Breaking the silence on suicide.

The article about “Breaking the silence on suicide” made me think about family and life.

Elaine, 54, struggled to let her son, Zen, 17, go when he took his own life while studying in Melbourne. Zen passed away on 1 Oct 2018. 

What is perplexing about Zen’s case is that before his passing, Elaine described her son as being his “usual loving self”. 

Elaine in fact flew to Melbourne to be with him on 27 Sept (about one day before he took his own life). They had dinner together and it was his favourite meal, steak. They had a hearty chat and Zen told his mother that he wanted to go to the gym that night. 

When they parted ways, Elaine even planned to take him and his buddies out while she is in town. 

However, a few hours later, at 1:30 am, Elaine (who was staying in a hotel) received a call from the accommodations manager where Zen resided. She rushed down to his residence and performed CPR on Zen until the paramedics arrived. 

Upon admission, Elaine was cuddling “her son as he convulsed with seizures on the hospital bed.”

Zen was hospitalised for three days and Elaine was by his side. As she scrolled through the messages on his phone, she realised that Zen had been planning his suicide a few days before. 

He even told the recipients what he intended to do. Unfortunately, no one alerted her about it.

The last time Elaine spoke to her son were these words: -

“I thanked him for choosing me to be his mummy for the past 17 years and 11 months...I told him mummy forgives him and asked him to forgive me too. Tears were rolling down his checks and that night, he was brain dead.” 

On 1 October last year, Zen’s parents decided to donate his organs to six recipients. 

After his passing, Elaine started a Zen Dylan Koh Fund “in partnership with non-profit organisation Limitless, to raise funds to counsel vulnerable youth.”

She also got a tattoo (her first) on her forearms, and said that “when she holds herself, it feels as if he is comforting her.”

And every evening without fail, she and her husband would light a candle for Zen. She said: “Even if we’re travelling, we will light a candle for as long as we live.”

Lesson? ...

How does a parent let go of a life she has nurtured from the start in her womb? 

I have written about a mother’s love before and now I am contemplating about the struggles to go on living. 

I recall Arnold Toynbee once wrote: “The sting of death is always less sharp for the person who dies than it is for the bereaved survivors...that’s the capital fact about the relations between living and dying. There are two parties to the suffering that death inflicts, and, in the apportionment if this suffering, the survivor takes the brunt.”

The grief and guilt are that brunt a parent has to bear, and Elaine felt both immeasurably. 

On his 18th birthday, a month after he took his life, Elaine wrote a letter to Zen asking for forgiveness “for the genes she had passed to him. She has found out that eight relatives in her family tree had mental illness of some kind.”

Alas, who is to fathom the cause or causes of suicide? Who has the mortal tools to measure the turbulence of the heart being bombarded by the circumstances of life? 

Even when Zen was in school, his parents had found “scalpel blades in his room”. 

They took him to see a psychiatrist and was diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder and later, Generalised Anxiety Disorder. Zen was also on medication. 

As a parent, there is always this hope that if you can be with your vulnerable child at the right time and at the right place, assuring him that things will turn out alright, you can save him from himself. In the same way you had preserved him in your womb, you strive to do the same in his life. 

But, when is your child’s breaking point then? When is the exact moment when his resolve to live turns insidiously into a commitment to die? Is it a wide, temporal gap where the death wish takes time and courage to process? 

Or is it a split second decision that ominously tilts the balance because the weight of his mortal anguish accumulates silently, most time, invisibly, over time? 

Those alive are left to grapple with those questions for life, and this is what Toynbee meant by the one-sided apportionment of suffering between the living and dying that death inflicts. 

Kay Redfield Jamison wrote: “Death by suicide is not a gentle deathbed gathering: it rips apart lives and beliefs, and it sets its survivors on a prolonged and devastating journey. The core of this journey has been described as an agonizing questioning, a tendency to ask repeatedly why the suicide occurred and what its meaning should be for those who are left.” (“Night Falls Fast”).

Let me end by repeating Elaine’s words to her son at his deathbed. “I thanked him for choosing me to be his mummy for the past 17 years and 11 months.”

I believe that is the only way to go on living, that is, to live with the memory of a life once lived and loved deeply. This love is the candle that is lit for Zen and its meaning is in the flame that can never be extinguished in the hearts of his loved ones for as long as they shall live.