the fatal last plunge. The decision to end a life, one's own, must be a difficult one, but again we, the one's who are addicted to living, see it that way. People who have severed ties to living, have cut strings with the mundane business of life may not, must not be thinking that, they have probably no connection with being alive. For days, maybe years before they have discovered the futility of their existence and feel dead to the world around them, it might just be the last step, the closing of the door.

Life is magnanimous, to be breathing and thinking and feeling is the only reality we know of ourselves, the single solitary manner to experience our own being, if we aren't alive then we aren't at all?? isn't that so? is it a complete frustration with being, with breathing and thinking that drives a person to end it all, finish it!

But, again that is the perspective of a person who is living and wants to continue to do so, what if one just is not wanting to exist, then to end it might not be an act of cowardice but of supreme courage! of a final act of sheer will, of way of taking and exerting control over the very thing that we normally have no control over, birth and death. The last goodbye might just be the very act of valor that so few can endure and go through while alive. Maybe the control and the resilience to take one's own life results in a ecstatic feeling of euphoria, the pinnacle of success that puts the dying person somehow apart and aloof from otherwise 'normal
people.

All religions forbid suicide or any other act of self-mutilation, but why? Is it that life is a gift of God and so must be cherished or is it the fear that the instant one chooses to die of his own accord and does so he takes the power of the Almighty in his hands, the power to give and take life, and that is transgression as no other?

Generally, people who kill themselves are considered 'mad', insane', depressed by the normal standard. What if they are not? what if they are just brave people who are decisive about things. I don't mean to glorify suicide, I mean to merely understand it....