It’s likely that a sizable fraction of people reading this have had suicidal thoughts. That doesn’t mean you are weird or have a mental problem. It means that at some point, things just no longer made sense. Resigning from life may seem to make sense. 

​It’s been a while since I was a young man. When I was, Iwas smart, uncertain of what life was all about, with a wobbly self-confidence. I had a tendency to fall in love but was way too shy to let my feelings be known. I think that like a lot of young people, then and now, confused lust with love.

​It wasn’t just that. I went from a conservative, not-very religious, loving and thoroughly racist family to one of the livelier liberal arts colleges in the country. I met and became friends with people from all over the country, who were from a much different background than my Ohio working class family background (my father was a high school dropout). I became friends with a gay guy who was a good man, no different from me save his taste in sex.

​But I had an increasingly difficult time understanding how things could have happened. How did the Germany of Bach and Beethoven come to build death camps? How did socialism go so wrong and the land of Tolstoy come under Stalin’s rule? How did my country with its dream of all people being created equal, how did it come to spawn such hatred for people of color for so long? And how could loving people like my family contain at its heart not just love, but be comfortable with views I could no longer hold?

​How could the world hold so much hate and allow so much misery? How could there be a God who allowed the Holocaust the KKK? So I searched my soul and searched for God and for meaning. I found no answers. I came to feel that life was meaningless. That’s when I started thinking about why bother living if it’s all meaningless?

​So how could I end it all? I had this problem. I don’t much like pain, so stepping out in traffic didn’t seem like much of an option. Ohio is flat and jumping off a bridge would just get me wet and bruised and embarrassed among the frogs. I had no access to a gun, and a splotty mess didn’t seem to be the way to go.

​That isn’t what stopped me. I got to thinking that suicide was selfish. My mom and dad had gone through hard times butkept on going anyway and sacrificed for me. If I committed suicide, that was no way to honor their achievement of getting me into college, the first man in the family to complete high school. I thought about the grief it would have caused my mother, one of the most wonderful people I have ever known. 

I thought about my grandfather, the editor of a weekly newspaper in the Virginia mountains, who had dealt with daily pain for years, and yet did his best to carry on his work in the profession he loved and for the people he served. And while it may seem kind of presumptuous, I thought about what it meant to give up: if you give up because you have no hope, how can what hope there is in the world survive? It seemed sort of selfish to not use what ability I have to make things better.

That’s part of it. You owe the people who came before the obligation to at least make the attempt to make the world better. You owe your family the obligation to do the best you can. You may not succeed but at least need to try.

There’s more. You owe yourself the chance to try. Trying to make the world a better place. Trying to find and give love. Trying to understand that evil exists but so does compassion. Suicide is a coward’s way out. Suicide is a sign of weakness. The universe needs you.

I had the luck to spend summers for years with my grandparents in extremely rural Appalachia. I went to sleep wrapped in the hooting of owls, the chorus of cicadas and crickets, and an insistent rippling from a river just below the ridge their house was on. Nature is healing, and one of the reasons we are here, I think, is to listen to the owls and the crickets, to listen to the river murmur, to feel the warmth of the morning sun on our skin.

This is not so easy to explain. But to me, one of the main purposes I have found in my life is to be a witness. To listen to those owls when I can. To feel that morning sun. To see the shapes the clouds make. To watch the shadows lengthen as the sun goes down. To hear the crunch of snow under my feet. 

The universe is vast beyond our comprehension. It is stark, lonely and cruel. Our small blue dot of a planet is lost in its immensity, But we have the ability to look out at the stars at night, to see a picture from the Hubble telescope and feel awe at the primeval magnificence of it.

That’s part of what made me decide to not kill myself. The fact it would make some of the people I cared for miserable. The fact that tomorrow is an adventure I would have missed. The fact the universe is magnificent, but we may be the only witnesses to its glory. You can see the universe. It can’t see you.For me, that is the basic power of life.

Continuing to live may bring pain. So what? That comes with the territory. People have been coping with the feeling that life is meaningless for many many generations. Having occasional doubt is entirely normal. The interplay of sadness and sunlight is in all of our lives. Choosing to work through the pain is worth it. All I can say is trust me on this. Someday you may see the universe reflected in your lover’s eyes. That’s why staying on the planet is worth it.

Wisdom of some sort eventually comes to all of us. Life will seem worth living, if only because it is life and we’re part of it all. The grim reaper will ring everybody’s doorbell soon enough, there’s no point in sending him an invitation.

Deep knowledge, every day.
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