15-year-old girl, Mannik Murphy, threw herself in front of a train recently, just after receiving her excellent Junior Cert results. She left a note. Apparently with everything to live for, bright and popular and pretty, her family have asked for privacy and so this writer is inclined to respect that. Press intrusion over the details of such a tragedy only adds trauma to grief. I have a contact at the school, but the prospect of picking up the phone and quizzing her about what happened, to get the “scoop”, makes me feel ill. It would be second nature to an investigative journalist, I’m sure, but my skin just isn’t that thick. I would have to have an exaggerated sense of my own self-importance to wade into the turbulent stormy waters of grief and ignore the buffeting and the suspicion and the exhaustion and the confusion, just to get at the “truth”.

There is no “truth” when it comes to understanding the motives for suicide. It’s a wretched business, purely speculative, and no one can reach any solid conclusions because the violence of the act leaves everyone close so traumatised, and, of course, the aggressor is not around to explain his or her motives. I say “aggressor” deliberately, because suicide punches a hole in the fabric of the consensus to which we all cling, with various degrees of effort: that life is precious and worth preserving at all costs.
We don’t have to be a signed-up Freudian to recognise that thanatos, the death wish, rumbles around in our psyches more often than we care to admit. Those frightened of heights are not so much scared of falling, but of the awareness that some part of them wants to fall, to jump. Those who buy packets of cigarettes wilfully ignore the words “SMOKING KILLS” every day. The death wish can manifest in a subtler way, through neglect; those who overeat and find themselves becoming obese, putting a strain on their heart and not really finding the will to diet, or those who starve themselves or are anorexic or bulimic. Those who get addicted to something, however harmless in small doses, find themselves centring their lives on something that is the opposite of engaging with life. Addiction has its root in a desire to manage feelings, to dam the flood of emotions that threaten to overwhelm our rationality, our stability, our sense of well-being. It’s present in those who get a little bit too drunk and ending up having unsafe sex with someone they don’t know. And in those who endure endless levels of stress at work or at home and do nothing about it, and end up with a heart attack at the age of 50. All of us, at some stage, have been through phases in our lives where life doesn’t feel worth living, even if it’s just the passivity of waking up in the morning and just not being bothered about carrying on with the day.
When someone acts on that deathwish, we are confronted violently with our own, and that is a nauseating, disturbing experience. Those who loved the person who has died inevitably feel responsible, racked with guilt, driven to distraction wondering if there was anything that they could have done to avert it. The sad truth of it is that, despite everything we are taught, despite the conceit in the West that preserving life is our main priority, we learn each time someone takes their life that there can be a greater, darker force, one of a fierce, almost tyrannical, individualism. It is the most powerful expression of the desire to take control over our feelings, to extinguish that which we cannot tolerate any more. Paradoxically, it is the ultimate expression of control over life.
The other paradox with suicide is that it is not the person who takes their own life that, necessarily, suffers. We can speculate at the struggle that led them to such a drastic act, and we can learn from those who have threatened suicide, who are dealing with depression or other existential crises, to examine at the rocky terrain that leads up to the final act. At heart, there is a monstrous obsession with one’s own pain, to the exclusion of all others. There may be cries for help, self-harming or talk of losing the will to live, or, indeed, unsuccessful attempts. They should always be taken seriously. For, as much as we may “tut tut” and dismiss such attempts as “attention seeking” or self-inflicted - especially in adolescence - the truth is, in my experience, that someone who is calling out for attention to their pain is demanding that everyone in their family address a similar pain, which is often so frightening that few dare to wade into those shark-infested waters of the unconscious. The person who is acting out becomes the one with the problem, the sick one, the disturbed one, while the rest of the family, with the best will in the world, fail to grasp the nettle for themselves. This is not to attribute blame to families - far from it - this is to point out that in our society we are deeply uncomfortable with allowing the expression of disturbing feelings, and we are loath to acknowledge the relational matrix that connects us like a web. Death, or the threat of it, is sometimes what it takes to call attention to what is wrong in a social system - whether that be a relationship, a family, a community or a society. And what is wrong is usually an imbalance, rather than a matter of culpability; an (all too human) desire not to deal with savagely uncomfortable feelings.
“Why did she do it?” blares the headline in the Evening Herald in front of me, as I write. Her letter may offer a clue, and I understand it to be heart-breaking, but it is but one piece of the jigsaw of evidence. What’s missing is an understanding of the emotional turmoil that led up to the cold, clear decision, the process that led her to conclude that one shocking statement, one lament, would suffice. One of the most unsettling things that her family and friends will have to face is their rage at the choice she has made, how she (through whatever logic she employed) came to such a decision, to disregard the pain she would cause them. I believe it to be one of the most harrowing experiences of life. I hope they manage to find some peace of mind, and forgive themselves - and her.