Suicide: The Ultimate Selfish-Aggressive Act

Suicide is the ultimate act of selfishness. It's also an act of aggression. No, not aggression against yourself, although that is true, but it's an act of aggression against your loved ones, the ones you leave behind to wonder for the rest of their lives if there was something that they could have done.

Last night, the husband of my oldest granddaughter shot himself in the head. Admittedly, the kid had some ... issues, but it was the way he did it that was the most shocking, most disgusting act of selfish aggression that I have ever encountered.

He killed himself in the living room of their house, with my granddaughter and his oldest child, a four-year-old boy, with him. I thought that he really loved their children, and I watched him do everything he could to take care of them. But apparently I was wrong, and what he could do wasn't nearly enough.

He had been an angry depressive -- although he never abused her or the kids -- for a over a year. My granddaughter repeatedly encouraged him to seek professional help, but he refused to do it. She never suspected that it would go this far -- but families of suicides rarely see it coming, except in retrospect. Then a lot of things seem to fall into place, and so she will spend the rest of her life rerunning the last year in her mind, haunted by all of those "if only" thoughts.

But the four-year-old (who will be five in May) is the one who will be the most fucked up by this, for the rest of his life. He's already saying stuff like "My daddy didn't love me and that's why he did it"...

Sure, he's going to get grief counseling, psychiatric help, and constant reassurance from the rest of the family that it wasn't his fault, but deep down, is any of that going to really matter?

It's hard enough on someone to have a parent die when they are young. To see it happen, by the parent's own hand, is so fucking terrible that I don't have the words to describe it. It may have seemed to him to be the easy way out, but that "way out", that was so fucking easy for him, will screw up that boy of his for the rest of his life (the other child is only a year-and-a-half old, so it won't affect him the same way -- he'll just feel a profound but vague loss, wondering where his daddy is).

I'd feel bad for the father if I wasn't so goddam mad at him for doing it...