Every suicide seems terrible
to those who thought they knew
the person who killed themselves
well enough that they did not think
deep enough to ask the unaskable.
How such a lack of curiosity
can lead to so serious an end,
death by the person's own hand,
forces open the incurious mind,
and indicts the tamed and timid,
in ways that no other act can.
But the living should know
that part of their life will be
to mark the passing of the newly dead
with a certain respect,
even when they died by their own hand.
It is a part of life that they will pass on,
with variants, to others in their own turn
when their passing has to be marked.
The living have all the tools required,
the legal procedures, the comforting words,
and all the collective gestures
through which we can disguise
how they misunderstood the departed.
What seems worse than suicide to me
is how as we breed we extend the secrecy
via which our greatest truths are revealed.
Mostly through our greatest acts of desperation.
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