Middle Age Suicide (Don’t Do It)

If Trump gets elected, I’ll kill myself. If I get my heart broken one more time, I’ll kill myself. If they are out of pesto at the store, I’ll kill myself. If I have to sit through another bad rendition of The Cherry Orchard, I’ll kill myself.

I guess I use the sentence a lot. It’s a comic relief. When I first watched Heathers in my early teens, it was laugh-out-loud funny. I mean, who would ACTUALLY want to kill themselves, or blow up the school? As I got around to early adulthood, I got my answer: lots of people. For many years, Heathers ceased to be funny for me.

I live in a country, where the long and bleak winter is, indeed, long and bleak, and lots of people off themselves in the course of our shared darkness. Everyone knows someone who ended it, just like they say in stories about the sea how everyone knows someone who never returned. We are, as people, melancholy and slow to warm up to new things, I think, and I guess the darkness isn’t so much shared as it is experienced separately, in the privacy of our own houses, rooms, universes, hearts.

Why, though? In this post-post-modern age of social media and instant gratifications, of likes and Friday Give-Aways, what’s going on with us that on the outside we are posting a picture of us with a significant other having dinner at a fancy restaurant with the caption “Love Forever” or the oh so constant “Love You To The Moon And Back”, while actually having an intense fight over the kitchen tiles or in-laws or whether to break up? This is something a friend pointed out to me, but I would like to take the idea to the next level:  in the spirit of Cary Grant, if I recall correctly, who made an excellent point about acting, “Fake it till you make it”, I wonder if, instead of suffering in silence and putting on airs of success and happiness just for social media’s sake, why not just take five from posting, and check out what others are doing.

One might be surprised, if one has the sincerity and courage to leave the cynicism outside the door, about just how many wonderful things can be found there, the trick really is to know where to look, and how. I myself have had bad days, when, as an avid dog person, my day has actually been made a little better by the gorgeous chocolate lab Humphrey from Great Britain, and, more cosmopolitically (yes it’s a word!), from Instagram. Five years ago my knowledge of such a canine would have been utterly nonexistent, and waking up with the right leg instead of left, me being a leftie, would have taken me far to the reaches of the afternoon until things might have been looking up again, sometimes even longer.

Of course social media is transient and fickle and surface only, and very much a polished picture of our everyday lives. But is that so horrible? If there is something positive to make one’s day just a little brighter until the real thing comes along, like the lovely Billie Holiday would put it, why not just take it? For me it’s the dog. For someone else it could be pretty female fighter pilots, or deserted parks in the fall, or Drake memes. Who cares? And I do think Hotline Bling is a gorgeous song.

When I was in my know-it-all and Camus-and-de-Beauvoir-are-my–spirit-animals –twenties, I felt compelled to disdain and look down my nose at the light-hearted, warm-and-fuzzy aspects of life; I used to join the choir of the holiday cynics, and yammer on about how the stores and cafés and whatnots begin their Christmas celebrations way too early, I mean what’s going on with the damn lights and trees and angel dust in November? And the music, come on, if I have to listen to the damn Last Christmas by Wham one more time, I’ll kill myself.

Well, no more. Now I think well hell yes, give me all the twinkly lights and beautifications you got, anything to take the edge off my misery and loneliness as I stand here at the bus stop, beat from serving angry people coffee for eight hours or whatever, contemplating either a grilled sandwich later or maybe killing myself if the damn bus is late yet again. Besides, some of those songs are truly beautiful and very in the spirit, and Last Christmas is actually one of my all-time favorites today.

Is there a chance that the very reason we are incapable of recognizing the sheer absurdity in wanting to take one’s own life is because there still is the glorification and taboo about and surrounding suicide? When a young person threatens to take their own life, we say, well they don’t know any better, they are so young; but with us, The Middle-Aged, there is no such excuse. Don’t we know how uncool being dead is? What a terrible thing to do to others? Lots of times I think people toy with the idea out of spite, along the lines “Just you wait, asshole, let’s see who’s crying when I kill myself!”

I mean hello? The most obvious catch is the one I believe the person who threatens totally disregards: if you actually do it, you won’t be there to witness the heartache, the horror, the disbelief, because you’ll be DEAD, you moron. If we would just take our heads out of our collective asses for a few minutes, we might actually see that we are not alone at all. Other people are not necessarily the enemy or someone to hide our feelings from or to fear losing face in front of, but they are going through the same horrible loneliness and existential feeling of despair in these dark months as we are.

And come on now, it’s Heathers! If one cannot find it funny, maybe one should be taken by the nice men in the white jackets somewhere warm, where they only serve one Double Stuffed Oreos and pasta with extra parmesan, or whatever equivalent there is for those with problems with gluten, and make one binge-watch Gilmore Girls Clockwork Orange –style. When a member of my household threatens to kill himself over whatever is on the frame that given day, I have educated myself to not consider it as a true threat, but as what it is; the ultimate declaration of I’m real angry/hurt/offended and here’s why, and by acting like an ass here I am actually asking you to make me feel better now. Either that, or, if I’m truly pissed off, I go for the old Woody Allen pun: well ok, but if you first fly to Paris, you’ll be dead an hour early so basically you are dead already, so quit bitching and come help me make these waffles!

Besides, there are others who share my view, the humor side of murder and suicide, I mean in addition of the master himself, Mr. Allen. Let’s look at a few examples:

From Friends:

Monica: Joey is going to kill you! He is actually going to kill you dead!

Chandler: Don’t you think I know that?

From Gilmore Girls:

Lorelai: What are you going to do?

Luke: You mean after I dispose of Taylor’s body?

Also there is a hilarious passage in one of Luigi Pirandello’s short stories about a balding man who contemplates offing himself, then thinks about what his suicide note would say: “I couldn’t handle the bald.” He ultimately decides against suicide. (Author’s note for those who are finding my quotations flawed: no, I didn’t check, I am paraphrasing, you IMDb-obsessed loons!)

As far as surviving the godawful blackness before Christmas goes, I know the GG collective is safe for now, in which I most certainly include myself; I mean, why die before having watched and re-watched A Year in The Life at least seven times, debated over whether they got it right this time or not, critiqued the fashion, got all the pop culture references, dressed up as Lorelai or Kirk next Halloween (or whenever, that is the fun of the show!), and so forth.

For those not inclined towards the show, here are some other reasons from my list for living yet another day, despite the cold, the dark, and the horror, inspired by Woody Allen’s Manhattan, in no particular order:

The smell of fresh coffee in the morning. What better way is there to begin a day?

The burgers and fries at Ohana’s. If I had to decide on a last meal, that would be it.

Going to sleep in freshly changed sheets. The feeling is very transient, but simultaneously so lovely.

The way my man smells. I think I first fell in love with him because of it. It is sort of a sweet, a little bit cinnamonny, smell. Can you pin down your lover’s smell? It is hard. But a real thing.

Buying new clothes. There is little quite as rewarding as coming home with a flattering skin-tight skirt, or a gorgeous new cashmere sweater, in the bag. Oh, man. If a woman says to me she doesn’t enjoy shopping for clothes, I am immediately dubious, and believe she is lying.

The color gray. It goes with everything, there are a million shades of it (no pun intended; I didn’t read the books. I read the original Twilight stories, though, so brownie points should be awarded, right?) to choose from, and if I look at the sky in the morning and it’s gray, I know my walk of the day will be fabulous with all the extra H2O in the air.

Writing. No explanations necessary, I think.

Friends, and more specifically my friend J. She not only keeps me clothed and down with the much needed realism of day-to-day life I sometimes seem to lack, she also appears often in my solitary suicide threat humor as I, generally being a flair-for-drama –person,  face the hardships of my life. “If I didn’t have J. as my friend, I would kill myself.”

The arts. Books, music, cinema. My Desert Island Three at the moment: The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike, an old favorite. The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia – is that cheating? Technically that is not one album - either that or Rihanna’s Anti, depending on how angry I’m feeling. Amélie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet. A classic choice. Although if the jury declares Holiday’s Columbia catalogue as valid, I would have to change my answer to the Gilmore Girls Box Set Series 1-7.

Pasta with cherry tomatoes, pine seeds, basil, garlic, and parmesan. Easy to make, slow to burn off, so I make it once a week max. Let’s face it, we are not thirty anymore.

Paris. My favorite town of all the towns.

Snow. Snow does make everything better, prettier, softer. I am glad Lorelai Gilmore sees the Northern Exposure kind of beauty in life. So do I.

Leisurely mornings after a rough week at work; Bill Evans blasting from the speakers (I don’t know if the word “blast” really applies here, but nevertheless I love listening to Waltz for Debby loud and on repeat), my morning brew steaming and fragrant in my Virginia Woolf novelty mug from Penguin Books, either typing away my thought of the day, or writing by hand in my journal, having a healthy breakfast – I always eat healthy in the morning; it is the evening when my resolve usually withers -  before heading out for my two hours of walking, really the only type of exercise I can stand.

Putting on wool socks my mother has made me.

A really good leather briefcase with strap. The one I bought used online, from some vintage site or other, has really made many a day worth living for me. It is practical as well as beautiful, and as us ladies often buy stuff with exactly the opposite order of reasoning, the more I find practical use out of pretty things, the more I don’t feel like a daft who just bought some ridiculous knick-knack with rent money (money being one of the classic reasons for offing oneself).

Masturbating. I am a late bloomer in the joys of it, and more than willing to spread the word: if you find yourself momentarily partnerless, and even if you have one, check out Nibble online. It is a little bit costly, but so totally worth it. This is really the reason I am so proud of being a Finn!

Excellent shoes. I walk a lot, and by a lot I do mean a lot, and good footwear is like good health: one doesn’t really appreciate it until it’s gone, and the new shoes are giving one horrible blisters and not being anywhere near as lovely as the old ones. A good cobbler is really like a life partner: when you find one, mate for life.

The moment the fight is over. And the moment after that. You know what I mean.

This is for M.