by Melissa A.F.

Created on: June 14, 2009

There is a simple answer to the question of suicide being a cowardly way out.

The answer is no.

Being a suicide survivor from the time I was in the first grade, suicide will forever be something defining in my life. My father took his own life after many years of struggling with severe depression, a disease that crippled his mind to the point where he simply did not want to be on this earth anymore. Mentally, not only could he not find peace on earth, but just existing was increasing unbearable. Finally one day, existing became too much and he chose to leave. I do not believe this was a rash decision on his part, rather something he had been contemplating for a long time before it actually happened.

Does this mean he is a coward? No. What it does mean is that he could not fight the disease that killed him. How can you try to fight something that takes over your ability to think straight? To live you must be able to trust your mind and he could not trust his any longer. When it gets to the point that jumping off a building is a better choice than life, then I have to be at peace with that decision. Holding on to him and trying to make him love life would have been selfish in my eyes. When someone wants to go that bad, if you love them then you have to let them go. I love my father but I really feel I never got to know the true sense of who he was, not because of my young age when he died, but because he was never really himself, he was a living disease. He didn't want to live as a disease and who am I or anyone else to judge him because of that? I didn't live the way he lived so I cannot judge him on the way he chose to die.

Fighting until you can't fight anymore does not make you a coward, it makes you human. We are all tested in different ways on this earth and until you have been through what someone dealing with suicidal issues or severe depression has been through, then you have no business throwing a word like "coward" around. Nobody lives with a healthy mindset and all of sudden gets up and decides to kill themself for the hell of it. It is the mental state of a person that determines the will to live, and when your mind becomes a slave to a disease, the will to live is compromised. I think if people were more willing to understand the severity of the mental state of someone with depression rather than throw around opinions suicide would be a much less controversial subject.

Do not demean those who have taken their own lives as "cowardly";they suffered enough while they were on earth. Give them the peace they deserve and let them rest.

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