'El suicidio de Dorothy Hale' (Frida Kahlo, 1938).
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“Stories are for books"

David Carr, The Night of the Gun

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The why, or as I call it, the unanswerable why is a common concern for those close to (and distant from) a suicide. It is a source of much speculation, fascination, accusation. In otherwords, it is a distraction. Fixating on the why diverts attention from one’s own grief and the more meaningful (and daunting) questions at its root, about the value of a life and one’s authority to end it. And answering the why (impossible: you were not inside their brain) requires all sorts of acrobatic revisionist history and dubious causality to construct a story that often ends up dissatisfying to the living and paternalistic to the dead.

This essay is not a defence of the act of suicide, but a defence of the suicide himself. It is in his name that I critique the storying of a suicide’s life to cohere his death. The way all types of narrative — investigative journalism, biography, eulogy, subreddit theorizing, gossipy YouTube comments — are used to wrest reductive answers from lives no more or less complex than our own. And it is in his name that I fight to take the suicide seriously and respect his humanity and agency to die on his terms. (Also, it’s already done. What else are you going to do?)

Still here? Okay. May those who wrought their death rest in peace. For those who remain, the questions are no smaller than the meaning of life itself and fabricated narrative arcs will not hold them at bay for long. It is toward this important reckoning with suicide’s grief, and a liberation from the why, that I dedicate this inquiry.

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On the first Monday in March, my mom told me Shayne killed himself. Oh, I remember saying to her. I thought you were going to say Samson did. Around that time, Samson, my younger brother, was also suicidal. And through the solipsistic lens of my own family, I saw the news of Shayne’s suicide as both a relief and disappointment. There was, and still is, a perverse anticlimax to every missed call that is not confirming someone’s death.

Shayne’s family, the Clenches, was a mirror to mine. Our families both had two older sisters and one younger brother (though Sam would later come out as non-binary). Even our names seemed to rhyme. Marley, Sydney, Samson to Meaghan, Shannan, and Shayne. (Mike and Mel were the dads. It was only the moms, Carolyn and Debbie, that deviated). From a young age the kids were paired off into preordained friendships and, for a good chunk of my childhood, the Allen-Ashes and the Clenches orbited each other's homes for movie night sleepovers, visits to the Pickering Town Centre mall, and camping trips at Arrowhead Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.

But after Shayne’s death in 2014, the new asymmetry of our families was unbearable. It brought Samson’s own suicidality into sharp relief. I began to see Shayne’s suicide as a deviation in a parallel universe — or cruel foreshadowing of my own family’s potential future. Years later, in 2019, it would be Debbie Clench, Shayne’s mom, to alert my sister and me of our own mother’s impending suicide attempt (a topic for a different essay). My sense of our families as two diverging paths in a Choose Your Own Adventure book has been hard to shake.

After Shayne died, Debbie, a short, sturdy woman with curly black hair, was adamant that the family be open about his suicide. “Our son, Shayne, passed away suddenly by taking his own life,” began his obituary. The honesty was a rarity. It still is. The most common way a suicide is implicitly made known is by not mentioning a cause of death at all. Because of the family’s openness there were several news stories written about Shayne. I read them for the first time recently and noticed something odd. The writers traced Shayne’s suicide back to bullying that started with his “funny walk.”

“Shayne had a funny walk, so stiff his dad would tell him to loosen up,” wrote one journalist in The Toronto Star. “[Shayne] had a funny walk that made him the target of bullies,” wrote another in The Guardian Liberty Voice. This detail surprised me. Though it had been ten years since his death I could remember Shayne with acuity — his small frame made sturdy from years of hockey, his blue eyes and ruddy freckled face, his shy close-lipped smirk. But I could not remember anything notable about how he walked.

This is not to say Shayne didn’t have a funny walk, just that I don’t remember it. But, even if he did have a funny walk, does that feel like enough? And what does it mean for a reason for suicide to feel like enough? Who metes out that permission? Who appraises another’s pain? Who governs your body? Who owns — woah, woah, woah now.

Searching for the why is a slippery slope to the same paternalistic thinking David Hume heretically railed against in 1783. “Has not everyone, of consequence, the free disposal of his own life? And may he not lawfully employ that power with which nature has endowed him?”¹ Though today’s crowd may be less overtly God-fearing (and eloquent), the impossibility of a satisfactory why seems to betray that the search for a reason for suicide is actually fueled by insidious unspoken belief that there will never be a good enough reason. That a suicide’s body is holy and that he should have (or could have) been controlled. Be that by God, his family, or the State. Scary stuff.

Perhaps this 18th century way of thinking has expanded, or grown more nuanced over time, but if it has, it's not been by a lot. In 2015, Simon Critchely wrote that after a suicide “one of two reactions habitually follow. We either quietly think that they were being foolish, selfish and irresponsible, or we decide that their actions were caused by factors outside of their control (severe depression, chronic addiction, and so on). That is, if they acted freely in killing themselves, we implicitly condemn them; but if we declare that their actions were constrained by uncontrollable behavioural factors like depression, we remove their freedom.”² It is hard to see how the search for the why yields outcomes any more generous than these.

It is hard, near impossible, for some to reckon with what they believe a suicide’s death may say about them. But there is space to be less prideful here. As Hume wrote that “no man ever threw away life, while it was worth living.” Can you believe him?

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In April 2023, Roger Gural and Janine Lariviere sued Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, alleging that the school was responsible for the suicide of their 13-year-old son, Ellis. Ellis had attended Saint Ann’s since kindergarten but was told in February 2021, months before his graduation, that he could not return for ninth grade. Three months later, he killed himself.

In their lawsuit, Ellis’ family blamed the school for “counseling out” Ellis instead of accommodating his dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. “Had they said he could go to the high school,” Ellis’ grandfather said to the New York Times, “he’d be alive today.”³ Though the comment section is notably absent from the Times story, a r/nyc subreddit thread⁴ about the article amassed nearly 250 comments. Some people blamed the parents, while others blamed the school or pointed to Ellis himself. “It sounds like the kid just couldn’t cope with hearing ‘no.’” wrote one user. But many more acknowledged that the situation was complex and that “externalizing the blame” was a fruitless exercise (I would argue internalizing the blame is equally fruitless). While there were likely some precipitating events taking place at Ellis’ school, for the family it seems like the lawsuit, and the story it relies on, is less an effective means of retribution (or resolution) and, as the Times suggested, more a way of keeping him in their lives as they make sense of their grief.

The challenge with suicide is, as Albert Camus wrote, “Since nothing is proved, everything can be proved.”⁵ In the face of this slipperiness, storying suicide relies on what historian Paul Veyne critically labeled “retrodiction”⁶ — a retroactive prediction that connects past events into a narrative to induce a sense of historical coherence. This is not, Veyne wrote, to say that the past is unknowable, “but it is extremely complicated.” And “causality is too muddled to be reasoned out by the example of two billiard balls that collide so very simply.” Put more directly, getting “counselled out” of Saint Ann’s alone didn’t drive Ellis to suicide, but it sure can seem that way when the story’s told right. (Put less directly, Camus wrote, “All things are not explained by onething but by all things.”⁷)

But, I understand. When an “obesity of grief,” as poet Ellen Bass called it⁸, sits with me, sits on me, a story feels useful, necessary even. A story, like a kind of emotional car jack, can alleviate the debilitating weight of the why. It does this by creating causality. “If I had called him more often, then he never would have killed himself.” This story implies that my friendship would have saved him, and, therefore, my lack of friendship caused his death. The painful logic of this story can be somehow less painful than the seeming irrationality of suicide. (Or the pain that someone wanted to leave their life, and yours, of their own free will.) But this story is, like all stories, a fabrication. Not necessarily fake or untrue, but constructed for our purposes. (“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”⁹ Right?) But this is “diegesis not mimesis”¹⁰ — this is story, not life. And conflating the two can do more harm than good.

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In The Night of the Gun, journalist David Carr rigorously investigated his own self-destruction to illustrate the slipperiness of memory (and memoir). Carr wrote that “memory is an expression of hindsight as much as recollection” and “recollection is often just self-fashioning. Some of it is reflexive, designed to bury truths that cannot be swallowed, but other ‘memories’ are just redemption myths writ small.” A potentially obvious, but salient corollary: stories about suicide are created by and for the living. And if, as Carr wrote, “We all remember the parts of the past that allow us to meet the future” then it is worthwhile to ask what the storying of suicide does for the one spilling the ink.

Where Carr indicted himself, Al Alvarez’s retelling of Sylvia Plath’s suicide in The Savage God seemed to be designed for his own absolution. By way of a prologue, Alvarez set out to story Plath’s already much storied (if not the most storied) suicide that took place seven years prior. He claimed the book was an attempt to understand why suicide happens, but acknowledged that no single theory can explain it. Despite this, Alvarez proceeded to repeatedly state without equivocation that Plath, who famously stuck her head in an oven, did not mean to kill herself. “I am convinced by what I know of the facts that this time she did not intend to die,” and “it was a mistake, then, and out of it a whole myth has grown.” If Alvarez were less self-righteous perhaps he could have seen that his story was adding another myth to the pile.

From his peripheral role as Plath’s acquaintance and sometime editor, he recalled that on their last meeting on Christmas Eve, 1962, Plath looked “desolate” and “strained.” They drank wine and he quibbled over word choices in her poems instead of addressing what he saw as the writing on the wall. But his retrodiction of the events seemed more about his own regret than understanding her:

“I was only trying, in a futile way, to reduce the tension and take her mind momentarily off her private horrors—as though that could be done by argument and literary criticism! She must have felt I was stupid and insensitive. Which I was. But to have been otherwise would have meant accepting responsibilities I didn't want and couldn't, in my own depression, have coped with. When I left about eight o'clock to go on to my dinner party, I knew I had let her down in some final and unforgivable way. And I knew she knew. I never again saw her alive.”

What The Savage God exhibits is the seductive power of guilt and regret — one’s own and the posthumous regret projected onto a suicide. Guilt and regret, despite their philanthropic appearance, are selfish feelings. When I wallow in the regret that I should have or could have “done something” to prevent a suicide from taking his life, I am contorting the suicide through the vector of my own sense of outsized importance. And when I maintain that a suicide didn’t mean to die, or would take it back if they could, I am stripping him of his agency (and therefore their humanity). As Audre Lorde said, “Guilt is only another form of objectification.”¹¹

Whether or not Plath wanted to die is unknowable, and either way it is not Alvarez’s fault. What Alvarez is at fault for, however, is letting his guilt control his pen to whip up another sad Plath story in an attempt to make sense of her death by absolving himself of a responsibility that was not his to bear. As Veyne wrote, “we speak of meaning, of understanding, but the correct term is much simpler: finality.” We seek the end of the story.

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This past October, Debbie Clench and I spoke for the first time in several years. Over Zoom I could see that her black hair has since gone gray and been dyed an orange-ish brown but once we began talking it was clear her mile-a-minute thinking and steadfast resolve remained. In addition to her work as an audiologist, Debbie also volunteers with families of suicidal children now. (After a suicide, she said, “There’s two paths: either people can't function anymore, or they become advocates”). And before I could finish explaining the premise for this essay she jumped in. “To people that I talk to, I say, ‘You're never going to get an answer to the why.” She continued, “And it's not really about the why. It's about how are you going to learn to live with it.”

I asked her how long after Shayne’s death she came to that perspective and she countered, “Well, I kind of know his reason. So it's a little bit different.” She then told me this story.

Debbie said she noticed “differences” when Shayne was around eight or nine. She sought help but he was only labeled with a "behavior problem" and never diagnosed with anxiety or depression. By 16, in 2012, his condition worsened — he was refusing to attend school and attempted suicide on Christmas Eve of that year. In January 2013, Debbie enrolled him in an outpatient program, but felt it failed him. “They never gave him a social worker. They never followed up.” In September 2013, Shayne was admitted into an adolescent inpatient program and in November he was discharged to the outpatient unit and kept up regular visits with a psychiatrist at the hospital. But in January 2014, after just a couple months, he was bizarrely “aged out” of the hospital’s youth services altogether. Shayne was just 17 years and four months old. Debbie fought with the hospital. “Adolescence goes till 18,” Debbie said to me, still incredulous. “Like, why are we having this talk?”

Desperate, Debbie looked for alternatives, even considering residential programs in the U.S., while also working to get him back into his old high school, Notre Dame, with a psychologist and social worker available to support. But Shayne started dating a girl from the inpatient program and she went to Ajax High, on the other side of town. “She promised him she was going to introduce him to all her friends.” But that never happened. “I think she went [to school] for a couple days, and then she was back in the inpatient unit.”

Nevertheless, in February 2014, Shayne began at Ajax High, but was placed in grade 12 despite missing both grade 10 and 11. Debbie was concerned, but the vice principal brushed her off. “She opened up her file drawer. She goes, ‘See all these files? These are all the kids I'm watching over. And don't worry, we'll get Shayne to graduation.’ I go, ‘It's not about graduation. It's about making him stay alive.’”

Within days Shayne was struggling. He asked the vice principal for help but she dismissed him. And after just one week, Shayne refused to go back. “He said, ‘Nothing has changed, and nothing's going to get better.’” But that weekend Debbie talked him down with a plan to reduce his course load and he promised to return.

That Sunday night Debbie recalled seeing Shayne at the top of the stairs after his shower, “I just thought, ‘Oh, my God, you're drop dead gorgeous.’” She also remembered that he seemed relaxed, “It's like his anxiety, everything was gone. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is good, you know, he's going back to school, right?’” It was only in hindsight she realized, “No, he was calm and he was great because he had made the decision to take his life that night.” Shayne hung himself in the early hours of Monday, March 3, 2014.

I tried to imagine what Shayne looked like on our trip to Mexico, or camping, or in his kitchen, or at his funeral — anywhere but hanging. Thankfully, Debbie continued talking. “But there was, I guess, three years of trying to search for the why.” Oh? “I read a gazillion books on suicide. I read a gazillion books on after death.” She also went to see a medium, at the suggestion of another mom she met at the inpatient program. And, eventually, she came to the conclusion that, “there is no answer to the why.”¹²

At the start of our conversation, Debbie asserted that, unlike other families, she knew Shayne’s why. She then recounted what she believed the why (or the whys) to be. But here, at the end of her story, was a kind of doublethink. Sure, she knew the why, but she didn’t know the why. It was this second why that eluded her. The why that was more spiritual than sublunary. The why that scratched the existential itch.

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So, why do people story suicide? Earlier, I discussed how stories of suicide can be written as an indictment, deflection or absolution. But I also wonder if there is something self-preservationist in it all.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote that strong emotions, like grief, “reveal us as vulnerable to events that we do not control.”¹³ Control, of course, being central to a Western view of the world. So, in this sense, telling suicide stories could be an attempt to correct the world and wrest it back under one’s control. “It seems better,” wrote Nussbaum, “that there should be someone to blame than that the universe should be a place of accident in which one's loved ones are helpless. Blame is a valuable antidote to helplessness.” Though I would not consider suicide an accident, this sentiment does seem to align with the perceived randomness and irrationality of suicide. (Not to mention the outright assertion in some cases, like with Alvarez, that a suicide did not mean to kill themselves, therefore rendering their suicide an accident.)

I believe it is this sense of helplessness that the storying of suicide attempts to address. Initially on a practical level, stories of suicide are often compiled of “clues” from the day, months, years leading up to a suicide’s death. After fashion designer Kate Spade killed herself in 2018, Redditors speculated on her business affairs, suggesting that she had “deep internal remorse about selling the company so early,” and proposed listening to her How I Built This podcast interview from 2017 to find “subtle hints.”¹⁴ In a YouTube video from 2017 entitled, “Chester Bennington Last day home footage” the former lead singer of Linkin Park rehearses with band member Mike Shinoda. The one minute long video purports to be from July 20, 2017, the day of Bennington’s suicide, but commenters argue that the video is actually tour footage from three years prior. Nevertheless, others dissected Bennington’s actions suggesting that he “already seemed tired,” with one person going so far as to say that, “The way he just says ‘yeah’ saddens me.” Compiling these clues into a narrative could be seen as preventative: if I know the signs then I can prevent future deaths. But this vigilance can easily fall prey to circular logic.¹⁵ (“Since nothing is proved, everything can be proved.”) After someone kills themselves, everything can be interpreted as a symptom of their suicidality. Even, apparently, the way someone says “yeah.”

Beyond this practical level there is also something existential at play. Suicide, for many, is an affront to their ethics. It just feels wrong. Sure, we all have different rules for the game of life —different expectations for love, beauty, family, success— but it is generally agreed upon that the purpose of life is to keep living it. So, to end it early runs completely counter to most, if not all, beliefs about how life is supposed to work. From this point of view, suicide could be described as anti-human. An action totally antithetical to the project of humanity itself. Seen this way, suicide is chaos in every dictionary definition of the word. It's existence disorders our value systems, elicits confusion, seemingly happens at random, and, to go Greek (or Freudian) for a second, connects to some primeval instinct, something base that predates proper society and good behaviour and right and wrong. As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed, then suicide is not allowed.”¹⁶ And if we “allow” suicide what, if anything, is left? Suicide is terrifying to so many because it represents the total lack of control and order that exists in all of life. A fact that many choose to ignore.

Conversely, maybe the deep fear of suicide is actually intimidation. It is not the chaos of a suicide that is threatening, but his sheer determination. It is paradoxical that many instinctively write off a suicide as lacking agency (i.e. they didn’t mean to do it, or they should have/could have been stopped) when suicide is the single most powerful act of self-control that exists. Perhaps this hurried, self-conscious desire to dismiss a suicide is in fact driven by a kind of awe at the power that a suicide wielded upon themselves. A power that most would never have the courage to admit that they have, let alone utilize. So, to write stories of a suicide after his death could be a way of diminishing his power by miscasting it as weakness. This rehabilitates the suicide into “an attractive and unproblematic dead person,”¹⁷ (which seems to be both a prerequisite to grief and a consequence of it). The scaffolding of story reshapes the suicide into someone more pitiable and likeable than the person who chose to die of his own free will.

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How do you explain suicide without story? Though it may seem tautological, perhaps it is enough to say, “he killed himself because he wanted to die.” Though even that may be too presumptive. I prefer to say, “he wanted to leave.” That’s it. Some people just want to leave. But this could strike some as too pat or euphemistic. It may be most accurate, then, to say “he killed himself because he killed himself,” and leave it at that. This brief exercise in alternatives reveals the difficulty in avoiding story altogether (a goal even I have failed at in this very essay). “He killed himself because he killed himself” is almost maddening in its unwillingness to cede any narrative ground. But this anti-narrative position is powerful because it is humbling, it is an admission of all I do not know.¹⁸

Between the much quoted first and last lines of The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus made some really interesting points about the limits of knowledge. “It is essential to consider as a constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life.” (I believe this upset to be part of my project.) Camus explained that what I can feel within my heart and what I can touch I know exists, but that’s where my knowledge ends, “the rest is construction.” And so, when it comes to suicide, “it is barely possible to speak of the experience of others' deaths” since you yourself have not lived through them.

It is in the confrontation between our obsession with knowing and the reality of the world that transcends being known where absurdity is born. And, Camus posits, how we relate to that absurdity determines if we will be able to handle living with it, or if we won’t. It is in Camus’ plea for the former that he famously urges that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

In the same line of thinking, I am arguing to abandon figuring out the why. And, instead, accept knowing that there will be some things that will never be known. This acceptance can work to assuage the brain of guilt and those unanswered what ifs. In fact, it can feel, as Camus writes, like a kind of “liberation” to “[lose] oneself in that bottomless certainty.” And if I can accept this forever freefall. Relax into the breeze, if the temperature’s right. Then perhaps I, too, can be like Sisyphus, happy.

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¹ David Hume, Of Suicide, 1783.^‍

² Simon Critchley, Notes on Suicide, 2015.^‍

³ John Leland, The New York Times, “An Elite School, a Boyʼs Suicide and a Question of Blame.” 2023.^‍

⁴ r/nyc “A Student at Saint Ann’s Committed Suicide. Was the School to Blame?” 2023.^‍

⁵ Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus” 1942.^‍

⁶ Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, 1984.^‍

⁷ Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”, 1942.^‍

⁸ Ellen Bass, “The Thing Is” from Mules of Love, 2002.^‍

⁹ Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979.^‍

¹⁰ Gérard Genette paraphrased by Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, 1984.^‍

¹¹ Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding To Racism” 1981.^‍

¹² Also, Debbie only brought up the “funny walk” after I asked her about it directly in our second interview. She said the years of intense anxiety impacted Shayne’s body, he developed severe digestion problems (so much so that he was tested for Crohn’s disease and colitis) and his movements became increasingly stiff.^‍

¹³ Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (2001).^‍

¹⁴ Reddit, r/news, “Designer Kate Spade Found Dead Of Apparent Suicide” (2018).^‍

¹⁵ Scott Anderson reported this circular logic in his piece “The Urge To End It All” in The New York Times in 2008: “I was struck by this upon meeting with two doctors who are among the most often-cited experts on suicide and specifically on suicide by jumping. Both readily acknowledged the high degree of impulsivity associated with that method, but also considered that impulsivity as simply another symptom of mental illness. ‘Of all the hundreds of jumping suicides I’ve looked at,’ one told me, ‘I’ve yet to come across a case where a mentally healthy person was walking across a bridge one day and just went over the side. It just doesn’t happen. There’s almost always the presence of mental illness somewhere.’ It seemed to me there was an element of circular logic here: that the act proved the intent that proved the illness.”^‍

¹⁶ Ludwig Witigenstein, Notebooks, (1914-1916).^‍

¹⁷ Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (2001).^‍

¹⁸ This feels reminiscent of a comment playwright Tony Kushner made to writer-director Chinonye Chukwu about her decision to not show Emmett Till’s dead body in her film Till (2022). “There are some things that are so terrible that you’re not really allowed to see them because the seeing gives us the illusion that we’re understanding something about the heart of the experience and unless you experience it, you can’t. So, there are some things you draw the veil across and say, you know it’s back there but you’re not allowed to look at it directly.”

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