🜏 Osric Dog 🜏 on Nostr: I've lost both my grandfathers to suicide. First one before I ever knew him: I was 2 ...
I've lost both my grandfathers to suicide. First one before I ever knew him: I was 2 years old. The other when I was 22.
And my best friend died by suicide when I was 29.
There's been a handful of others I knew; a college friend who hanged himself during finals week, and a coworker who was "just cleaning his gun." But I didn't have as much of a connection to those two.
But I like to think that I have a special relationship with suicide. We keep bumping into each other when we neither of us expect it.
My therapist and my brother try to understand when I give my perspective on suicide. But I think I've come to realize that suicide is inherently irrational. There's no way to make it make sense.
And so I'm most puzzled by my desire to sometimes work on a draft for a suicide note.
My friend didn't leave a note, and it's always bothered me that he didn't offer any kind of an explanation. One of my grandpas left a note, but it was purely functional: he put it in the mailbox and it said "Call the police, I've killed myself."
(The grief counselors instruct me that we shouldn't say they "killed themselves." The grief counselors paint suicidal thoughts as a disease, and so it's supposed to be said that they "died of suicide" or "died by suicide." But I'm just quoting Grandpa's note here.)
Based on my own desire to understand what was affecting them, I guess I want to be prepared to explain for others those things which sometimes affect me.
But like I said: suicidal ideation is not a logical process, and it is not supported by lucid perceptions of the self. So, how am I supposed to convey the twisted way that the world looks when I fall down?
Lately, I've taken to thinking about a suicide note as something like a kernel panic stack trace. Both are final messages regarding a crisis. Both do their best to communicate what went wrong. And neither of them make any sense unless you can fully take the perspective of the one panicking.
I find it interesting when I pursue this method of describing the crisis. A stack trace includes more than what immediately went wrong. Sure, there's always a surface-level explanation, things like: access-violation, unreadable memories, illegal operation, or out-of-resource events. But if you have the full stack dump enabled, you can go deeper to see things like the active function calls, waiting processes, and register states. I want my note to include these insightful additions - perhaps with context about assignments at work that keep me up at night, friends I haven't spoken with in years that I feel guilty for "abandoning", and things like the amount of money I owe this month for the car, and the mortgage.
I think the real magic of a stack trace comes from the memory address dump. It tells us what the kernel was doing when it shit the bed, and if you have the source code a real expert can even identify where in the code the kernel was working when it died!
I don't think my note can approach that level of transparency. (Does anyone have my source code?) About the best I can do is the function stack sequence.
And when I try to model that dataset, I seem to always wind up with the same foundational axioms. I suppose these are the things that I believe about myself as bedrock.
(They still don't make any sense to anyone else. Like a panic trace, you kind of "just had to be there." I don't think that it can be explained without the perspective.)
But it's remarkable that I have these preconceived notions which keep recurring and recurring.
I haven't shit the bed. The true panic is reserved for the crisis that cannot be managed or overcome though regular system operation. And so far, I keep working alright in those boundaries. (Posting my personal drama to Fedi is just "regular system operation", right?)
I just want to avoid creating confusion. Or, at least less confusion than my relatives & friend left for me.
And my best friend died by suicide when I was 29.
There's been a handful of others I knew; a college friend who hanged himself during finals week, and a coworker who was "just cleaning his gun." But I didn't have as much of a connection to those two.
But I like to think that I have a special relationship with suicide. We keep bumping into each other when we neither of us expect it.
My therapist and my brother try to understand when I give my perspective on suicide. But I think I've come to realize that suicide is inherently irrational. There's no way to make it make sense.
And so I'm most puzzled by my desire to sometimes work on a draft for a suicide note.
My friend didn't leave a note, and it's always bothered me that he didn't offer any kind of an explanation. One of my grandpas left a note, but it was purely functional: he put it in the mailbox and it said "Call the police, I've killed myself."
(The grief counselors instruct me that we shouldn't say they "killed themselves." The grief counselors paint suicidal thoughts as a disease, and so it's supposed to be said that they "died of suicide" or "died by suicide." But I'm just quoting Grandpa's note here.)
Based on my own desire to understand what was affecting them, I guess I want to be prepared to explain for others those things which sometimes affect me.
But like I said: suicidal ideation is not a logical process, and it is not supported by lucid perceptions of the self. So, how am I supposed to convey the twisted way that the world looks when I fall down?
Lately, I've taken to thinking about a suicide note as something like a kernel panic stack trace. Both are final messages regarding a crisis. Both do their best to communicate what went wrong. And neither of them make any sense unless you can fully take the perspective of the one panicking.
I find it interesting when I pursue this method of describing the crisis. A stack trace includes more than what immediately went wrong. Sure, there's always a surface-level explanation, things like: access-violation, unreadable memories, illegal operation, or out-of-resource events. But if you have the full stack dump enabled, you can go deeper to see things like the active function calls, waiting processes, and register states. I want my note to include these insightful additions - perhaps with context about assignments at work that keep me up at night, friends I haven't spoken with in years that I feel guilty for "abandoning", and things like the amount of money I owe this month for the car, and the mortgage.
I think the real magic of a stack trace comes from the memory address dump. It tells us what the kernel was doing when it shit the bed, and if you have the source code a real expert can even identify where in the code the kernel was working when it died!
I don't think my note can approach that level of transparency. (Does anyone have my source code?) About the best I can do is the function stack sequence.
And when I try to model that dataset, I seem to always wind up with the same foundational axioms. I suppose these are the things that I believe about myself as bedrock.
(They still don't make any sense to anyone else. Like a panic trace, you kind of "just had to be there." I don't think that it can be explained without the perspective.)
But it's remarkable that I have these preconceived notions which keep recurring and recurring.
I haven't shit the bed. The true panic is reserved for the crisis that cannot be managed or overcome though regular system operation. And so far, I keep working alright in those boundaries. (Posting my personal drama to Fedi is just "regular system operation", right?)
I just want to avoid creating confusion. Or, at least less confusion than my relatives & friend left for me.