Please Stay

In early 2014, I received (perhaps by accident) two lovely hardback copies of Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It by Jennifer Michael Hecht. I was meant to consider the book for review. Since I was a fan of Hecht’s blog and of her previous book, Doubt: A History, I tore into it eagerly.

In the author’s Preface, Hecht describes a 2009 suicide cluster of poets whom she knew, and the confusion and upset the suicides caused her. Working through the experience, she talks about a blog entry she wrote for The Best American Poetry. She quotes it at length, describing the purpose and thoughts behind the entry:

Then I addressed the reader with a bold imperative: “So I want to say this, and forgive me the strangeness of it. Don’t kill yourself. Life has always been almost too hard to bear, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time. It’s awful. But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear.” In the West, I wrote, the dominant religions had told people suicide was against the rules, they must not do it; if they did they would be punished in the afterlife. “People killed themselves anyway, of course, but the strict injunction must have helped keep a billion moments of anguish from turning into calamity. These days we encourage people to stay alive and not kill themselves, but we say it for the person’s own sake. It’s illegal, sure, but no one actually insists that suicide is wrong.” I announced, “I’m issuing a rule. You are not allowed to kill yourself. When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community. One of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide. That means that suicide is also delayed homicide. You have to stay.”

Enraged, I put the book away, likely throwing it dramatically, though I do not recall. It is March of 2025, and I think I’m finally ready to pick it up again.

I do not know when I first began to experience suicidal impulses, nor do I recall when they became sharp and frequent. I know, though, that I was a child. It is now April, and I turn 50 this month, and have lived with suicidal thoughts a long time. I have, if you’ll forgive the statement, not killed myself, and I do not think that I will. Nonetheless, I did and do resent being told I am not allowed to, by imperative. I recognize that Stay is a book of philosophy, and such books frequently deal in imperatives. Still, the subtitle describes it as a history book, not a moral lecture. On the other hand, I have read many moral lectures with which I take issue; few cause as an intense reaction in me, over more than a decade.

It was not, primarily, my own rights I was feeling when I became so angry. I was angry for the rights of my best friend, the poet Michelle Greenblatt.

Michelle was born in 1982; she was eight years my junior. She was, throughout her adult life, in intense physical pain. Her doctors diagnosed it as fibromyalgia—what that means is beyond our scope, but what she experienced was crippling and very real.

Because of her inability to work, Michelle lived most of her life with her parents on Florida’s Atlantic coast. We were, in 2014, impoverished poets, and our relationship was mostly conducted over the phone, often well into the night. Over the course of these conversations, she asserted her personal right to suicide, and speculated on its possible eventual necessity, given her physical condition. At one point, I told her that I was incapable of accepting this: that, while I honored this right in the abstract, I could not allow her to kill herself with my knowledge, and would have to make an interventionary report. Over the years, I relented, assuring her that if she needed to commit suicide, she should feel free to say goodbye to me, and I would not “out” her—an arrangement that was never tested.

I saw my statements to Michelle as fundamentally different from Hecht’s, though others might disagree. To my way of thinking, I could accept suicide, but not take personal responsibility for it. This might’ve been cowardice on my part, or it might’ve been a gentle way to exert influence without issuing demands, which might or might not have been ethical. (These questions belong to the past, since I am now a mandatory reporter who must report suicide attempts.) Hecht, on the other hand, was taking personal responsibility, from a profoundly impersonal distance. Although one might suspect that the author of Stay is necessarily familiar with suicidal impulses (and otherwise would not have taken on the project), no mention of these impulses is made in the volume.

In my role as an editor of poetry, I have counseled numerous suicidal people, competently or otherwise. I do so by issuing no demands, no criticism, and suggesting no restrictions on the suicidal person’s behavior. I make myself as vulnerable as possible, talking about my own relationship with despair and suicidal feelings. Stay takes the opposite approach, and, at the time, in my own intensity and relative immaturity, it’s not surprising that I found it toxic.

Of course, an exploration of my 2014 anger is of limited use in understanding the book, so we’ll move on now. Once we clear the Preface, the book is primarily the history text that it purports to be. It is a friendly and accessible historical overview, beginning with Roman lore and the suicide of Lucretia. This post-rape act, which was seen as honorable, inspired Roman independence. The book goes on to explore antique conceptions of suicide, before the West began to widely believe in an afterlife. It talks about the difference between honorable suicide and despair suicide, and how they were perceived.

As the West began to believe in an afterlife, the powers that be increasingly feared that people would enthusiastically commit suicide in hopes of leaving this miserable world for a better one. So they increasingly condemned it. Finding condemnation insufficient, they began increasingly obscene deterrents. By the middle ages, the bodies of suicides were posthumously tortured, and the filial survivors of suicide were punished in a variety of ways, not least through seizure of the deceased’s estate. Hecht points out the depravity of such punishments, while acknowledging (reluctantly?) that they may have been effective. Although she is a staunch and rather famed atheist, she bemoans how the weakening of the Church and the gradually disappearing belief in an afterlife has allowed for pro-suicide philosophies and philosophical writers. The primary purpose of the book is to find secular authors who reject and condemn suicide. Towards that end, she has collected a fascinating collection of quotes and ideas from Shakespeare onward.

I am mentally ill, and I have been physically ill. They are not the same. It is correct that we call them both “illness” and strive to hold the ill blameless: illnesses are, after all, nothing more than biochemical reactions which make life unpleasant for the organism. Physical and mental illness feed off of one another, and we would benefit from integrating their treatment more thoroughly. At the same time, they must be differentiated to understand the person experiencing them.

Stay, on the other hand, makes allowance for the possible suicide of the physically ill, but universally condemns “despair suicides.” This distinction seems shaky to me. Right now, my father is experiencing Alzheimer’s. If I eventually follow him in this malady, and choose to commit suicide rather than allowing dementia to take me and my relationships, is that a despair suicide or a legitimate rejection of a hopeless physical ailment? Or consider the young person with a chronic pain condition and major depressive disorder. How can these things be fully extracted? How can we decide what behavior is legitimate, and what is “self-murder?” Stay does not address this at all. It can’t. It’s drawn too hard a line, and can’t wriggle through these impossible uncertainties.

Throughout the book, Hecht frequently—and in her own voice—refers to suicide as “self-murder.” Interestingly, she talks about the etymology of suicide, pointing out that it is, despite its appearance, not initially Latin. In fact, “suicide” was simply not a word before an outbreak of suicides in England in the early 1600s: Wiktionary believes the newly-coined Middle English word seolf-cwale (literally “self-slaughter”) was retroactively made into a Latinate, and the word stuck. In the middle ages, “self-murder” was presumably just about the only way the act was described.

These are not the middle ages, and self-murder is an incredibly charged term. Almost everyone believes that murder is bad, and must be condemned. Furthermore, among those who still believe that people can be good or bad, a murderer is generally considered a bad person. Hecht makes no suggestion that suicides are bad people, but she is aware of words and how they are perceived, and must realize the implications of her term.

As I say: almost everyone condemns murder, and Hecht wishes to use this language to condemn suicide. The funny thing is, I can’t truly mount a linguistic argument against her, because I can’t actually find it in myself to universally condemn murder, either. “Murder” is extralegal homicide, and I cannot bind myself to the legitimacy of law, nor can I believe that homicide is always wrong. I can discourage it, as I discourage suicide. But I believe that homicide in self-defense is acceptable, and I have a much broader definition of “self-defense” than the law. Specifically, I allow for, and indeed sometimes celebrate (although always reluctantly), homicide that delivers humans from their oppressors. With this logic, I tend to draw a sharp distinction between revolutionary violence and the actions of the miscreant, though thinkers on both sides of this issue have raised coherent objections to this distinction.

I live in a world of exceptions to the rule, of Luigi Mangione and Norman Morrison. Hecht explores the possibility of exceptions to her rule, considering how physical illness might make suicide acceptable, and considering the nature of “coerced suicides” such as that of Socrates. For me, exceptions are so commonplace that they make rules meaningless and counterproductive. Perhaps someone who can’t condemn murder has no business objecting to the ethical framework of another, but here I am, bitching about this book.

Hecht is a student of literature, and her good taste shows. When she quotes a philosopher or artist speaking on suicide, she finds meaningful and masterful passages that immediately encourage one to read the original. I’m particularly delighted by her extensive discussion of Schopenhaur, whom, I note with amusement, I have always been warned against: friends and associates of mine who read Schopenhaur have always told me he is a poor, even dangerous, fit for my personal melancholy. But I find this passage, from The World as Will and Representation (trans. E. F. J. Payne), absolutely life-affirming:

The earth rolls on from day into night; the individual dies, but the sun itself burns without intermission, an eternal noon. Life is certain to the will-to-live; the form of life is the endless present; it matters not how individuals, the phenomena of the Idea, arise and pass away in time, like fleeting dreams. Therefore suicide already appears to us to be a vain and therefore foolish action…”

When Hecht stops to analyze literature, her analyses are generally as beautiful as her selections. Consider her thoughts on Hamlet, from page 74:

He is not just asking whether he is too tired and miserable to go on, and he dismisses the question of whether he has something to live for after all. Life is pain, it is slings and arrows…Fate and fortune are outrageous and batter us and pierce our flesh. Heartache and a thousand normal human shocks are wretched. Yet when he says that death is an ending “devoutly to be wished,” it does sound like he is still trying to convince himself. Even the vibrant line about taking up arms against a sea of troubles shows a kind of severe ambivalence, for swords are not the best way to fight the sea. Hamlet does not kill himself. His answer in that deep but narrow question is “to be.” But in this pivotal moment he does not say that he has to stay here, alive, for any specific reason. He just does not see immediate death as a decisively inviting alternative.

Hecht then moves on, reasonably enough, to the more overtly anti-suicide thoughts in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. But centuries of readers have found Hamlet’s ambivalence more compelling.

Hecht’s consistent skill in literary selection and analysis make her thoughts on Julie by Jean-Jacques Rousseau all the more jarring. They begin on page 133, and I will quote them extensively:

[Rousseau] has been remembered as both a proponent of tolerance for suicide and a strenuous opponent of suicide. The reason for this is a famous pair of letter’s in Roseau’s novel Julie. The first is from Saint-Preux, a young man in despair because he is in love with a virtuous married young woman. It begins, “Yes, Milord, it is true; my soul is oppressed with the weight of life.” For a long time, he confesses, life has been a burden to him; he has lost everything that made life sweet, and only sorrows remain. “But they say I have no right to dispose of it without an order from the one who gave it me.” Saint-Preux objects to this, addressing his position to Socrates. “Good Socrates, what are you telling us? Does one no longer belong to God after death?”

The young man mentions Arria and Lucretia, Brutus, Cassius, and the “great and divine Cato.” He claims that in the whole Bible one finds not one prohibition against suicide, and notes that when someone in the Bible takes his or her own life, “Not a word of blame is found against any of these examples.” Samson, he notes, is even celebrated. He says the world is bad, and the good in it is mixed with evil. Somewhat shockingly, not only does he want to die, he advises the friend to whom he is writing, the Baron, whom he says he knows to be as miserable as he is, to put an end to his sorrows by taking his life too.

The Baron responds with an intense condemnation of suicide, which Hecht describes for two and a half pages, culminating in this quote direct from Julie (trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vache):

Know that a death such as you contemplate is dishonorable and devious. It is a larceny committed against mankind. Before you take your leave of it, give it back what it has done for you. But I have no attachments? I am of no use to the world? Philosopher for a day! Have you not learned that you could not take a step on earth without finding some duty to fulfill, and that every man is useful to humanity, by the very fact that he exists?

In those two-and-a-half pages, Hecht repeatedly asserts the rightness of the Baron’s response, even going so far as to use that most dangerous of superlatives, wisely. Which is weird, because although Rousseau did not kill himself, and I have no plans to kill myself, I find Saint-Preux’s argument far more compelling than the Baron’s self-righteous rage.

I had lost friends to suicide, and suicidal behaviors, before I first picked up Stay. I have lost more friends to suicide since. On October 24, 2023, my 29-year-old daughter, Michaela, killed herself. She left no note, and although I can offer endless speculations, I do not understand why. I confess that I often failed to understand Michaela’s motivations and moods, a truth which I know she was aware of, and that did not help her pain. I can and do level further recriminations at myself. I can point to the behaviors of others in her life, and accuse them of fatal toxicity.

But before I do any of these things, I have to remember sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who founded the It Gets Better project. The project assists LGBTQ+ youth who are experiencing bullying, in and out of their homes. Founded in 2010, it has a very simple, quotable mission: to let young people know that whatever they are experiencing, their lives can and will get better in adulthood, that adult LGBTQ+ persons are very often happy, healthy, and thriving, often despite apocalyptic childhoods. The It Gets Better project speaks of “resilience and triumph.” It was founded as a reaction to a large suicide cluster, and is inherently anti-suicide.

It is now 2025 in America. The government has declared that trans people like my daughter do not and cannot exist, and therefore anyone claiming to be trans is delusional and dangerous. Many people in power openly equate transgenderism and pedophilia. Online bullying of trans children and adults, once normal enough, is now mainstream, and takes place in every public comment stream. Trans people are being denied passports. It would be impossible, at this point in history, for me to look Michaela in the eye and tell her that it gets better.

And Michelle? Michelle succumbed to her physical ailments on October 19, 2015. This was shortly after then-governor Rick Scott (now a U.S. senator) made it impossible for her to get the pain-management medications she needed. Today, doctors would view her with suspicion; politicians refer to people dependent on pain-management medications as addicts, and they don’t mean it in a value-neutral way. The rise of American fascism certainly wouldn’t impact her like it did Michaela, but how could I tell her it gets better? How could I tell Michaela that she robbed her future self of potential happiness?

My life stopped on the afternoon of October 24, 2023. I am forever on the phone with my ex-wife, hearing the news. I am consistently astounded when I hear of more recent deaths by suicide, since it does not seem possible that the practice has continued in a world separate from myself. I was utterly flabbergasted when I read the biographical note of another poet who said that her child’s 2024 suicide motivated her to anti-suicide activism. How could a parent have lost their child to suicide more recently than I did? How could said parent ever find anything resembling purpose ever again?

I do not believe I’ve lost my last friend to suicide. I imagine I will suffer acutely for these future suicides, that I will mourn them more acutely, now that I’ve lost my daughter. But I also suffer at the suicide of strangers; I suffer to read of the mom motivated to activism. The unfairness of it rattles me, intellectually and emotionally.

Michaela’s suicide increased my already notable suicidal thoughts. Of course it is impossible to go on without her. I have a wonderful seven-year-old daughter in my current and very happy marriage; I have reasons to live, and count them assiduously. Alas, despite the Book of Job, children are not fungible, and the wound will remain open for the rest of my life. The pain will persist, and might always effect the suicidality of my thinking.

Please don’t read this and call a crisis line. I have a support network of people who care about me. I have an excellent psychiatrist, who has been treating my bipolar disorder for years, and a new and clever therapist who attentively sees me regularly. This may be a plea for understanding, but it is not a cry for help; I get plenty of help.

I describe this to describe my relationship to Stay. If I am more tolerant of Stay’s central argument now than I was in 2013, it is not because I find it more reasonable, but simply that I am older, calmer, and better-medicated.

At the same time, I know—indeed, I always knew—my hostility to Stay was never entirely fair. Oh, maybe it’s fair to roll my eyes at the jacket copy by Billy Collins and David Lehman, or the Yale University Press pedigree. And yes, I absolutely feel there are things the book lacks. But this is an earnest and sincere book, well-organized and readable, about a subject that is fundamentally impossible to approach well. Hecht deserves my respect, though she has not earned (and certainly doesn’t need) my support.

This, obviously, is not a book review in any meaningful or useful sense. This isn’t intended to be a coherent critique or rebuttal, either. Let’s call this document a counterapology, which isn’t a real thing but I wave my poet’s license freely and I’m invoking it here. Stay includes many arguments which I have not tackled here: it is a valuable and intelligent book, and a worthy addition to the soliloquies of the suicidal person, though it strikes me as dangerously incomplete.

I write this essay for purely personal reasons: as an attempt to work through my grief. I suppose I read the book for the same reason. If so, I believe I found that the book served my purpose: it did assist me in my goal of leaning into my grief. It does not make me less inclined to commit suicide, but if it does make someone less so inclined, that’s wonderful, and I hope I would never undermine such an achievement.

To me, there’s something specific in the book that’s missing. The book covers, with insight and detail, reasons to avoid suicide. The book expresses admiration and gratitude for those who have resisted suicidal impulses, saying that the world is better because they are in it. The book states clearly that the author wants you to live, and she wants you to live a long and happy life. And the book, as I’ve repeatedly mentioned, repeatedly orders the reader not to commit suicide.

Unless I’ve very much missed it, the word please does not appear in the book. And while each person’s suicidal ideation is necessarily unique, the lack of this word strikes me as an egregious misunderstanding of, in many cases, the suicidal mind.

So I’ll say it.

If you’re reading this, if you’ve gotten this far, or even if you haven’t read this essay and have, for whatever reason, skipped to the end: please understand that I want you to live. I am not alone in this. Hecht wants you to live. Chances are good that you have loved ones who want you to live, but even if you don’t, know that there are many of us who want you to live.

I have no authority here: moral, intellectual, or otherwise. I know what it’s like to be suicidal, but I don’t know what you’re going through. I cannot promise you that your life will get better. Still I want you to stay, and, whether I know you or not, will miss you if you go.

So please.

Please, please stay.