Édouard Levé - Suicide

You did not have children. Your wife had asked you if you wanted any. You didn’t feel ready yet, and you didn’t know if you ever would be. To procreate was such an important and such a mysterious act that you did not believe yourself capable of doing it wisely. You had to accept not being able to measure up to your capacity to transmit life. You did not think that, when they conceived you, your parents were any more reasonable than you currently were. Guessing at the selfishness and the levity of their decision distressed you. So you came to believe that you had been less desired for what you were than for what they imagined you would be. You felt like an impostor, because you knew that, though you had not disappointed them, you never resembled the dreams they had built around you. However, you did not know anything about these dreams, since you had never asked your parents to tell you about them. Why have a child? In order to prolong life, and for the sake of curiosity about what your offspring might look like. You reached a point of thinking that the life you were leading was not worth prolonging. But your child would not be you. It would be itself. There was no reason to believe that you would pass your sadness on to it. Might it not be, on the contrary, destined for happiness? Yet, rather than giving your wife an answer, you remained evasive. Awaiting an enthusiasm you did not show, she took your silence for a refusal. You died without descendents.

As my thoughts turn to you again, I do not suffer. I do not miss you. You are more present in my memory than you were in the life we shared. If you were still alive, you would perhaps have become a stranger to me. Dead, you are as alive as you are vivid.

Your desire to die was less strong at night than during the day and less strong in the morning than in the afternoon.

You did not leave a letter to those close to you, explaining your death. Did you know why you wanted to die? If you did, why not write it down? Out of fatigue from living and disdain for leaving traces that would survive you? Or because the reasons that were pushing you to disappear seemed empty? Maybe you wanted to preserve the mystery of your death, thinking that nothing should be explained. Are there good reasons for committing suicide? Those who survived you asked themselves these questions; they will not find answers.

Your mother cried for you when she learned of your death. She cried for you every day until your burial. She cried for you alone, in her husband’s arms, in the arms of your brother and your sister, in the arms of her mother and your wife. She cried for you during the ceremony, following your coffin to the cemetery, and during your inhumation. When friends, many of them, came to present their condolences, she cried for you. With every hand that she shook, with every kiss she received, she again saw fragments of your past, of the days she believed you to be happy. Faced with your death, scenarios of what you could have lived or experienced with these people, gave them a feeling of immense loss: you had, by your suicide, saddened your past and abolished your future. Your mother cried for you in the days following your funeral, and she cried for you again, alone, whenever she thought of you. Years later, there are many, like her, whose tears flow whenever they think of you.

Regrets? You had some for causing the sadness of those who cried for you, for the love they felt for you, and which you had returned. You had some for the solitude in which you left your wife, and for the emptiness your loved ones would experience. But these regrets you felt merely in anticipation. They would disappear along with you: your survivors would be alone in carrying the pain of your death. This selfishness of your suicide displeased you. But, all things considered, the lull of death won out over life’s painful commotion.

You wrote a collection of verses, brief and condensed, like your life. You told nobody about them. Your wife discovered them after your death in your desk drawer: