It is agonising to read about a person driven to so much despair that they end up taking their own life. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business tycoon dealing with a massive business downturn, or a beauty queen who pushes her child from a highrise before jumping off herself, presumably after a matrimonial dispute.

Suicide works for no one, not even for you if it is you who are thinking of taking your own life.

Forget about it working for your parents or your spouse.

Forget about it working for your children or your friends; your love or your ex; your colleagues and relatives; your neighbours and their dogs.

Forget that it would work for your pets and your plants; your vendors and your clients; your bankers and your lenders.

Forget about it working for your Doodhwala and your Newspaperwala.

Most of them would mourn your death.

Quite a few would call you weak and a few among them would also curse you and call you selfish to the core.

Then there are others who would call you an escapist who made a mess and left it for those who would need to clean up behind you.

Your parents, if they love you, would also consider suicide and so would your spouse. Remember they would not know whether to have pity on you or be angry at you. They would have extreme mood swings and their mood swings would challenge many. Their lives would change forever for worse. Their meals won’t be the same and neither would be their outings or the side of the bed where you snuggled close to them nor the morning bye or the evening Hi!

Your kids would learn that it is an option because you, whom they loved immensely and looked up to, opted for it.  When in a tight spot, your much-loved kids may choose to follow you. You would have taken away their Birthdays, PTMs, Picnics, Friends Homework, Play Sessions, Good Nights, Good Mornings, Gifts, Photographs. They would not know whether to thank you for bringing them to this life or to blame you for leaving them all messed up. The colour in their clothes and the flavour in their food would vanish. Someone would surely walk by their side in the aisle on their marriage. But your exit, rather than the marriage, would be on their minds.

Your friends would be in a dilemma. They would have shared a lot of pain and sorrow with you, they would have invested a lot in this relationship. If you commit suicide they would feel cheated and defeated. You would’ve short changed them and left a vacuum. Every reunion would begin and end with a reference to you and it won’t always be pleasant.

Your love and ex would unite in confusion, they both would hold themselves part guilty and partly lost. They would not have too many to share their pain and sorrow. The secrets and the lies would never get a vent. Their beds, nooks, and corners would never be the same. They would always be jittery holding another hand, as your memory would haunt them.

Remember:

Life is a package deal.

What has happened, may happen again but would definitely not happen forever.

There are millions more troubled than you at any given point of time. Perspective and horizon are the keywords.

Shame and fame are two sides of the same coin. If you feel ashamed of what you’ve done, you would be giving more reasons to others to shame you and your loved ones. If it is the fame you have lost, you still have the flame inside you to see that fame again. Believe in yourself, pull yourself out of the crevice of self-pity and depression. See the light around you, bask in it, arise again! Look at the flowers in the desert. The scorching heat each year pushes them under the dry hot sand but the faintest drop of rain brings their tiny beautiful heads bobbing up afresh.

And last but not least:

Mind it, it is not your job to put an expiry date to your life. If everyone who is suffering from pain (the entire human race)  opted to choose the path of self-destruction and suicide, the entire world would have become the world of dead thousands of years ago.