Under what circumstances would you commit suicide?

I've thought about my friend, Doug Stewart, who killed himself at age 32. I've written about him before. He was highly intelligent, and a gifted cellist and writer. At one point, he had gotten into law school, and, later, an MBA program, but he wound up abandoning both. He didn't find them satisfying.

What he was really after--the all-encompassing need that drove him--was to find the boyfriend of his dreams. That male needed to be young and beautiful. It's as if Doug were permanently stuck as a 22-year-old, forever seeking the same: the love of his life, and a rescuer, a knight in shining armor. But reality never turned out to be that good. Ironically, Doug never knew that he, himself, was closest to his own image of the ideal. He was traffic-stoppingly beautiful and his personality naturally produced art. He literally dripped with talent. But none of that mattered to him. He needed to find it in someone else, but despite thinking that he had found it multiple times, he was always let down.

Eventually, he grew isolated, concluded that his life wasn't worth living, and he probably did the same thing as when he had previously attempted suicide: drank antifreeze and went to sleep, slipped into a coma, his kidneys shut down, he stopped breathing, went into cardiac arrest, and died.

He was a close, close, vitally important, larger-than-life friend to me, and completely irreplaceable. And having been through a lot of suffering, myself, I've wondered: under what circumstances would any of us decide to commit suicide? Why would *anyone* who was healthy decide to do so at 32? Had Doug not been the black sheep in his Mormon family (parents and siblings) for being gay, would he still be alive today? Could I have done anything to save him, and had I been able to do so, would he ever have thanked me, or only tried to commit suicide again?

I think that he probably concluded that his life wasn't ever going to get better, but only remain the same--at best. And that meant financial failure (barely surviving), friends who didn't give him what he deeply needed, and, most damningly, no husband. I don't think that he could bear the thought that there might not be a knight in shining armor out there for him.

I think that his great talents isolated him from others. I understood him, and I loved him, but I was far away, and I was only one person--not The One. In retrospect, I was his best friend--always supporting him, always. But that wasn't enough. He only wanted to find The One, he dedicated his entire life to it, and he repeatedly failed despite coming tantalizingly close. But in the end, he was in too much pain (or a sort of numb apathy caused by persistent failure, so as to induce him to not even feel motivated to ever try again) to go on.

I want to believe that he's at peace now, but that may not be the case. Perhaps, if there's an afterlife, he regrets his suicide. And if there's not, then there is no Doug to regret his actions, or feel peace, or torment, or anything else.

Doug committed suicide because he couldn't get what he profoundly needed emotionally: love. Real love. True love. Lasting love. Sustaining love. The absence of love killed him, far more than active hate ever could have.

I remember once when he was looking for an apartment. He had found a place that he went to look at. One of the two (straight) "pretty boys," as he described them, let him in and showed him around. He didn't want future problems, so he mentioned that he was gay and wondered if that would be a problem for them. They dissembled, saying that there was someone else who would probably take the apartment. He said something like, "I guess that's too bad," and left. When he was far enough away, but not too far, they started laughing at him.

This is such a minor scene, and yet I'm quite sure that it repeated itself throughout Doug's life. Even though Doug had many sisters and brothers, and his parents, he was effectively an orphan with no relatives; he was alone. Because he was gay, and anyone who met him would quickly conclude it, there was no hiding for him. He couldn't escape himself. But there was nothing wrong with him. It was society that was prejudiced and hateful, and nothing that we, his friends, could say or do was enough.

If you were gay, and alone--truly and fully alone on your own, without anyone to count on at all--would you be able to last? For how long? What if you wound up homeless and sick? What would there be to live *for*--or rather, *whom* would there be to live for? What purpose would you find in life?

Under what circumstances would you, personally, be driven to suicide?

This is another way of asking, which among your greatest fears, if realized, would make you want to stop living?

Thanks,

Steve