David Hernandez
A View of the Tragic Play of Suicide From the Gallery is a drama we see or read about in our daily lives. Sometimes we get most or all the necessary details about the life just lost from the media, but rarely do we get the inner drama of the person who lived the drama live with all its daily torture, usually hidden from the people who will soon be the spectators having to live the afterglow now as the curtain has fallen on the darkened stage. Those saddened spectators will be the loved ones who must now feel and live with the specter of the lost body and soul of a relative or beloved friend. Those who cared are left with the empty wonder, why? That why? might have been answered just a few days before the final resolution was made. There are always reasons and explanations, often not understood even by the victim. Victim? Who else is the prime victim when a man puts a bullet in his brain, slits his wrists, or leaps out of a 20-story window? But suicide may take many other forms, and most of the time we may not even know that suicide has anything to do with a person dying. We often do not think of suicide when a coroner gives a 'reason for death.' What is rarely given in most cases is that the heart had nothing to do with the victim’s death, except as an incidental 'cause,' for instance, in the case of someone like the famous actor John Barrymore, whom everyone knew from his early career that he was drinking himself to death, as did his doppelganger, Errol Flynn, who drank as many toasts to suicidal health as did his mirror image. Why suicide? Simply because just as the fellow who puts his shotgun in his mouth and blows the top of his head off, as Ernest Hemingway did, knows that he is not going to live through such a jolly gesture, so too does the fellow chain-drinking know his liver and other organs are going to burn out and end his life early, including his heart that accompany them. That is attenuating (slow) suicide, as surely as chain-smoking going to 3
