Regaining meaning: Narratives on the experience
of suicide by a loved one
JOSÉ FELIPE SALGADO ÁLVAREZ
10601775
27/06/2014
Supervisor: Robert Pool
Second reader: Joop de Jong
Master’s thesis in Medical Anthropology and Sociology
e-mail: jfsalgado1@gmail.comTable of contents:
Acknowledgements………...4
PART I: WHAT IS IT THAT GOT LOST?
CHAPTER I: JUSTIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM
Where were we? Background and positioning myself………6 Suicide survivors and anthropology: Statement of the problem….………....7
CHAPTER II: SUICIDE IN PERSPECTIVE
What is suicide? Definitions and approaches...10 Theories on suicide………...……….11 Suicide survivors: Medicalization and stigmatization...15
CHAPTER III: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Understanding and the ethics on suffering...17 The narratives and the hermeneutical experience……..………...20
CHAPTER IV: METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Research question and main objective………...………...23 Data gathering and analysis………..……….24
PART II: REGAINING MEANING THROUGH NARRATIVES
Introduction to the narratives………27
CHAPTER V: RUTGER’S NARRATIVE, THE BOOK WITH TORN PAGES
The Book of life………30 The torn pages, the space to remember……….32 The crashed car, and the problems of identity………...33
Understanding, hypothesis and emotions………..34
New chapters, giving meaning to suicide………..36
CHAPTER VI: JOANNE’S NARRATIVE, DRAWING THE TIMELINE The timeline, the life that would never be……….40
The pillow drawing, what we were together……….41
Being that girl………...44
The power needed to free oneself……….46
A new life, drawing the timeline………..49
CHAPTER VII: LIESBETH’S NARRATIVE, SHARING LIFE BEYOND LIFE ITSELF Saying goodbye to a soul mate………..………52
Unbearable pain and the failure of society………54
Life is for the living………...55
CHAPTER VIII: CONCLUSION Regaining meaning...……….58
Acknowledgements
This work is dedicated to those who have lost someone to suicide, but also to the ones that gave light to our life before leaving and that we will always remember as that, as the light they shared upon us. I would like to thank first of all, my collaborators, as without them this work would have never been possible without them. To Rutger, Joanne and Liesbeth, thank you not only for helping me with my research, but also because you opened your life and heart to me, and I could not be more thankful of that. To Dr. Maria and Dr. Joke, I would like to thank you because you helped me understand the Dutch context related with suicide. To my supervisor Robert Pool, who helped me with his comments and opportune advise during my fieldwork and writing process, and always encourage me to do the things I was afraid of. To Joop de Jong, for agreeing to be my second reader and was always willing to help me. I would like to thank also, Estefania and Jolanda for helping me with the consecution of collaborators. To Vegard, Sari, Nestor, Annabel and Mandy, for all the support and laughs during the hard moments in preparing the research and the writing process.
In this part, I will change to Spanish as it is for my parents. Este trabajo está dedicado a los sobrevivientes de suicidio, y los suicidas mismos, pero también quiero que este trabajo sea para mis padres. A mi mamá, por todos sus esfuerzos y enseñanzas, por su preocupación y emociones que siempre me ayudan a seguir adelante y no parar, gracias por eso y mucho más. A mi papá, por ser ejemplo y muestra de entereza y trabajo, por sus consejos y apoyo incondicional, que me dan la confianza de arriesgar y llegar a hacer este trabajo realidad. Gracias por todos los esfuerzos, por ayudarme y por hacerme quien soy.
And last but not least, I want to thank Laura, as without her this work would have never been done, as she was my support, my reader, my adviser, and the most faithful believer in this work. Thank you for the easy and hard times, for the moments when I was unbearable but you stayed there, for helping me figure out everything day by day. For your support and for everything you do, that helped me go through the whole master, thank you.
CHAPTER I: JUSTIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM Where were we? Background and positioning myself
It has been five years since I was posed with a question that sometimes I wish I could forget. On the night of the 24th April 2008 I was driving after leaving my sister in a party, preparing myself to go to the movies when I received a call to inform me that one of my friends had committed suicide. Until today I don’t understand how I managed to get home, what I do remember are my hands shaking and the chaos on my mind. Diego Felipe Castrillón (Castri as we called him) was a joyful, artistic, persevering and sportive young man. Our paths crossed when I decided to join our high school basketball team, and our friendship was established because of our weaknesses and strengths. He wasn’t what can be called a “good “ student, and I definitely wasn’t a skilled basketball player, so we decided to help each other with our strengths. In both fields we lived victories and losses, we were part of a team, we were classmates and we built a friendship. That night I couldn’t quite understand what was happening, everything seemed so surreal and mechanic at the same time. With a group of friends we decided to go to his mother’s house, and then went to gather in a friend’s house to talk and remember him. Everything was blurry but there were two things I would never forget. The first one was his mother’s words while I hugged her; and the second one is the question that one of our friends asked me, Where were we?
Such a question, lead to emotions like anger and guilt, but also after some years, by trying to answer it, to this research, within my attempt to understand. My experience with Castri changed how I understood suicide, and life itself. While my emotions helped me to search for answers outside the social logic surrounding death and life issues, in which life has an intrinsic value by itself. Through my search, I ended up working in a NGO in Bogotá-Colombia that treated people with suicidal thoughts. There I learned that although there has been a lot of work related with suicide, and how to deal with a suicidal person, there is little known about suicide itself, and what happens in the suicidal motives. I also learned how difficult it was to fully know what was happening in Castri’s mind when he committed suicide, and how it was even harder to fully understand why? At that moment, I realized
that I didn’t need to know every reason in his mind, but I did need to understand suicide in order to place it on my experiences, on my own life. The question that followed me was where were we? I kept asking myself, why didn’t we notice? What could I have done different? Would it make any difference?
This research comes from these questions, trying to answer them standing on anthropology as my academic interest, but also because as an anthropologist it is the only way I could do it. Following the work developed by Gabriel Gatti (2008), this work is enunciated from the “I” as it has come to be clear in the last paragraphs, in what the author calls a work from the “guts”. These few paragraphs are not a confession, nor an autobiographical exercise, but rather as has been said about Gatti’s work “if at first the author exposes himself, by letting know of his situation or part of his family life, it is to remind the readers that his own narrative (in this case a sociological narrative) it’s not an alien to the matter of “the narratives” that he is going to actually take care of” (Alvaro, 2008). Therefore, my anthropological narrative will be present through these words, as well as my narrative as survivor of suicide, presenting and re-presenting my informants’ experiences and narratives. As a final note, it is important to underline that this text is not about Castri’s story, or Joanne’s, Liesbeth’s, and Rutger’s loved ones stories and deaths, this text is about their narratives and how they conceive and understand suicide and the death of their loved ones.
Suicide survivors and anthropology: Statement of the problem
The World Health Organization states on its web page that over a million people die by committing suicide each year, yet very little is known about this phenomenon (WHO 2012). When thinking on issues related with death experiences, most of the few anthropological studies focus on the social understandings of it. Whether approached from religion studies or cultural studies, death is a mayor and important part of societies. In the case of suicide, as Jean La Fontaine puts it:
“Anthropology is interested in the phenomenon of suicide as a source of information on the way in which a society’s organization affects categories of persons within it…[Furthermore], Anthropology is concerned with the social
elements common to the acts of self-destruction that occur in a community and how these relate to roles, structures, and related development, and resolution of conflicts in that community” (La Fontaine 1975, p.90).
Thus, a gap in the anthropological knowledge of life and death has arisen related to suicide, and the ways people understand and cope with it. This comes from a bias on the anthropological studies of suicide; focused on the social meaning given to suicide. Besides the work developed from different anthropological perspectives, in social sciences there is a great amount of work that has been done from the psychological and sociological perspective. As many authors have stated, the contemporary knowledge on suicide within social sciences has its roots on the sociological work developed by Durkheim (Carbonell 2007; Doradea 2004; Finchman et. Al. 2011; Joiner 2005). Since Durkheim’s book Suicide: A study in sociology (2005), sociologists have done some approaches to suicide trying to think about it as a social phenomenon, as part of the social world. Rather than resulting of mental illness or disease (depression, alcoholism, bipolarity), different forms of understanding suicide arise from a social perspective: This means that the suicidal person stops being pathologized (La Fontaine, 1975; Joiner, 2005; Shneidman, 1996).
Anthropological and sociological studies explored the social meanings of the act of suicide, but most of them don’t focus on the experiences of those close to a suicidal person (Carbonell 2007; Doradea 2004; Durkheim 2005; Finchman et. Al. 2011; Joiner 2005). Some of the work developed by Shneidman (2004), where he interviewed the family, friends, girlfriend and therapists of a suicide case, might be the exception (Nevertheless, this work aimed to understand the context of the suicide not the interviewees). Following from this, my interest is to try to fill the gap in this issue by asking: What are the narratives of the people who have experience the death of a loved one by suicide in the Netherlands? As a case study, that can share some light to the absence of studies in anthropology on the so-called survivors of suicide1. This attempt will be done under the light of the
1 Suicide survivors are conceived on the literature, and in the international organization web pages, as the
people close to someone who committed suicide. From this perspective, a suicide survivor is someone to whom a loved one committed suicide. At the same time it is different to the survivor of a suicide attempt, these are the people who tried but did not succeed in their attempts to suicide. Nevertheless, such confusion does not exist; instead of suicide survivors in the Netherlands they use nabestaanden van zelfmoord. At the
ethnographic and narrative methodologies, using hermeneutical phenomenology as a theoretical framework. These are the better approaches to understand the ways people relate to their experience and try to give meaning to it within their life. The narrative method will help me approach how people talk about their experience and try to give sense to it through in depth interviews. On the other hand, the ethnographic method can help me to see those narratives in practice on people’s everyday life.
CHAPTER II: SUICIDE IN PERSPECTIVE What is suicide? Definition and perspectives
In order to talk about the suicide survivors, it is important to define and go into suicide, as a subject and as an academic interest. Defining suicide is not an easy task, as has been stated in suicidology (the science that studies suicide). Suicide is a multiple, diverse, and complex phenomenon (Joiner 2005; Doradea 2004; Salas 2011; Martinez 2007; Durkheim 2005; Fincham, Langer, Scourfield & Shiner 2011), which makes it hard to label some deaths as suicide. Furthermore, most of the time, people don’t recognize that what happened to their love ones was a suicide. Apart from this, one should ask if suicidal terrorist attacks or drunk driving causing fatal injuries are to be conceived as suicide. It becomes even more difficult when speaking of euthanasia as the right to suicide, but this topic deserves a research by itself. In this thesis, suicide is conceived from its etymological definition that comes from the Latin suicidium: Sui, which means to or of itself; cidium from the verb caedere, the verb death. In other words, suicide means giving death to oneself (Doradea 2004, p. 17). This definition of suicide is a limited one, but allows us to think of the multiple and different ways of giving death to oneself, as will be analyse through the data. Suicide is constructed in the mind of those who intend to kill themselves, but at the same time suicide is an action. The act of suicide puts a stop to existence and the only thing that is left is silence, although the act itself is a way of saying something, and the academics and suicide survivors can only interpret the action of suicide and give meaning to it, to discover what was the suicidal trying to say.
The studies on suicide have been conducted mainly from psychology, specifically with the birth of suicidology in the 70’s (Martinez 2007;Shneidman 1996, 2004). Edwin Shneidman and Norman Farberow co-founded the first suicidology centre in 1974, following their concerns to understand suicide. It is important to remark that the science that studies suicide arises from a psychological and psychiatric framework, which means that it has a biomedical approach. Therefore, suicidology tries to understand suicide from a preventive and therapeutic perspective, which also limits their understanding of suicide as a social
phenomenon. Nevertheless, on the attempt to understand suicide as a social phenomenon multiple efforts have been done from sociology. The most influential work on suicide from sociology is Durkheim’s work on suicide (Durkheim 2005), because it is one of the few social theories on suicide and is used even in the suicidological work. Other works on suicide from sociology such as the ones from Ruth Cavan, Jack Douglas, Maxwell Atkinson, are of great interest but come as a consequence of Durkheim’s work (Fincham, Langer, Scourfield & Shiner 2011). Even though their work tries to improve Durkheim’s theory, they don’t present a different approach to suicide, making them less influential than Durkheim’s work.
Theories on suicide:
As Joiner (2005) states there are few existing theories on suicide, understanding theories as complex and complete explanations of phenomena. Nevertheless, there have been a few attempts to create a theory that can explain suicide in its wider sense and possibilities. The most relevant theories are those created by Durkheim (2005), Shneidman (1996, 2004) and the most recent Joiner’s theory (2005). These theories have a big influence in the way suicide has been conceived, and allows us to think on how suicide has been approached. From these theories, particularly Durkheim’s conception of suicide, many models on suicide and extensions has arisen. Here, I will review them in order to display the current field to draw on when thinking of suicide. Before starting, it is necessary to make some clarifications about the current conception of suicide. First, the definition of suicide its different to the kinds of suicide that might appear within the theories, every kind corresponds to different motivations to commit suicide. Nevertheless, those kinds are inscribed on the act of suicide as a whole, hence a classification of suicide appears. Second, suicide as the complex phenomenon it is, comprehends different suicidal behaviours, signs or actions that could indicate risk of suicide. The behaviours have been labelled by the WHO (World Health Organization 2012) and include suicide ideation, suicide attempt and committed suicide. Third, even though these are the suicide behavioural stages, many
psychologists and suicidologist recognize a forth behaviour, the suicidal gesture2 (Joiner 2005; Martinez 2007; Shneidman 1996; Cornette, Abramson & Bardone 2002). Fourth, suicidal behaviours are fundamental to logo therapy (the therapy conducted by most psychologists, in a format of question-answer dynamic), as they allow the therapists to perform a suicide assessment. Finally, the fact that suicidal behaviours are conceptualized as stages, does not mean that there is a lineal process in suicide, but only exemplifies its complexity.
After this annotations, let me begin by Durkheim’s theory. Durkheim presents suicide as a product of social relationships, as a social phenomenon. He explains how the relationship between the subject and the social environment, produces certain situations that could lead to suicide. In doing so, he recognizes the causes of suicide within these relationships between individual and society. This means that suicide has social causes, above others. The types of suicide are marked by the sense of integration and regulation that the individual feels with society (Durkheim 2005). Then he presents in his hypothesis the four types of suicide: egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic. Each of these types is related with low or high social integration and regulation. The suicides that are related with the integration are the egoistic and the altruistic. Egoistic suicide denotes a low integration with society; which means that the suicidal person doesn’t care about society, and the consequences of his/her suicide. In the other hand, altruistic suicide denotes a high integration with society; which means that the suicidal person sacrifices their own lives for something major that them, for the society sake. In the case of the other two types of suicide, anomic and fatalistic, suicides are related with regulation. The anomic suicide corresponds to the low regulation in society; the suicidal subject finds himself against sudden and strong social change, busting their expectations of society. The fatalistic suicide, on the other hand, is caused for high regulation that leads to the impossibility of the subject of any movement within the society (Durkheim 2005; Joiner 2005; Martinez 2007).
2 The suicidal gesture comprehends any decision, action or impulse that implies hurting oneself in any way,
The second theory that I will like to address here is the one that comes from Edwin Shneidman’s work (Shneidman 1996, 2004). He is one of the co-founders of the American Association of suicidology, and a constant presence on the suicidology sphere (Evans, Farberow & Associates 2003). Shneidman’s theory differs from Durkheim’s approach, while the latter is looking for social causes of suicide, the former refers to individual causes. The approach from suicidology wants to make possible for the therapist the assessment of the suicidal patients, and therefore should be focus on the suicidal behaviours. Shneidman wants to think on the psychological causes of suicide, an explanation to why people commit suicide, and what can be done to save people’s life. This does not mean that Shneidman’s theory does not conceive the social context of the suicidal person. It matters but only as elements that can help understand how the suicidal person thinks about the social context, and how relates to it. The central point of the theory is the concept of psychache (Shneidman 1996, 2004), which means an unbearable psychological pain.
“It is pain, psychological pain, what I call psychache. He hurts living in his own skin. He is wearing an unacceptable painful indwelling psychological catheter that is not adequately fitted, not adequately useful, and not adequately fulfilling. On the whole, he does not feel worthy. He is estranged, and he hurts beyond bearing” (Shneidman, 2004).
Besides the psychache the social elements of Shneidman’s theory are in one hand for the therapists, and in the other to the survivors. In Autopsy of a suicidal mind (2004), Shneidman shows how the observation of the social context of people allows thinking of a more effective treatment for them. But, also helps to understand the state of mind of the suicidal person. Thus a relief to the survivors’ questions on why people die by suicide, and more important why did my loved one died. Shneidman’s theory pathologized suicide, and explains how psychache its actually a disease. He does recognize that the individual has some responsibility over his/her suicide, but emphasizes how the suicidal person is not to blame because he/she is sick (Shneidman, 2004). Shneidman brings suicide closer to the medicalization.
The last theory left to explore is the one presented by Thomas Joiner (2005). This theory is interesting, not only because it includes and discusses with the other theories, but also because Joiner is himself a survivor. His attempt is to make suicide more understandable suicide, not only for the therapists but also survivors and society. He explains how suicide is full of stigmatization and that much more understanding is needed, understanding that can save lives. Joiner states that his intention is not to replace existing theories, or to change concepts as psychache. He is presenting a theory that is “intended to provide an account of suicide that incorporates the strengths of major existing models, but goes beyond them to develop a framework that is at the same time conceptually more precise and epistemologically broader, explaining more suicide-related facts” (Joiner 2005, p. 38). The proposal made by Joiner, comprehend those theories, but tries to make them more related to the specific causes of suicide. On Joiner’s perspective suicide is due to three needed elements: the ability to enact self-injury, thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness (Joiner 2005, p. 23). According to Joiner, the ability to enact self-injury needs to be acquired in what the author calls “work up the act”. This means a history of pain experiences that allows losing the fear of harm. Work up the act, as the ability acquired to commit suicide, is central to Joiner’s theory. There is a difference between the desire to death and the ability of give death to oneself, those who want to die not always can. The other two elements needed to cause suicide correspond to a more social sphere, as are defined by the relationship of the suicidal person with society. Thwarted belongingness to society is one of the elements, the feeling that there is nothing that connects the suicidal person with life. And perceived burdensomeness is the idea of the individual that, beside belongingness, he/she represents a burden for those who love them and society. The importance of Joiner’s theory is that tries to understand suicide as a whole from the individual, biological (explaining the role of serotonin) and social perspectives. As a survivor he tries to present an understanding for those who have lost a loved one, but still from a therapeutic framework.
Suicide Survivors: Medicalization and stigmatization.
It is important to remark that, suicide survivors differ in the suicidology literature from suicide attempt survivor. They recognize themselves with that name (Jackson 2003), as the loss of someone they love by suicide is something that has to be survived. Nevertheless, this term can be confused with the suicide attempt survivors, and so they acknowledge that some people might be more confortable with another label. In the handbook to survivors of the American Association of suicidology (Jackson 2003), it becomes evident that the label survivor is to make a difference between suicide grief, and other kind of grief. As they explain, “suicide is different” and therefore the suicide survivors give a recognition that other kinds of grief do not. The experiences and interpretations of the act of suicide are not present on the reviewed theories. Even if Joiner is a suicide survivor, his work is based on clinical experiences and tries to explain suicide from an academic perspective. Not all suicide survivors have the theoretical tools to create a theory on suicide, and those experiences and narratives get lost on the stigmatization and medicalization of suicide.
First, let me address the stigmatization of suicide. As many authors have explained suicide has been stigmatized for a long time (Carbonell 2007; Doradea 2004; Fincham, Langer, Scourfield & Shiner 2011; Joiner 2005; Shneidman 2004). The conceptualization of suicide as a sin in religion (Doradea 2004), as a crime in law (Salas 2011), and as pathology, leads to a stigmatized view on suicide. Nevertheless, the shame and stigmatization most of the times do not affect the suicidal person, but mostly to the suicide survivors. This is because in one hand, the belongingness of the suicide attempt survivor makes them feel that they do not need to feel shame, because their only desire death. And in the other, once the suicide is committed, as the suicidal person is death, only survivors are left and have to deal with blaming and shame. The reaction of society is as if the family has failed, as is stated on Shneidman’s book: “the families of suicide victims have been punished, often relieved of their possessions, sometimes rejected by their communities, the pain of their terrible loss belittles and misunderstood by friends, families, churches, and nations” (Shneidman 2004, p. VIII). Stigmatization derives from the lack of understanding, which Joiner (2005) recognizes as the root of the suffering of survivors. Not only because of the grief, but also
because of social censorship, as suicide is a social taboo. The effort made by the theorists on suicide is to eliminate this stigmatization by giving understanding to suicide. Nevertheless, this is a particular kind of understanding, one from medicalization.
Suicide has been conceived from a therapeutic perspective, and therefore pathologized. This attempt is evident when thinking of suicide with focus on causes, and suicidal behaviours. As it is evident on Joiner’s discourse, for example, when he states at the end of his book that: “the main contribution of the book, I hope, is to provide people with an understanding of death by suicide; despite the tragedy, shock and pain of it, there are tractable and comprehensible reasons that people die by suicide, just as there are tractable and comprehensible reasons that people die by heart disease or cancer” (Joiner 2005, p. 224). Hence a medicalization of suicide is evident, making it the domain of the medical or therapeutic practice. The consequences of the medicalization of suicide are in the knowledge produce about it, but also empower the health professionals to perform interventions. Besides, it is established that suicide is something that can and must be treated. The agency of the individual is therefore undermined, and has no right over his own life. Medical sphere is part of society and shares many values with it, and suicide fights against the principle of life, and also the biomedical value of the desire to a longer life (Guigou 2005). The suicidal person is challenging the social intrinsic value of life, which is impossible to understand from an individual. Thus, suicide is take out of the subject and medicalized. The subject doesn’t have the responsibility and the right over its own life, the health professionals do (Salas 2011). The medicalized understanding on suicide is what is imposed to the survivors, where something happened to they loved ones. But sometimes, the experiences of the survivors differ from this medical discourse, and can get lost within it.
CHAPTER III: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Understanding and the ethics of suffering
Suicide, and more specifically the suicide of a loved one is a suffering experience. Therefore, as an academic and as a human being it is mandatory to be clear about the position of the research, and what it is aiming for. In my case, I am interested on the understanding of suicide, not from the perspective of the academics draw on chapter II, but from the perspective of the suicide survivors. Hence, it is important to clarify what understanding means, and the ethical implications of working with a suffering experience. Bourdieu (1999) tries to explain what understanding means, and what jeopardize this understanding for the social scientist. His attempt is to draw on the interview as the moment of understanding, and the limitations that as a researcher the social scientist has. Bourdieu presents five problems while doing interviews that can limit the understanding of people’s experiences: the possible violence in communication; the intrusion in someone’s experience; the spiritual exercise involved when emotions are in scene; the resistance to objectification from the interviewee; and finally the problem of writing and translation. Within these problems, the author emphasizes the challenges to social scientists, such as the relation established while interviewing someone in suffering. What Bourdieu does is to establish the reason why understanding can be broken, when trying to capture the other’s experiences. Understanding for Bourdieu is something constructed, where the interpretation is always there, but that understanding happens with society and its relationships on the backstage. For him, the power relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee is crucial in the process of understanding.
The researcher has to be reflexive on his power position over the subject, as he is the one that owns the knowledge. Not only because of a degree but also the experiences being narrated to him (Bourdieu 1999, p. 609). This recognition can avoid the intrusion of the researcher, and his subjective vision on the social phenomenon. Bourdieu recognize in this relationship the violence of communication, as the researcher has the whole power of the
relationship. He explains how the subjective intrusion of the researcher is violence against the experiences of the people, as the perspectives of the latter get lost in the intrusion. The questions to ask are how violence breaks understanding? Trying to capture the other’s experiences in academic rationality can stop us when understanding pain? Furthermore, Bourdieu takes his argument to the writing of the interviews, and problematize the translation made by the researcher. This account accepts that there’s something lost in translation, emotions, words, physical presence, etc. Thus, he questions what understanding is? He tries to refer to the interview as the social phenomenon when understanding is constructed in social sciences. Understanding should go beyond capture, involves acknowledging the other’s knowledge on their experiences, and the power over them.
According to this, understanding of suffering goes beyond capturing someone’s pain experience. As the concept of capture can involve some violence that resembles the pain, thinking on suffering should elude the imposture of the subjectivity of the social scientist. If we shift this attempt to understanding, rather than capture, much more can be learned from suffering experiences. Wilkinson (2004) tries to describe the problems that arise when working with suffering experiences from social sciences, and attempts for a conceptualization of the “failure” in this task. In his article, Wilkinson shows the accepted difficulty in social sciences to achieve the understanding of suffering experiences. To him, suffering is something that escape from language, and at the same time is trying to be explained by the same language. Therefore, suffering experiences get lost within the absence of methodological tools to understand it. As Wilkinson explains it,
“Language always seems to fall short of expressing a substantial part of what suffering does to people and in this context researchers are liable to be drawn into debate with the conventional frameworks of analysis and inquiry. In struggling to attain an adequate conception of their main object of study the moral and intellectual value of social science itself is brought into question” (Wilkinson 2004,
That the social scientist questions his/her role, and value, in understanding suffering experiences is not something to regret. On the contrary, that this comes into question allows reflexivity, which from Bourdieu’s perspective can lead to understanding. Thus, understanding acknowledges that interpretation is always present in understanding, but not necessarily a violent one. Wilkinson goes beyond, and displays a positive outcome of the failure to capture human suffering. For him, being able to recognize that suffering experiences break meanings, language and life experiences, can take social sciences closer to an understanding of suffering. Experiencing suffering means trying to make sense, give new meanings to the human experience beyond the rationality and structures in language and social sciences. Acknowledging that struggle of people in pain can lead to a renew understanding on suffering.
Another author to take into account when thinking of suffering experiences, and the ethics needed to understand is. Aranguren’s work (2008) challenges the researcher’s position over the horror, the pain and suffering experiences of those who are being studied. The author tries to display how some people’s experiences called by him “limit experiences”, can break the enunciability of the subject. This means that there’s a rupture in life, produced by experiences that can’t be explained with words. That is a breaking point in people’s life, therefore the researcher encounters him/herself with the unspeakable and unutterable: the experiences of suffering. This implies some methodological and ethical issues when thinking on narratives of pain experiences. The author goes through different examples, where the families of the disappeared and torture during the Argentinean dictatorship, explain the break on enunciability. As a result, he proposes a solution for the researcher in front of suffering experiences: the “listening ethics” which allows people to go beyond the enunciability. Understanding that there are things that can, and others that cannot, be told. If the narratives are true or not, if there’s something left to silence, or if the subject lies and replace fragments of the story, should not matter. As those narratives are inscribed on people’s interpretation of the suffering experiences, and therefore part of the meaning they give to it in their life.
Gatti (2006) raises similar questions as Aranguren, as he also recognizes that language falls short, and that it is difficult to talk about suffering experiences. The author does so by analysing the detained-disappeared phenomenon. Nevertheless, he goes beyond by saying that the vacuum created by the absence of the other allows a narrative of no-sense (“sin sentido” in Spanish). This can be understood as a narrative that goes beyond the logic within linguistics, and makes it possible to think in of narratives where the sense is given through practices. What cannot be told with words, and therefore was invisible becomes visible in practice. The question of the role of social scientists arises once again, by asking how to represent the unutterable? How can the vacuum on sense be represented? He goes on by saying that, representing the impossibility of representation is a way of doing justice to the invisible. This representation can only be done through the testimony of those who have experienced the vacuum, and the catastrophe in life.
The narratives and the hermeneutical experience
Once it is recognized that, the understanding of the suffering experience passes through the lens of the researcher, and how that understanding has to be achieved with an ethical approach. It is important to specify how the suffering experience is understood, and made narrative, after the suicide survivor experiences the vacuum. As understanding is an interpretation, the suicide survivors have to interpret the event in their life, so they can give meaning to it. That is, a hermeneutical experience that can be seen through the hermeneutical phenomenology framework. Such framework is constructed from two epistemological perspectives, phenomenology and hermeneutics. Phenomenology has a long tradition in social sciences, and has been defined as “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself… But this expresses nothing other than the maxim formulated above: ‘To the things themselves!’” (Heidegger 1996, p. 30). A phenomenological approach seeks to understand ontologically every phenomenon, from the experiences of that phenomenon. On the other hand, hermeneutics is the science of interpretation of different phenomena in order to achieve a particular understanding of the world (Gadamer 1999). Finally, hermeneutical phenomenology can be applied to study the interpretation of the phenomenon itself as a way of understanding. This necessarily implies
understanding comes from the subjective interpretation of experiences, as Gadamer puts it: “An understanding from a methodical conscience will always try not to directly take for granted its anticipations, but rather be aware of them in order to control them, and in that way achieving a correct interpretation from the things itself” (Gadamer 1999, p. 334, my translation). From the perspective of the hermeneutical phenomenology, I intend to explore the understanding that survivors have of suicide, as a phenomenon that is being experience and interpreted by them.
Such understanding can be found embedded within survivors’ narratives. Narratives are particular forms of discourse, but differ because of their subjective emphasis (Capps & Ochs 1996, 1997; Grinyer 2006). Therefore, the “narrative is a fundamental human way of giving meaning to experience and […] both to order experience and construct reality” (Grinyer 2006, p. 207). Rather than a discourse where the meanings and structures to understand reality are established, narratives come from the experience and are shaped by it. This process of making sense of a certain experience requires an interpretation of it, allowing people to cope with this experience in the day-to-day life. Thus, narratives come from the subjective experience of an event that will lead to a new understanding of it, but also a reconfiguration of the self after the experience.
“Inseparability of narrative and self is grounded in the phenomenological assumption that entities are given meaning through being experienced and the notion that narrative is an essential resource in the struggle to bring experiences to conscious awareness. At any point in time, our sense of entities, including ourselves, is an outcome of our subjective involvement in the world. Narrative mediates this involvement” (Capps & Ochs 1996, p. 21).
The narratives that represent experiences consequently give new meanings through speech. Hermeneutical phenomenology is useful to think about the process of understanding from experience, and therefore how narratives are constructed. Gadamer (1999) explains understanding from this theoretical framework, showing the hermeneutical process of knowledge that comes from reading. Summarizing, the subject encounters him/herself with the text and reads it in what Gadamer (1999) calls the shock experience; the text needs to be interpreted by the lens of prejudgment, which are the cultural, social and experiential
knowledge of the subject; afterwards the prejudgment changes with the shock experience, opening a new horizon where understanding is placed; the horizon is defined by the knowledge acquired from the prejudgment and the shock experience, but at the same time is multiple and allows multiple ways of understanding (Gadamer 1999). These three concepts are useful for my research if the suicide of a loved one is a shock experience. The narratives are the results of the hermeneutical process that Gadamer (1999) described.
CHAPTER IV: METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS Main and specific objectives
The main objective of my research is to analyse the narratives of the people who have experienced the death of a loved one by suicide in the Netherlands. In order to do so, it is important to accomplish the specific objectives needed to get to a proper analysis of this social phenomenon. The suicide of a loved one is a complex and suffering experience, which requires trust from the survivors to talk about it. This implies some difficulties to obtain data, but there are several ways to do so always with an ethical approach. The data acquire was process on the platform Nvivo, and analysed through its tools. The specific objectives and correspondent methodologies are the following:
• Explore if the suicide of a loved one can be thought as a shock experience for the survivors of suicide: The intention of this objective, is to consolidate the relationship between the suicide of a loved one and the shock experience that leads to a new understanding, and therefore the narratives. This was done with the in depth interviews.
• Enquire whether the narratives are being incorporated in daily life, or are left to the story telling of the narratives: The intention of this objective is to analyse if the narratives are helping people to cope their suffering experience in practice.
• Describe the survivors’ narratives, presented by them with their stories: The
intention of this objective is to show the way survivors live, and experience, the death of a loved one by suicide. Methodologically the narrative “is a strategy of inquiry in which the researcher studies the lives of individuals and asks one or more individuals to provide stories about their lives. This information is then often retold or restoried by the researcher into a narrative chronology” (Creswell 2007, p.13).
Data gathering and analysis
During my fieldwork, I was able to contact nine respondents to participate in my project, resulting in a very heterogenic group, consisting of: seven survivors of suicide and two and two mental health professionals involved on grief. Within the survivors, the relationships with the people who committed suicide was also different, one man was a friend, two women where partners, and finally one man and three women were parents of those who committed suicide. The latter, the group of the parents, where between 40 and 60 years old, the partners were in their thirties and their forties, while the friend was in his twenties. As can be perceived, I did not have any specifications or requirements in order to have a homogenised group, as this is a qualitative study that does not require proving that the data acquired is valid with each other. On the contrary, such a diverse group allowed thinking in different perspectives and narratives after experiencing the suicide of a love one.
The respondents were contact through networking with my classmates and Facebook. As an international student in the Netherlands, with no knowledge of the language, I needed to contact people willing to speak in English with me. Two of my classmates, helped me contacting people they knew who were related with the subject of suicide. From there, with snowballing, and after learning the Dutch concept of nabestaande, I looked for Facebook groups that contain that word, and after asking permission to the groups administrators I could post a request to people who would like to participate. Through my classmates and snowballing, I was able to contact four of my respondents, while with the networking in Facebook I could contact five of them. Although people seemed very interested in participate, many were stopped by the fact that the interviews had to be conducted in English. After some online and telephone talks, the group mention above remained willing to participate. Nevertheless, one woman lived in Belgium, which made it hard to develop the narrative and also to fit the group, as it was a project in the Netherlands. Besides her, the rest of the group of the parents said it was too hard for them to speak about suicide in person, and even more if it was in English, so I decided to conduct some structured interviews with open answer. Nonetheless, the narratives were hard to develop from the questions I made, and finally I decided that in order to make justice to their narratives I
could only include the narratives of those to whom I could interview in a face-to-face talk. The interviews were developing themselves as non-structured interviews and six of seven interviews were recorded with the respondents’ permission.
Although, I interviewed suicide survivors and professionals, in this work you will only find the narratives of the three survivors I met and interviewed during my fieldwork. This thesis is about them, about their experiences and narratives, about their lives and perspectives, and I decided to honour them with a chapter for each one of them. The interviews with the professionals were very important for this research, as they taught me about the Dutch perspective on death and suicide, besides the way people mourn and grief in the Netherlands, so I could understand the context in which my respondents constructed their narratives. Nevertheless, only the suicide survivors’ narratives are presented here, and belong to Rutger, Joanne and Liesbeth. Rutger suffered the suicide of one of his friends, while Joanne and Liesbeth suffered the suicide of their significant others. The three of them shared with me their stories and narratives; while Rutger and Liesbeth invited me to their places as they wanted to be comfortable to talk about their experiences, Joanne wanted us to walk through her home city, so we could go and visit the places that were important for her and her significant other. In the next part of this work you will find their narratives, and their path in regaining meaning.
PART II: REGAINING MEANING THROUGH
NARRATIVES
Introduction to the narratives
In this section, I will present the narratives of the three respondents I interviewed during my fieldwork. As explained before, these narratives are subjective explanations and interpretations that come from lived experiences (Biglia & Bonet 2009; Gatti 2008; Ezzy 2000). Nevertheless, even if the lived experience is similar, or the same, to different people, the way it is understood can differ from one to the other. From this standpoint, the narratives of the people close to a suicide share some similarities, but also differ on some subjective and relevant points. In this sense, after some thought I decided to dedicate a chapter for each of my collaborators, as I think is the only way to make justice to their narratives and stories. It is true that some common ideas appeared on our talks, but first it is important to recognize those particular thoughts that made each narrative a complete and strong one. Once the narratives have been shown, the common points would arise themselves between lines and can be analyse from the lived experiences of the survivors of suicide. Each one of these narratives is loaded with emotions, metaphors, experiences, understandings, prejudgments and meanings, which allow the suicide survivors to cope with the death of a loved one. It is important to know that due to the suffering that these experiences bring along, sometime the narratives can be felt a little disorganized or without a sense. Nevertheless, these narratives have an order of they own, and do not respond to the logic or sense on death and life issues common in society, they give a different sense and meaning to the suicide of their loved ones.
It is important to remark that, despite the fact I am talking about the narratives born from the experiences of the suicide of a loved one, I decided to focus on the perspective and experience of the survivors, rather than in the suicide episode. I deliberately did this, as I think that their narratives should be the protagonists of my thesis. Nevertheless, some of the representations that they did during the interviews will appear within the narratives, being the representation that they wanted for their loved ones. While writing the narratives, by coincidence rather than a chosen order appeared, increasing the years that have passed since the loved one committed suicide. In some sense, there is the sensation that some issues get
solved or at least change with the passing years, but also the structure and ideas about the suicide of their loved one, and suicide itself, start fitting the survivors’ life.
CHAPTER V: RUTGER’S NARRATIVE, THE BOOK WITH TORN PAGES
Rutger Decided to have a cigarette before we talked on his beautiful backyard, he asked me to come with him. In the middle of the backyard there was a table, on top of it there is a pot where a flower was seeded in the name of Rutger’s friend. Then we sat and he started smoking, so I asked him if he wanted to know anything about me before we talked about his experience, to what he replied “can you tell me about your friend?” I told him about my experience and then we moved to the living room to start the interview. Rutger Is a 25 years old, young man, that currently is working in a hospital but he is an animal caretaker, he lives with his mom, brother, 2 cats and 1 dog. All of them were with us at some point of the interview, making it clear that all of them have supported Rutger while living as a suicide survivor. Likewise, he is a joyful and reflexive young man that believes in a better world to work for, and as he described himself a man that loves metaphors. Through these metaphors it is possible to read Rutger’s narrative about his life, and how it has change since his friend committed suicide.
Albert is Rutger’s friend; he decided to commit suicide in 2013 in what appears to be an impulsive act. As Rutger told me, Albert was a very thoughtful, joyful and impulsive young man, he was 2 years younger than Rutger and they did not lived in the same city. Albert committed suicide one morning after a night of drinking; he decided to go home earlier, so his flat mates kept drinking for a while. Once they finished drinking, the went home and decided to order a pizza, the one who decided to make the call noticed Albert’s door open, and found it strange, so he went in and there was Albert hanging on his room. Albert’s impulsivity lead him to be a little reckless about himself, and not to think too much on the repercussions of his action, although he was very reflexive about the world we live in. He did not leave a suicide note, or any other kind of explanation of his suicide, but Rutger talked about his suicidal tendencies. Besides this, Albert was diagnosed with ADHD, and was rather unhappy about that diagnosed, as he did not think that category defined him.
The Book of life
To Rutger, Albert3 was like a little brother to him even thought they were not friends since childhood. Albert, shared Rutger’s sense of humour, besides the will to make this world better despite they were fed up with it as Rutger said. Sometimes Albert would feel hopeless about people and life itself, but at the same time he found people worth fighting for. His mom told Rutger and his friends that, because of their shared values, Albert told her that he have understood what family feels like, referring to his friends. Nevertheless, he committed suicide in the spring of 2013, letting behind his family, his friends, and within them Rutger According to Rutger, Albert was a very enthusiast and active man, the one that made every party complete, and most of all the less egoist person that one could ever meet. He always put others before himself, building him as a little careless for himself. Rutger Always referred to him as a very impulsive man, which led him to be careless about his own health. But above all, for Rutger Albert was a kind soul who was fed up with the world and decided to left it.
In Rutger’s narrative the world happened to Albert, so his friend could not see a different way out different that suicide. Nevertheless, he believes that there is always another way out, but sometimes it is too difficult to see. Although it might seem like Rutger believes that suicide is something that happened to Albert, because of the world, during our interview he made it clear that everybody is the owner of his or her own life. Taking away the decision over the own life, taking away the agency over the own body and existence, would take away meaning to Albert’s choice. For Rutger, although he believes that there was a way out of Albert’s sadness, the choice that his loved one took make sense because of who he was. As Rutger told me when talking about his first reaction, he said:
A friend called me, a friend from our group, I was pissing at the very moment, and I couldn't believe it at first but I immediately thought it was true. […] A lot of people said ‘I can't understand how can a person do that to himself’ and well they can't understand, but I can, and a lot of other friends also could understand why he did such a thing, it is difficult to hear but you know? We knew where his feelings and
motivations of doing that came from, so it made it a little more understandable. He knew that it was true immediately as it made sense within his knowledge about Albert, and therefore understood the suffering and pains his loved one was going through. Such understanding of motives and suffering, depends on the fact that he took the decision to kill himself by choice. Suicide was not something that happened to Albert, but something that made sense for the end of Albert’s book of life. Rutger Could understand not only his motives, but also his choice of ending life, as well as his friends because they knew Albert, but also because Rutger had thought about it too. They both shared sense of humour, and at the same time the feeling of an exhausting world full of problems. He had been depress at the time that Albert decided to commit suicide, but he would not want to shy his light in a dark world, still Albert’s dead made him think “It could have been me”. After his friend suicide, something changed in Rutger, now he felt different and a new perspective of life raised, a new chapter in his book of life. As he explained,
I think it has left a mark, I always like to think about myself, or any person's life as a book or something, you know? You have a beginning and an end, and in between you have different chapters. You can see one lifetime, or one year as a chapter or something… and there's one person in the book and that's you, and he have some friends and he have some enemies somewhere with him in the first chapters and then disappeared and then come back later, you know? Like a real person's life, yeah I think definitely a new, a new… well you have the chapters, and yeah, a new chapter in my book begins. For example if my book has ten chapters and I think after the suicide, I think I went from chapter well let's say three to four or something.
Albert’s book of life has ended, but Rutger’s book is only beginning and it is one where, as he said, the character wants to live to the fullest. In new chapters the characters developed and move to the next one, but every chapter leaves a trace in the story. Rutger Acknowledges the mark that the chapter he shared with Albert left, but at the same time knows that his book continues: never the same, developing page by page, but always remembering.
The torn pages, the space to remember
To understand Albert’s suicide, or at least give meaning to it, Rutger has to place it in his life. First of all in Albert’s life, but also in his own life to be able to see Albert’s death from a different perspective, one that he constructs. Rutger could understand from his perspective that somehow suicide fitted in Albert’s life, but he could not understand why he did it at the end. The dichotomy between understanding and misunderstanding, lead to confusion around the meaning of suicide and also to difficulties when it comes to place it in one’s life. In some way knowing it makes sense, but not really knowing why Albert committed suicide makes it hard to only comprehend it from one perspective, and at the same time how it fits in the daily reality of life. Nevertheless, for Rutger it is very clear that his friend suicide change his life, the way he conceive it and live it. When I asked him where would he place Albert’s suicide in his book of life, he told me:
I think if I’m going to say it vividly, I don't think I’m going to tear a page out of something. No, it's not like that because it's not only one page and then well the rest is fine or something, it's something from the first pages were fine and then this is the book [(showing with his hands an imaginary book)], and here happened the suicide [(pointing a place in between his hands)], then I think from here on I'm tearing on the corners, I'm tearing the corners apart or something. Then you still can read what's been happening in my life, because I’m still living and experiencing things, feeling great, feeling down and all those kind of stuff you're still living. Yeah it's something that continually keeps… stays with you in some kind of way, so I’m thinking that I would tear the corners apart or something […] On every corner, every page, you see that there's some damage left.
Despite the fact that Albert is dead now, Rutger can’t erase his friend or the shared memories with him, Albert’s life and impact in his own life, including his suicide. Dead is part of life, it can be include and understood in people’s life, but suicide implies some kind of uncertainty. Rutger could make sense of the suicide, but to place it in his book of life is to acknowledge that uncertainty, as he would never really know why? Albert’s life left a mark that could be read through the passages of the chapters where he was present in
Rutger’s book, but his suicide left a mark in the whole book. Rutger keeps living, and experiencing life, but there is something that would never be the same, the suicide of his loved one changed him. His existence has been mark like torn pages, and his perspective of the world change with it, his whole experience of the world is affected by Albert’s suicide. This is how Rutger places the suicide of his loved one in his life, how he remembers him on a daily basis, by living with the mark that stays forever and changes his identity. From that moment on, he became a nabestaande van zelfmoord (suicide survivor in Dutch) adding that characteristic to who he is, but without being able to completely understand how something that other did change his identity.
The crashed car, and the problems of identity
When Rutger was telling me about his first reaction when he discovered that Albert had committed suicide, he told me he went and met with his friends, but when they tried to talk it would happen that "After two or three words, your throat its soared it's…the words kind of stuck in your mouth" (Rutger). In this sense, nothing could be spoken and therefore the communication of emotions or feelings with others was impossible. The lenses to read the world are not enough to conceive such pain in life, and the language does not get to fulfil the experience, with this the whole identity of Rutger got puzzle by Albert’s suicide. As Rutger explained, language was not enough to explain what he was feeling, the words and all the communication that comes with them could not help him to express himself, words help to describe and explain things but in this case they could not. He told me:
Yeah, for 50% or something, but language is such… you know? Feelings, emotions, and you try to put that into words, or sentences, or it's just trying to put it in a form that that's not doing the right justice to what you really, really, feel and how you really think about something… they’re just words.
In Rutger’s experience is not only related to the lack of words to described the shock experience in his life, but also that existing language, or at least spoken language, cannot described his whole experience. Language helps to organize and structure the world from a particular perspective, one that has been created while building the identity. When such
perspective does not have the tools to frame the life experiences people have to change the frame of reference, and therefore their whole identity. For Rutger this was the case, it is not only about his book of life, but who he is and how he defines himself has changed, his identity got puzzled and he needed to change it. Not completely, as he had to look at Albert’s suicide from other perspective, but at the same time the old one, the one before the suicide, fed this new perspective as he explained:
Cause like in a book, on a road, if I’m a car, and I’m driving to wherever I go, and one time there was a bump in the road, and that is the experience… that's the suicide of Albert. And I had a crash, but I kept the car on the road, it had a lot of shaking and difficulties to get straight again. And I'm, well every now and then I’m looking over my shoulder, where was that nasty bump, I drove around or through, and I think the car is a little bit damage. For example, one wheel has a little itch, not itch, well you know what I mean… I'm just continuing on the road, yeah it leaves its marks on the car.
Part of who he was remains within his new perspective of the world, but this does not mean that he had not change, on the contrary his identity changed and what made it change was Albert’s suicide. Rutger will always look at the “bump” on the road as that moment of transformation, when he started to be a suicide survivor, when that experience was added to his identity, and when he needed to change his perspective in order to understand, or make sense of Albert’s suicide in his life. His language was broken, as well as his frame reference of the world, and he needed to approach this experience from a new perspective, one that allows him to start a life after the suicide.
Understanding, hypothesis and emotions
To understand the catastrophe in life, as suffering experiences can be lived that break language and identity, or a shock experience, can be of great difficulty. Even harder when it comes from the actions of others, as the explanation or reasons of Albert’s suicide only Albert could have known them from first hand. Although some hypotheses have risen from Rutger and his friend’s perspective, they would never really know why he did it? Or what
suicide made sense to Rutger but at the same time it cannot be completely understand as the why endures. When Albert committed suicide, he left some things unsaid that Rutger would love to hear, he did not explain to his loved ones through a note, leaving an empty space to interpretation. The feeling of impotence in Rutger and others, lead to other emotions like anger, some need of explanation that now would never be answered.
The thing we were a little bit angry about maybe, is that he didn't left a note or something, where he told us why he did it, only if it was why he did it, it would have made it a bit more understandable for everyone, because we know… we think we know the things he went through, why he did it. But yeah it would be nice if he left a note or something, that's also one of the things why a lot of, we as friends think that he did it impulsive, because if he would've plan it long before, I think he would left a note, because he was a very good writer and he liked to wrote about himself, what he felt, what he thinks about, all kind of stuff, So I think if he would plan it he would've let a note.
Nevertheless, the silence in Albert’s suicide, his lack of words to explain his pain to his loved ones, his own language broken, had something to say and explain. Rutger could read within the silence, and a hypothesis raised from silence and he saw impulsivity rather than a planned suicide. His previous framework could not explained why his friend committed suicide, why he would let things unsaid, how to understand it, so he had to approach Albert’s suicide from other perspective, giving meaning to his silence. Within the logic of spoken language, and the rules of logic, Albert’s lack of communication meant nothing, but from the perspective that opened after his dead, silence acquired a new meaning, something to be interpreted and understand as the impulsivity of Albert’s suicide. Still, Rutger’s emotions about his friend suicide are very strong, and even with this hypothesis he would never know for sure why? And that makes him angry about not having something that could explained the death of his loved one, especially since he said:
I've been depress myself, also around the age Albert decided to kill himself, and I thought about it also, but I always kept saying to myself: I can't do it, I can't bear that
my family and friends have to miss me, because I know how much all of them love me, and how much I love them. I can't miss them, I didn't like the world at that moment either, but I always thought for myself, there’s a lot of darkness in the world and the least thing you can do is shy your own little light in it, and I think I'm too great for the world to miss, so it also stroke me by, yeah it came close by for me that he did the thing that I could've done.
Earlier in this text, I said that Rutger understood that suicide could be an option, one that Albert decided to take. The reason he conceived it as a plausible option was because he had thought about it too, but he could not do it. Albert could, and Rutger saw himself on his friend’s actions, and thought how much he will miss him, and how much this dark world needs people like Albert or himself. Rutger realized that, even though suicide is an option, it is not his option of life, as he feels so much is needed to be done, not only for the world but for his life. Albert could not see that, but his dead brought that light in Rutger’s life and thought him to a new chapter of his book, one where he knows that has to live at the fullest, but also give meaning to Albert’s suicide.
New chapters, giving meaning to suicide
In order to give meaning to Albert’s suicide, Rutger needed to change his perspective, not only to life but also to suicide itself. It remains being an option, for him suicide is a decision and is completely valid, especially when people are suffering in a way that the only option out is death. That suicide stopped being an option for him, for his book, it does not mean it has to be for others. For Rutger, the definition of suicide and his conception about it change, not in the basic understanding of it but more in a subtle, still very meaningful, way. He kept the form of his conception of suicide, but the content change and had some effects on his understanding of Albert’s suicide and his own practices on life. For one part, he does not think about suicide as an option for himself. Second, despite the fact he understood suicide as an option, he could not completely understand suicide and less Albert’s suicide. And third, he knew now that suicide is not something that makes everything disappear, there is a lot of people left in pain, with a big mark in their lives. So
