sol.ace_r

When people talk about suicide, they speak easily.
They say it is wrong, bad, irresponsible.

Most people look only at the outcome.
One incident, one choice, one ending.
Then they draw a line in the name of morality.
Did it cross the line, or should it never have crossed it?

Strangely, they rarely speak about the time that lay before that line.

They do not ask how long that person endured,
how many times they had to soothe themselves by saying, “Just get through today,”
how many unspoken nights piled up, layer upon layer.

Perhaps much of the negative view of suicide does not come from death itself,
but from fear of a pain that cannot be understood.
What we cannot understand is hard to keep close,
and what is hard to keep close is pushed away with rules and judgment.

The moment we say, “That was a wrong choice,”
that pain becomes something from a different world—
something I do not have to experience.

Yet the mind that contemplates suicide is often closer to wanting to escape life
than to running toward death.
It is less a desire not to live
and more a confession that life, as it is now, is no longer survivable.

Even so, we read that confession only as an ending,
as if the sentence suddenly began there.

Asking someone already standing at the edge,
“Why did you go that far?”
looks like a question, but is really a way of measuring distance.
Within it, there is no intention to stand alongside them.

That is why the question of whether suicide is courage or cowardice
is always slightly misplaced.
It is a question that works for concepts, not for people.

A human life cannot be sorted so simply.
For someone, merely getting through a single day
may already have required immense courage.

This is not a piece meant to defend suicide,
nor to condemn it.
I only want to ask.

Why do we have so much to say about the ending,
yet lose our words so completely about the time that came before it?

Perhaps what we truly fear is not death,
but the fact that someone else’s pain
could one day become a language we ourselves must speak.

So instead of leaving an answer, I want to leave one question.

Before judging a person,
how much have we truly tried to imagine the time they spent enduring?