An Unexplained Death. Mikita Brottman

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      The phone call on Tuesday, May 16, that caused Rivera to leave home in a hurry was from somebody at Agora, the umbrella organization of which the Oxford Club was a subsidiary. At the time, Agora used a business line that diverted all its connections to a single number, so it is impossible to know who placed the call. No one at Agora admits to calling or meeting with Rivera that day, although the company’s phone records for that day show five calls to Rivera’s number. To all appearances, Rey rushed off because he was late to a meeting. If so, it must have been pretty informal, or a meeting with someone he knew well, since he was wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops.

      After Rey’s death, employees at Agora were instructed not to speak about the matter to the police. They were protected by the company’s lawyers. Allison never learned who placed that final call.

      According to NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness), 90 percent of suicide “completers” display evidence of a diagnosable mental disorder. I am constitutionally skeptical of statistics, and I would certainly not trust any claims made on behalf of suicide “completers.” Since the questions must have been asked after the suicides were “completed,” who is being consulted about “displays of evidence”—the suicide’s family and friends? To me, the conclusions drawn from this “data” are indicative of the paradox at the heart of the issue: the fact that a person commits suicide has come to be regarded, retroactively, as a symptom of mental illness—rather than, for example, an expression of personal will.

      In contrast, people in some cultures consider suicide to be a morally responsible act when the alternative will bring shame or suffering to others. Such cultures do not consider individuals as beings with an existence separate from those of their families, as we do in the West. Japan is perhaps the best-known example of a culture in which even today, people are, for the most part, deeply tied to either their family or their business—and men, Japan’s most common suicide victims, are often joined tightly to both. In Japan, what happens to you happens to your family and the organization you work for, and so if you have done something that causes public shame—if you have stolen company money to cover gambling debts, for example, or paid money to prostitutes— suicide may be considered preferable to inflicting your shame on your family and your business. In such situations, suicide would not be regarded as a sin; on the contrary, it is often seen as a way to restore and make restitution to the family and the company. In some cases, it may even be considered the natural and morally responsible action, just as we in the West expect that someone who has experienced the death of a close relative will want to take time off from work to grieve their loss.

      Although things are slowly changing, large Japanese cities still have problems with public suicides, especially on the subway. In Tokyo, at least one person every day throws himself on the tracks. When this happens, the words that appear on the screen on the platform announcing the reason for the delay are jinshin jiko, which translates as “human accident.” Such suicides are so common that they have become an inevitable part of the daily commute, hardly worth grumbling about.

      Japan Rail has tried to discourage jinshin jiko in various ways, such as undermining the family honor rationale by introducing a rule that the suicide’s family is charged an enormous fine to compensate for commuter delays—a sum that would be financially devastating if it had to be paid all at once (fortunately, it can be paid in installments). Other disincentives include platform barriers, telephone hotlines, emergency buttons by the tracks, soothing blue lights, even softly lit photographs of kittens; yet jinshin jiko goes on as before. People with a profound and constant desire to end their lives will manage to find a way, even in a closely guarded prison cell. Surely this shows us that suicide is not always an irrational act.

      Even here in the United States, at least six states have now legalized physician-assisted suicide, confirming that death is an acceptable choice for anyone with a degenerative illness, in chronic pain, or otherwise unable to enjoy a decent quality of life—which cannot be measured only in terms of physical health. Those whose bodies are still robust and who seem fully engaged in the world may nevertheless be experiencing great psychological pain. Medication and therapy can go only so far.

      Interestingly, when it comes to suicide, all the medical examiner needs to prove is that the person caused their own death; no motive need be established. The same is true in legal terms. A motive for suicide, while useful, is not necessary. It is not the job of medical examiners or attorneys to concern themselves with the psychological disposition of the decedent. If a motive is not obvious, they do not need to find one. It is, to put it crassly, none of their business. A 1947 article in the Yale Law Journal by Orville Richardson and Herbert S. Breyfogle reminds us that in distinguishing suicide from accident, motive is irrelevant. “The springs of human action are often hidden,” conclude the authors, “and are of such obscure origin that not even a psychiatrist with the full and voluntary cooperation of his patient can find them.”

      Rey Rivera died in the middle of May. Most people assume the absence of sunshine triggers suicide risk. Winter can certainly be depressing, but it is indisputable that suicide rates worldwide increase significantly as soon as winter is over. From the cold depths of hibernation, it is common for the depressed to become so numb they cannot feel what Freud calls the “ordinary unhappiness” of daily life—they cannot mourn, grieve, or cry. They are on ice. When the winter comes to an end, however, the frozen depths begin, very slowly, to melt. Forgotten memories emerge. Old desires resurface. Movement and action are possible. “The bright day brings forth the adder.”

      Spring is the real suicide season.

      If Rey Rivera killed himself, it means he went from rushing to finish editing a video and making plans for the weekend, to suddenly deciding to jump off a very high building.

      Is there such a thing as impulsive suicide? Do people really kill themselves suddenly and spontaneously, out of the blue? Those who study the subject believe so; they call this type of death the Richard Cory suicide, after Edwin Arlington Robinson’s famous poem. The Richard Cory suicide is considered to be the act of a supreme narcissist, a person who cannot admit, even to himself, that everything in his life has gone awry. The grandiose and mysterious final gesture thereby performs a kind of alchemy, transforming passive humiliation into an active mastery of the situation.

      On an Internet suicide grief support forum, I found accounts of some of these Richard Cory suicides. At least, they were reports of people who apparently committed suicide abruptly and unexpectedly, in the middle of what appeared to be an otherwise ordinary day. One man wrote that his partner woke up late, realized she’d missed an important meeting, called in sick to work, showered, had lunch, and then hanged herself. A woman described how her father put laundry in the dryer then lined the stairs with masking tape, as if making ready to paint them, then changed his mind and hanged himself instead. Some accounts, more specific, led me to newspaper articles, Facebook pages, and memorial websites, where I learned about these perplexing deaths in more detail.

      On December 18, 2010, Miss P., a popular and successful twenty-seven-year-old investment banker and charity worker, left her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan early in the morning and walked sixteen blocks north to 180 Riverside. Surveillance video showed her entering the building dressed in Ugg boots and a winter jacket. She got into the elevator along with a woman who’d just returned from walking her dog. Miss P., who seemed alert and aware, asked the woman how to get to the roof of the building. The woman told her. At 8:13 a.m., Miss P.’s body was found in an interior courtyard; she was pronounced dead at the scene. She left no note. Friends and family say Miss P. was bright, attractive, ambitious, and well loved, and that she always appeared to be in high spirits. The day of her suicide, she’d planned to meet a close friend for brunch. “It’s like something just changed overnight,” said the friend.

      On Tuesday, July 1, 2014, around nine in the morning, a number of people saw a man jumping from the Tobin Bridge in Boston. The jumper was reported on various СКАЧАТЬ