crosses are wooden and they were rotting away and they were waving
in the breeze and they were just—just gorgeous really, just really fine
. . . and the daisies were blooming and the grasses were growing tall
on the graves and the breeze was blowing and I was just so impressed
by the earthiness of it and life, of this part of death.” Ariel goes on to
describe her impression in the cemetery that death’s completion of
the circle of life is “graceful” and “gracious.”91 For Ariel, life and
death have begun to merge, such that there is beauty, grace, and in-
deed life in death.
On this same point of merging death and beauty, Sylvia Plath
(who died by suicide) described a poem she wrote called “Death &
Co.” “This poem is about the double . . . nature of death—the mar-
moreal coldness of Blake’s death mask, say, hand in glove with the
fearful softness of worms, water and other katabolists.”92 Notice not
only the reference to softness but the intimacy implied by “hand in
The Ability to Enact Lethal Self-Injury Is Acquired ● 87
glove” and indeed by the title “Death & Co.,” implying a togetherness
in death. Lines from Plath’s poem “Edge” convey some of these same
qualities:
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment . . .
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far; it is over.
In his book on suicidal experiences, the psychologist Richard A.
Heckler included this example: “The window looked out over the
river and it was a beautiful scene. The moon was full and I was feel-
ing this real peacefulness. I said to myself, ‘It’s a beautiful night
to die’ . . . it’s like when you go to weddings, you take pictures to
remember everything that happened. Well, I was taking mental pic-
tures to remember this [referring to death by suicide].”93
In his 2004 book My Life Is a Weapon, Christoph Reuter described
suicide attacks by Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War as follows: “Many
of the deaths were celebrated . . . with the macabre-seeming designa-
tion of death as a wedding celebration.”94 A traditional Iranian wed-
ding table with mirrors and candles was placed above their graves.
Though it is questionable whether suicide attackers represent true
suicides—a question that is addressed in a later chapter—it is note-
worthy that in this example, as in others, self-sacrifice merges themes
of death and vitality.
Jon Hilkevitch reported in the July 4, 2004 edition of the Chicago
Tribune on death by suicide—in this case, that of a sixteen-year-old boy. The boy was struck by a train. A police officer who examined the
boy’s computer found lyrics from Led Zeppelin’s song “In My Time
of Dying”: “In my time of dying, want nobody to mourn. All I want
88 ● WHY PEOPLE DIE BY SUICIDE
for you to do is take my body home. Well, well, well, so I can die easy.
Well, well, well, so I can die easy.” Here, as in previous examples,
death is merged with positive things like ease and homecoming.
Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of the rock band Nirvana, died by sui-
cide in April of 1994; the band’s last album, In Utero, was released a few months before, in September of 1993, and it is clear that suicide
was on his mind as he worked on the album. Lyrics from this album
illustrate the merging of death with themes of nurturance and life,
sometimes in stark and disturbing ways.
In the song “Milk It,” the lyrics include the phrase “I am my own
parasite,” which, on reflection, is a very succinct and even sublime
way to combine urges toward death and life. In the same song, the
lyrics continue, “I won my own pet virus, I get to pet and name her,
Her milk is my shit, My shit is her milk.” Though not necessarily
pleasant reading, Cobain clearly had a penchant for disturbing imag-
ery in which themes of nurturance are merged with themes of dis-
ease and waste. A similar example appears in the song “Heart Shaped
Box,” in which Cobain refers to an “umbilical noose.”
This fusing of death and life themes and urges may be at play in
the selection of suicide methods and locations. In Tad Friend’s 2003
New Yorker article, he stated, “several people have crossed the Bay Bridge to jump from the Golden Gate; there is no record of anyone
traversing the Golden Gate to leap from its unlovely sister bridge. Dr.
Richard Seiden, a professor emeritus at the University of California
at Berkeley’s School of Public Health and the leading researcher on
suicide at the bridge, has written that studies reveal ‘a commonly
held attitude that romanticizes suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge
in such terms as aesthetically pleasing and beautiful, while regarding
a Bay Bridge suicide as tacky.’” Why does it matter that one’s location
of death be beautiful? One possibility is the merging of needs for
nurturance and death that occurs in the suicidal mind.
The same New Yorker article described the suicide of a fourteen-
The Ability to Enact Lethal Self-Injury Is Acquired ● 89
year-old girl who bought a book on suicide methods as a way to pre-
pare for her fatal jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. The book
stated, “The Golden Gate Bridge is to suicides what Niagara Falls is
to honeymooners.” Here again, the invocation of the imagery of love
and life in explaining choice of location for death is striking.
In that same article, Friend wrote, “At a 1977 rally on the Golden
Gate supporting the building of an anti-suicide barrier above the
railing, a minister, speaking to six hundred of his followers, tried to
explain the bridge’s power. Matchless in its Art Deco splendor, the
Golden Gate is also unrivalled as a symbol: it is a threshold that pre-
sides over the end of the continent and a gangway to the void be-
yond. Just being there, the minister said, his words growing increas-
ingly incoherent, left him in a rather suicidal mood. The Golden
Gate, he said, is ‘a symbol of human ingenuity, technological genius,
but social failure.’” The minister’s words emphasize the awe-inspiring
aspects of the bridge; the minister’s growing incoherence and refer-
ence to social failures and feeling suicidal were foreshadowing for
a horrible event a year or so later. The minister was Jim Jones, who
died by suicide along with over 900 followers at Jonestown, Guy-
ana—an incident that will be explored in more detail in a later
chapter.
One wonders if similar processes are at play regarding suicide
in natural locations that are beautiful or awe-inspiring. Alain de
Botton, in his book Status Anxiety, notes that the vastness of places like the Grand Canyon is soothing to us because it represents in-finite space, in which differences in things like status, effectiveness,
and belongingness seem trivial. He says, “Whatever differences exist
among people, they are as nothing next to the differences between
the most powerful humans and the great deserts, high mountains,
glaciers and oceans of the world. There are natural phenome
na so
enormous as to make the variations between any two people seem
mockingly tiny.”95 The vastness of natural phenomena can be both
90 ● WHY PEOPLE DIE BY SUICIDE
awe-inspiring and soothing, qualities that could appeal to someone
thinking of death as somehow life-giving. In June of 2004, a man
who was touring the Grand Canyon in a helicopter removed his
seatbelt and jumped to his death, 4,000 feet to the canyon floor. Just
before that, I received a call from a reporter who was pressing me to
explain a similar death, this time that of a man whose death was
originally seen as a skydiving accident, but on investigation seemed
an intentional suicide. The man had apparently cut the lines of his
own parachute hours before skydiving. The only explanation that
makes sense to me—but that I still view as tentative and specula-
tive—is that in the minds of people who are far along the trajectory
toward suicide, death is not only not ugly, but has become beautiful
and sustaining, so much so that places like the open sky or the Grand
Canyon seem a fitting context for suicide.
A detail about Spalding Gray’s death by suicide may involve the
merging of themes of death and comfort as well. Police said Gray was
last seen at around 6:30 p.m. on the evening of his disappearance, and
was last heard from at around 9 p.m. that same evening when he
called his home and spoke with his six-year-old son, saying he loved
him and was on his way home. Perhaps Gray was simply lying to his
son about returning home, so as to protect him, at least for a little
while longer. But for a very thoughtful writer like Gray, who under-
stood what his son would go through (because Gray himself lost his
mother to suicide), one wonders whether Gray was trying to leave a
message of reassurance, something along the lines of, “It’s okay now,
don’t worry about me, I’m home”—and whether he actually believed
this message himself.
In my opinion, the most disturbing suicide of all was also a mur-
der. It occurred in Germany in March 2001—the case of the cannibal
Armin Meiwes. Meiwes, forty-one, a computer expert, met forty-
three-year-old Bernd-Jurgen Brandes in early 2001 after Meiwes ad-
vertised for “young, well-built men to slaughter” on websites em-
The Ability to Enact Lethal Self-Injury Is Acquired ● 91
phasizing sexual masochism, cannabilism, and the like. Brandes will-
ingly accompanied Meiwes to the latter’s home, where Miewes killed
Brandes with his consent. Meiwes recorded the gruesome two-hour
episode on video, and he cannibalized Brandes’s body over the ensu-
ing months.
The video documented several highly graphic and grotesque events,
but also documented two important points—Brandes seemed to be
coherent and nonpsychotic, and also seemed to give genuine and full
consent for his killing. These points were key in Meiwes’s trial; there
is no law against cannibalism in Germany, leaving prosecutors only
the options of a murder charge or a kind of manslaughter charge
akin to what in the United States would be termed assisted suicide. A
murder conviction seemed unlikely because Brandes seemed sane
and repeatedly asked to be killed. Meiwes was convicted of the other
charge and sentenced to 8.5 years in jail with the possibility of parole.
How to understand Brandes’s baffling death? Little is known
about Brandes; it would be of interest to know, for example, whether
he had ever attempted suicide. It is clear that he was extremely mas-
ochistic and fantasized often and intensely about being killed and
eaten—perhaps a form of mental practice for this highly unusual
method of suicide. Extreme masochism does not seem to provide a
full explanation of Brandes’s death, however; there are numerous
people who are extremely masochistic, yet I am aware of none who
have died in the way that Brandes died. I believe that Brandes’s
highly unique state of mind shared similarities with suicidal people
who fuse imagery and feeling about death and life. For him, his death
affirmed his desires and met his deepest wish; for us, his death was
deeply horrific. The discrepancy between his view and ours indicates
the difference between those who have moved far along the trajec-
tory toward serious suicidal behavior compared to the rest of us. It
is possible that the process that led Cobain to write phrases like “um-
bilical noose” and “I am my own parasite” was horribly amplified
92 ● WHY PEOPLE DIE BY SUICIDE
in Brandes, such that he progressed from thought to unthinkable
action.
For the majority, death is a fearsome prospect. When this fear
erodes, behavioral and psychological changes can occur. Behavior-
ally, people who have habituated to the fear of death are capable of
extreme forms of self-injury. Psychologically, they may come to view
death as alluring, even sustaining. This can only happen, I believe,
when people have habituated to death and the like to an extreme de-
gree, so that they are no longer repulsed by death, but attracted to it,
not just as a way to negate pain and suffering, but as a positive and
even beautiful thing. That most of us have trouble wrapping our
minds around this concept shows the distance necessary to travel—
both behaviorally and psychologically—before one has developed
The current model proposes that the acquired ability to enact lethal
self-injury is a necessary precursor to serious suicidality, especially to
completed suicide. This acquired ability involves fearlessness about
confronting pain, injury, and indeed death; the reinforcing qualities
of repeated self-injury may also be involved. How does one acquire
this ability to “surmount the most powerful instinct of nature?” The
answer, according to the theory proposed here, is through repeated
experience with painful or provocative stimuli, especially (but not
limited to) deliberate self-harm. As this occurs, people are able to en-
gage in more and more seriously injurious behavior, and may come
to view death and related things in peculiarly positive ways.
Just because someone has, through various means, acquired the
capacity for severe self-injury does not mean that they desire it.
Racecar drivers, to take one example, must habituate to conditions
that would be harrowing to most people, and thus develop the ability
to stare down fear and pain. But they are unlikely to be at high risk
The Ability to Enact Lethal Self-Injury Is Acquired ● 93
for suicide, because the acquired ability to enact lethal self-injury is
but one part of the story. Serious suicidal behavior requires both the
desire for suicide and the acquired ability to carry it through. The ex-
amples of Hart Crane and Spalding Gray illustrate both sides of this
deadly equation—both men had developed the capacity for lethal
self-injury (through past suicide attempts and other provocative ex-
periences), and both men struggled to belong and to feel
effective.
My account argues that desire for suicide occurs when basic needs
for effectiveness and connectedness are thwarted. Shneidman stated,
“A basic rule for us to keep in mind is this: We can reduce the
lethality if we lessen the anguish.”96 I believe this is close but not quite right. Lethality is a stable quality, built up over time with numerous painful and provocative experiences—it doesn’t come and go, at
least not very much. By contrast, anguish—viewed here as perceived
burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness—does come and go.
The basic rule then is this: We can lessen the chance that people will
enact their lethality if we lessen their anguish. The next chapter ex-
amines the specific nature of this anguish.
THE
DESIRE FOR DEATH
3
I phoned my mother recently, and among the updates about her
grandchildren and the family, she said, “Do you remember my friends
Kevin and Julie?” I said I did. “Do you remember their son Steve? He
was just a year younger than you.” I said I thought I might, vaguely.
“Well, they just had awful, awful news on Steve. He hanged himself last week, just after his girlfriend left for work.” I asked the usual
questions about Steve’s state of mind before his death (“happy as far
as anyone knew,” my mom said) and his circumstances (happy with
his girlfriend though struggling to find a career, according to my
mom).
There was a painful subtext to the conversation—my dad, her hus-
band, died by suicide too, years ago. We didn’t really need to speak
the subtext; it was clear already, and it amounted to a one-word
question—“Why?” Why did my dad do that? Why did Steve do that?
Later that night I searched for Steve’s name on the Internet, and
found his obituary as well as a kind of virtual guest book where peo-
ple could express condolences and memories. There was no mention
of work or career anywhere, though there was this: “Steve was re-
94
The Desire for Death ● 95
cently re-baptized as a Christian and was a member of Springview
Church, and he had found great joy in his renewed faith.”
Great joy in faith, and yet dead by suicide in his thirties? My dad
was also very religious and involved in his church, yet dead by suicide