Is There Such Thing as Justifiable Suicide?

                                                     http://www.jackierobinson.ymca.org/yblog/executive-decisions/2010/9/11/test.html

Wislawa Syzmborska wrote “Photograph from September 11^th.”  This poem brought back emotions for me because I can vividly remember being in 7^th grade and the entire school was quiet and cold. The hallways were dead and not one person was lingering. Everyone was glued to the television watching the twin towers crumble to the ground. It was the most god awful site I had ever seen and the image of people- not just people but everyday hard working adults-like my parents- were jumping from the buildings. Symborska wrote about the people jumping from the towers; she gives almost a peaceful description of the circumstance and one that I wish I had thought of while watching these people fall to their deaths.  She writes “The photograph halted them in life, and now keeps them/ above the earth toward the earth”(Symborska lines 4-6.) 

I also reacted strongly to “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” by Kevin C. Powers. For me, death is something that I have been struggling with for the past few years. I think about it more and more as I get older and it becomes more significant in my life. I think the fact that death can be so far out of your control and the fact that you don’t know what happens after life, that it can become a scary thought.  This poem, I think, is about a man that was in a war and ultimately couldn’t bare the thoughts of what had gone on during the war and wanted to take his own life. He was writing a suicide note to a woman he loved and in this instance this person did have control over life and death.  To think that he is choosing death because of events that happened during the war saddens me.  In my mind, I feel he must have had to do some pretty unpleasant things to people in order to consider taking his own life. I couldn’t even fathom taking my own life, although I couldn’t fathom taking another’s.

I am very opposed to suicide but in both poems “Photograph from September 11^th” and “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” suicide may become justifiable. The difference between the poems is the people in the world trade centers were probably going to die no matter what and the more peaceful way, for them, was to jump rather than to burn to death so is that really suicide? In my eyes, no, I guess just the image of those people jumping will never leave my head, it’s like what Sam Hamill said in his piece “The Necessity to Speak”, “we cannot bear very much reality” and in this instance I cannot handle this much reality (Hamill 1.)  In Powers poem suicide may be considered less justifiable but more so compared to a person who is depressed because his wife divorced him and wants to take his life. I know it is a hard thought to think about for people who have been in the war but in this incident the person might have the chance to be helped. If they can find the strength to reach out maybe they can be saved.

http://www.save.org/