Presence and suicide

Suicide paradoxically transforms absence into an overwhelming presence. Grief involves symbolically constructing this absence to rediscover one’s own presence in the world.

The Lack of Presence

A primary idea is that the energy driving suicide stems from an absence within oneself, and that this absence would lead to the obvious conclusion of self-destruction. It is the question of presence for the being who will take their own life. Of course, there is also the subject of absence for those left behind, especially when the absence of the departed was chosen.

The lack of presence can be represented as a mirror:

• before the person’s disappearance, within the person,
• and after the person’s disappearance, within others.

When I speak of “others,” I imply a close bond—familial, friendly, or romantic—and I assume that the suicidal person is engaged in such close relationships.

I think it is somewhat reductive to reduce suicide to a mere individual symptom of the person, a symptom detached from the social system in which they live. As we know, the symptoms of individuals are often the symptoms of the group, with people acting as a form of regulatory instrument for the group through their symptoms.

A Chaos in the Natural Order of Things

Suicide represents a chaos in the natural order of things:

• this chaos was present in the suicidal person and provoked their disappearance from life;
• “it is inherited by those close to them, who are transformed and, above all, gain a new dimension in their identity: that of a porosity between the living and the dead, between the animate and the inanimate” (The Enigma of Mourning by Laurie Laufer, 2006, page 8, introduction by Marie-Josée Mondzain).

The Solution of Guilt

There is, of course, guilt—something I know well, having lost my eldest son to suicide less than three years ago. The great appeal of guilt is that it explains this situation, which is utterly beyond reason. Why did my child choose to leave? If I tell myself, “It’s my fault,” I give meaning to this choice of disappearance, I inscribe it in a coherent narrative, which is reassuring because, at last, this part of the world makes sense. But in doing so, I have actually succumbed to oversimplification and missed the work of mourning—that is, a conscious movement toward self-transformation. This explanation through guilt acts as a screen against grief and removes us from otherness (merging us with the departed), cutting us off from the reality of their disappearance, which always remains unreachable. What must be achieved, it seems to me, is learning to live with the unfathomable mystery, the absence of explanation, the absence of meaning. “Perec does not write to remember; he writes to trace the contours of the forgetting necessary for memory” (Laurie Laufer, The Enigma of Mourning, page 113).

Thus, a truly constructive, life-affirming grief is one that accepts life with absence, while constructing the figure of absence. It is about grief as a radical crossing toward relinquishing the fantasy of omnipotence. Guilt is omnipotence. Shame is omnipotence.

Becoming-Present

For the mourner, the work consists of becoming present to their own life around an absence whose form they must construct. If it were an inner garden, one could imagine a great well built at its center, and as we move through this garden—symbolizing our life—we circle this well, whose depths we have patiently dug, whose walls, aesthetics, and even beauty we have crafted. We have constructed absence within ourselves to be present in our own lives. This well also symbolizes, through its depth into the abyss, the extreme coldness that the bond with the now-absent person has become. We are no longer missed by the dead; “we are deposed as the object of the dead’s desire” (Laurie Laufer, The Enigma of Mourning, page 166). Here, “desire” is understood in the psychoanalytic sense: it concerns the desiring subject, who wishes to live and be in relation, to know how to ask things of others.

Creating a Sepulchral Work

Grief consists of creating a sepulchral work, symbolizing within ourselves through images what we have become. Without this work of creating the other’s tomb within ourselves, we become entirely the sepulcher of absence, as though merged with it. This is why the work of construction is indispensable if we wish to cultivate life. Otherwise, our body, our soul, become death itself. The mourner serves as a tomb for the departed. The mourner thus loses their own death, stripped of its living flesh. The dead, especially if they chose it, become absolutely present in place of the life of those who survive them.

This is an immense paradox because the person who chooses suicide deliberately chooses to absent themselves, and in doing so—likely without intending it—inscribes themselves in an extreme degree of presence in those who remain. They may even be more present in others after death than they were in life. Thus, what we have here is not a mirror but a negative:

• between the choice to leave one’s presence in the world as something black,
• which for others becomes something white, dazzling, blinding—the presence within themselves of absence.

This was not desired by the absent one, who treated, as best they could—like an inept doctor with a “solution”—the symptom of their feeling of impossible presence in the world.

The Final Solution

The suicide was alone in their act, and most often, they carry it out in secrecy; their body is discovered afterward. It is very rare for loved ones to support them in their path toward ending their life, though it can happen—and is desirable in cases of end-of-life suffering, often for the elderly in unbearable pain. In such cases, we no longer speak of suicide but of assisted death.

The suicidal person seeks to provide a definitive curative treatment for the suffering of their presence in the world. It is perfect solutionism.

The point here is not to sketch the fantasy of an understanding that might have allowed for better suicide prevention—nor, on a personal level, the prevention of my son’s suicide—because such an endeavor would be even worse than the path of guilt: it would be the fantasy of being able to turn back time or to help others because one failed to help their loved one; it would also echo the “solution” found by the suicide, by wanting to provide, afterward, a “solution” so that others might not take their own lives or do so less often. Morbidity lies in the fantasy of a solution.

Of course, suicide prevention is important, and it is entirely useful for psychologists to work on the subject. But when one finds themselves after a suicide—and this is where I position myself here (not to be confused with before a suicide, as these are two entirely foreign places)—what must be embraced is the construction of the absent one’s sepulcher within oneself to become present to oneself again. And in doing so, in that black hole of the well we have built within ourselves, to know that there, presence and absence merge and dance together forever in suicide.