I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening.

When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting

I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.

...Time does not heal, It makes a half-stitched scar That can be broken and again you feel Grief as total as in its first hour. -Elizabeth Jennings

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)