Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 16:36:18 -0400

A tired middle aged couple stood by the reception desk. They were in jeans and t-shirts and obviously had no normal business there. The woman was explaining "I'm Mrs. Miller. Sherry Reynolds' mother. I need to see her boss - I think his name is Ed Williams." The receptionist looked uneasy.

A while later people started talking in the cubes. One of the new girls in Ed's team had killed herself. No one had known her, but they'd mostly managed to pick up her name and that she was in her early twenties, and she had two or three kids. No one knew any details.

Over and over they said they couldn't understand why someone would do that, how they could. They were as shocked by suicide as by murder, or more so. Even the woman who claimed to have been treated for depression on and off for years proclaimed that she couldn't understand, that she'd never wanted that.

She turned the subject to suicide in general and brought up a musician from the 70s who'd killed himself. "He had everything in front of him. He was on top of the world, he was friends with the *Beatles*. I'll never understand how someone could want to die, especially when they had so much."

Not so goddamned depressed after all, were you, you materialistic bitch.

Even now hardly a day goes by that death doesn't cross my mind. It's rare for me to actively want to kill myself for more than a second or two - long enough that I know better than to allow a gun in the house. I always know that I have that final control over what happens, I can always end it if I need to. I just don't spend days curled up crying, wanting nothing else and unable to leave the house to obtain the means.

I still think it's cruel to prevent prisoners in jail from killing themselves, but I suppose that's the point.

Maybe I'm a snob to think that suicidal tendencies should be a prerequisite to a diagnosis of depression, to think that maybe they would do better to check for thyroid disease when there's no suicical thought. Maybe they should call it something else if you're not suicidal.

I understand that shallow and stupid people can be suicidal, but I can't believe that anyone intelligent wouldn't understand suicide.

I can't imagine being shocked by suicide.

Names clumsily changed out of some vague and misguided idea of ethics.

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