Moshimistic wrote:
A friend posted this quote today on Facebook:
"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.
The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant.
The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."
~ David Foster Wallace
So true. My wife has flirted with the idea of suicide - to the point of planning how I and my son would be taken care of after - because of the amount of constant pain she is in. When you're faced with that much pain for days or weeks of time, you look at suicide and say, "hey, that will only hurt for a moment."
meatwad wrote:
bune wrote:
PHATJ wrote:
bune wrote:
Most of what I've been thinking, especially with the suddenness of this, is that maybe it's like with Robin Williams.
Meaning what? Didn't Robin Williams have a debilitating disease that was becoming hard to function with normally?
Exactly that, yes.
Even so, hanging himself in his hotel room in the middle of a tour after a show seems out of character from those who knew him best.
Look I don't know Chris Cornell, but the person who I
think he was based on "knowing" him through his music and message, interviews he's given, etc. just don't add up to this sort of sudden and shocking demise. I don't think there's any evidence of him having some sort of debilitating illness...he was an active 52-year-old by all accounts, played nonstop with his bands and continually created.
Even if there was some sort of illness, he seemed like the kind of guy who would have faced it with his family by his side. At least that's who I continue to believe he was. Kurt Cobain? Wasn't that surprising. The guy was a 27-year-old, anxiety-ridden junkie. Scott Weiland? Another junkie trainwreck. Same with Layne. That wasn't Chris Cornell, and his having lived through all the friends he lost, to come through on the other side with a wife and young kids that by all accounts he loved and adored, his band, the adulation and adoration of pretty much everyone...it all just makes this seem so implausible.
I've been thinking about the whole Phil Hartman situation again. This reminds me of that.
Phil Hartman was killed by his wife who was coked out of her mind.
