Please Stay - Page 9

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.