Choosing Death, Every Day
Discussing a recent death by suicide, I found myself less certain than I expected, not only about what had happened but also about how to think about it at all. We often reach for explanations. We say it’s pressure, pain, or a chain of events. But I couldn’t see how any external difficulty could lead to a point where life itself becomes unbearable. That gap, between what is visible and what is lived internally, is where my confusion sits.
I have kept using the phrase “c*mmitting suicide,” even as the language shifts towards “death by suicide.” I understand why the shift is happening. It seeks to hold compassion where judgement has often been quick. Still, I am not yet settled on what it means to speak of suicide as something that happens to a person, rather than something a person does. The act remains stark as “taking one’s own life.” But our framing is changing, and I am still working through what that change asks of how we think about responsibility, pain, and agency.
Life can become difficult, unwholesome, and even disfiguring. There are forms of suffering that compress a person inwardly in ways that are not obvious from the outside. That much is clear. But it has also seemed to me that the certainty of death, the fact that it will come without our invitation, should press us towards enduring life rather than hastening its end. I admit this is easy to say from the outside of another person’s experience. It is harder to say what it means from within it.
Suicide is about choosing the convenience of death over the inconvenience of living.
At some point in that conversation, I said that suicide is about choosing the convenience of death over the inconvenience of living. It sounded unempathetic. Even now, it might still. But I have not been able to discard it, because the pattern it points to does not begin or end with suicide.
Every day, individually and collectively, we make choices… choosing either the convenience of dying or the inconvenience of living. Not always in the final sense, but in fragments and instalments so small we neither notice nor name them.
When one embraces excess, overeating or overdrinking without care, indulgence without restraint, one is, in some measure, choosing the convenience of dying over the inconvenience of living, which would demand discipline, moderation, and movement. When one gives oneself over to habits and impulses that offer immediate pleasure but erode the self, whether through excess, dishonesty, betrayal, or neglect, one again chooses what is easy now over what sustains life later. These are not dramatic acts, but they move in a direction. And direction matters.
This is not the same as suicide. It is not equal to it, and it should not be reduced to it. But it is not unrelated. It reveals a habit of choosing relief over responsibility, ease over endurance, and the present moment over the longer arc of a life.
Every day, individually and collectively, we make choices… choosing either the convenience of dying or the inconvenience of living.
The same pattern appears across our lives. To be diligent is inconvenient. To be honest when dishonesty would profit is inconvenient. To remain faithful, accountable, and patient is inconvenient. To pursue something uncertain, to build slowly, and to endure the tension between where one is and where one hopes to be is inconvenient. And so, often, we choose what stabilises the moment rather than what strengthens the life. That choice is understandable. It is also consequential.
Because a life is not shaped only by its crises but, more persistently, by its permissions – what we allow ourselves to avoid, postpone, or excuse.
That realisation turned the thought back on me, more sharply than I had expected.
If the pattern is real, it is not something I observe from a distance. It is something I participate in through small decisions, repeated compromises, and the quiet preference for what costs less now but exacts a higher price later.
Direction, over time, becomes destination.
The question is no longer abstract: Where, exactly, am I choosing the convenience of dying over the inconvenience of living? And if I am honest, how often?
It is tempting to reserve serious language for serious acts, to speak of life and death only at their extremes. But perhaps that is part of how we avoid seeing the continuity between them. The final act shocks us. The preceding pattern rarely does.
This is not an attempt to explain suicide. It is certainly not an attempt to reduce it. It is an attempt to take seriously the idea that the way we live day to day, what we choose, what we avoid, and what we justify, has a direction to it. And direction, over time, becomes destination.
Which leaves me with a harder question than the one I began with: not only how someone arrives at the end of their life, but how I am, in quieter ways, arriving at mine.
- By Constant Ngozi Ozurumba, Founder, ManAnew Life Empowerment Foundation
Feature Image: by Deborah Ranzetta on Unsplash / Inset image: by Mohammed Mohammed from Pixabay
