Suicide is Painless?

I was going to write this yesterday. In fact, each day, lately, I've had a plan but haven't followed through. Some weeks are more interesting than others.

A few years ago, my brother committed suicide. I knew he was having marital problems, but obviously his problems ran much deeper than I or anyone else in the family realized. No note that I'm aware of; he just told a friend that he was going to blow his own head off, and then he did. The last time I saw him was a few months before that. He had gained a lot of weight and was drinking a lot. He seemed very anxious, constantly checking his cell phone and laptop. He told me that he had been working as a network administrator for Cisco, travelling from state to state, and that he had to keep a tab on things. He even bragged about the network of computers he had installed in his apartment, and how he was going to make so much money providing network service. As always in the past, he claimed so many things, but all I could really be sure of was that he was troubled.

But this was nothing unusual for my brother. He was a troubled youth, a troubled teen, and, after he joined the Navy, a troubled sailor. When he retired from the Navy, I thought he was doing so well. He seemed to always have a good job and a good income. I remember once, when I was living in San Antonio (Texas), he told me that he couldn't imagine living on my paltry income. And my income always lagged behind his. Yet, by the time he ended his short life, my income was still much less but I had saved while he had squandered his.

He left behind an estranged wife, a girlfriend I never met, and two beautiful boys with great potential. I loved my brother, but I can't help but think what he had done was the height of his selfishness. He had so much going for him, or at least as far as I knew, and his family relied on him, but he left them and he left the rest of the world. My dad explained that, by the time my brother got to the state of mind he was in, it wasn't about selfishness anymore: he just wanted to end his life. My dad understood this because he's been suffering for years from a near-fatal sequence of events that started with steroid injections for pneumonia. Each year, my dad can absorb a little less oxygen, and his other disabilities confine him to a wheelchair most of the time. I think he is ready for the end; even fantasizes about it, but I'll write more on that later.

Yesterday, more people in Baghdad were killed by a pair of suicide bombers who took not only their own lives, but the lives of a score of innocent people, as well. While I can appreciate some of the motivations for these acts of suicide (their families are often compensated and they are considered by their peers, and sometimes their families, to be martyrs), I still cannot help but think that their selfishness goes beyond that of my brother. Whatever personal goal they had in mind, they took the lives of so many people who now have left their families and loved ones... I can't even begin to calculate how many lives were effected from these two acts. Unlike my brother, as far as I can tell, these men, these suicide bombers, were fully cognizant of their actions and did not suffer the same debilitating sense of futility that led my brother to do what he did. Maybe they suffered from a sense of futility about their social plight (living in an impoverished society; opressed by others), but I think their victims were in much the same straits when their lives were cut short. I cannot help but think that their selfishness and the pain they inflicted was 20-fold what my brother's was. Then I think about how bad it still hurts that my brother killed himself, and the depth of pain caused by the two bombers takes on devastating proportions.

And these bombings occur just about every day, somewhere in the world. They've been going on for a while. I know the kind of pain they're inflicting does not stop or start with the suicide bombers. Governments cause and support pain -- I think all governments do. And to what end? They're competing with each other for a scrap of land, a pot of oil — things that wouldn't be so important if the people of the world could just cooperate and work together to figure out more efficient ways to share the world's resources. The amount of suffering caused by the "pragmatic" doctrines of these governments and organizations only fuels the engines that crank out the hopelessly misguided bombers.

I know, this is nothing new. Everything I'm saying: old news.

So I guess suffering is a given and nothing can be done to stop it. At least not in this material existence. So I'm looking for something deeper, perhaps for religion, perhaps just for a life beyond the flesh and bones of my own body. But I cannot and will not accept a belief that is exclusive of others to the point that I could justify taking my own life to make them suffer.