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To my students in the “Literary Creation” course at Prepa Tec in Metepec.
I am writing this on the evening of September 10, World Suicide Prevention Day. Recently, I dedicated a couple of sessions to discussing the subject with my students in the “Literary Creation” class in Prepa Tec high school. This afternoon, we finished an installation with some texts that we wrote ourselves. Obviously, we did not intend to express all our ideas and sensations on the matter -far from it – but we examined some fundamental questions such as whether it is possible to realize when someone is considering taking their own life, if we can really help someone who is experiencing a deep depression, if among us in class, someone perhaps is hiding an excruciating pain invisible to others, and if we would qualify suicide as something bad.
Along with these reflections, we read, as I say, our own texts and commented on them.
Maybe at some point we’ll try to post some of these texts and reflections. Today I only want to evoke here the collage of impressions that these readings left me: the image of a man whose mask, instead of preventing him from being seen, prevents him from seeing others; a shadow that, in the midst of silence, chooses to be extinguished; a swordsman who, engaging in a collective slaughter, is ashamed to trip over a stone; a woman who is dragged by the waves far from the beach, and from there, before dying, stops to contemplate other tourists in the distance enjoying the sand: seconds that weigh, incomplete breaths, objects that look at death with the same hunger as hers… And other phrases tossed about: “My sweet death, only you understand what it is to sigh with air you do not want”… “Your heart plans to suffocate you while you sleep”… “Only the wind understands what it is not to stop”… “The bottom: I have never seen it up close; I have only come to feel excessively sad”… “Inside I already lost”… “I am my own beautiful disaster”… “This light is you”… “Keep shining”… “I am possible”… “If the night would shine all night…”
All of this was written by my first-, third-, and fifth-semester high school students. I feel proud and hopeful, highlighting it. For my part, I participated by coordinating the conversation, asking questions, and sharing my opinions alongside theirs. However, I don’t know why I suddenly concentrated on a point which, when I mentioned it, seemed to me a little off topic, and which, nevertheless, I return to here. I do not present it as a personal conclusion about suicide, but as one of the lines of thought – perhaps tangential – that the sad affair presents to us (although, as always, maybe the secondary leads us to something primary).
Thus, I found myself asking my students if they believed that certain behaviors such as smoking, alcoholism, and drug addiction in youth can be considered self-destructive behaviors -and, in that sense, suicidal- or are they manifestations of something different, perhaps the obligation to comply with a rite of passage where the young person must show that they deserve to enter adult life.
Perhaps it would be fascinating to explore the ideas of my students in this regard, but the truth is that the conversation ended somewhat inconclusively, and we did not advance much along that route. For me, however, the subject drew me further, reminding me of a short essay I wrote several years ago, which I ended up reading to them after mentioning some data I had collected more recently while working on a book about preventing traffic accidents. The document noted that during the previous year, at least 60 young people had died in car crashes on the Mexico-Cuernavaca highway, which was equivalent, the text said, to the students of two high school classes, all deceased. (I imagine that today the figures retain the same proportion, if not increased). The question I asked the class, then, was whether the reckless driving of many young people could be associated with self-destruction.
We didn’t make much progress on this matter either (I suppose, as before, due to the embarrassment it caused in my young listeners), and I proceeded to read my own text.
In this, I shared something that will undoubtedly also shake you now, dear readers (many of you will recognize yourselves in one way or another in it). It was what happened to my friend Roberto Noriega while he was traveling on the Mexico-Cuernavaca highway, in this case, not the autopista but the federal highway, which has only two lanes, flowing in opposite directions. He was as calm as ever when a car coming in the opposite lane decided to pass another vehicle and came directly toward my friend’s, straight on. Roberto waited, hoping that when the other driver saw the situation, he would drop back to his previous position, but he didn’t; he kept coming. Roberto waited until the last moment, and in the end, he could only make an avoiding swerve that threw him into the ditch and against the embankment. The other car passed and continued on its way.
My friend’s vehicle was destroyed. Soon, Roberto received a visit from the highway patrol. One of the officers, realizing what had happened, congratulated my friend for his prudence: “Sir, you don’t know how many deaths occur because many drivers pass in that same unwary way, and those who run into them head-on do not pull aside, as if to prove that the other must be the one to move away. Many kill themselves and their entire family.”
Suicide? To me – I also wrote it in my text – this lurid anecdote reminded me of the story of Oedipus, “who was going in his chariot and came face to face, at a crossroads, with that of the old king Laius. The two men argued over who should go first and ended up fighting. In the end, Oedipus killed his rival without realizing that it was his own father he was killing.”
If I continue associating ideas, it leads me to the psychoanalytic proposal (unprovable, but lucid) that the suicidal act is an attempt to have “the last word” (that is, the last word in an argument with someone who lives inside us and who refutes us repeatedly, relentlessly, to the point of humiliation: that someone may well coincide with the figure of the father or mother).
Perhaps this description does not fit all suicides, but it is undoubtedly a hypothesis that helps, in our case. Crashing head-on into a car that doesn’t want to back off – isn’t that an explicit way of having the last word? And we must admit that this degree of desperation cannot be directed only at the stranger coming toward us. In that car seems to come the shadow of someone more powerful, someone for whom revenge is more important than our own life.
(Let me suddenly apply the brakes. All this sounds too macho not to wonder if women react the same as men, and this not only on the road but also when they take their lives directly: with their deaths, are they also trying to have the last word, at least in some cases?)
With all this, my conclusion is that (sometimes, I insist) both suicide and violence towards others can be ways of imposing our criteria, perhaps as a result of feeling unbearably subjugated by someone. Possibly, (this leads into a critique of the patriarchal), even the famous rites of passage, which seem to us “understandable and natural,” are no longer anything but a submission, a humiliating challenge to prove that one’s word is valid. Thus, alcoholism at an early age, drug addiction, and even smoking, could be opting for self-destruction rather than allowing the humiliation of not being taken into account.
From this perspective, if it is a question of preventing suicide, there is no other way: as parents, as teachers, we must stop demanding that our sons and daughters, that our students, demonstrate (as they do, sometimes desperately) that they deserve to belong to our world (a world – returning to the texts of my students – of assassins ashamed to be seen tripping, shadows that choose to self-extinguish, people who die while seeing others enjoy life).
Our world! It is urgent to show our young people that we are capable of renouncing the need always to be right, and that it is vital to embrace them regardless of how they are.
Our world, where it is time to accept that they are the ones, still alive, who have the last word.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
