Thank God I'm Not Dead
Maybe don't read this one.
Disclaimer: If you’re uncomfortable with the discussion of suicide, I wouldn’t read this if I were you. And if you can’t laugh during dark times, I would also not read this if I were you.
Dear Mom and Dad,
I’m writing this note to you because I want you to know that you did nothing wrong. You were both amazing parents. And you don’t deserve to go through what you’re probably going through while reading this.
I’m not sure what was wrong with me. I’m not sure why I couldn’t be happy. All I know is that I wasn’t. And for that, I’m sorry. Again, you don’t deserve this. It’s my fault I couldn’t solve this problem. And it’s my fault that the only solution was to end my life.
Love,
Jack
Our main character folded the note, put it in an envelope, peeled off the paper covering the sticky strip, and folded it over. On the envelope, he wrote “I’m sorry” and placed it on the bedside table in his parents’ bedroom in their vacation condo where he was currently living.
He walked into the living room and passed the TV. On it, a paused episode of Mad Men. One of the characters in the show had failed to kill himself by looping a garden hose from the tailpipe of his Jaguar into the cabin. It’s not that the method wouldn’t work. He failed because the Jaguar wouldn’t start. The character decided to hang himself in his office instead.
He always thought that hanging himself would be the worst way to go. My Jeep will start, he thought to himself.
A few years before, in a town close to his own, a girl convinced her boyfriend to kill himself. He got a gas-powered air pump, put it in the back seat of his pickup truck, and ran it until the cab filled with carbon monoxide, replacing the perfectly breathable oxygen that was there before.
“I don’t think I can do this. I got out. I could feel myself falling asleep in there,” the victim texted his girlfriend from a strip mall parking lot only minutes from his home.
“I know you can do it, baby. Just get back in your truck. You need to do this. You’ve been struggling for too long,” she replied.
Her boyfriend did get back in the truck. And her boyfriend did die. And she did go to jail for manslaughter. And the funny thing is she only got 11 months. They even made a movie about her story. I wonder what she got paid for it. Profiting off convincing someone else to commit suicide. That’s the American Dream.
That was a clever way to go, if we’re being honest, our main character thought to himself when he read that story for the first time.
You see, when you’re plotting your own death, the fear of pain grips you. Well, it does if you have a fear of pain like he did. Algophobia. That’s what the psychologists call it.
He was twenty-one. And the idea of killing himself began when he was twelve. When he realized half of his sixth-grade class hated him. And the other half didn’t know who he was. At twenty-one, he no longer cared about what twelve-year-olds thought of him nine years ago. However, he was still sad. And he was really getting tired of it.
Jumping off stuff never appealed to him. He had seen this documentary of the people who had survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Apparently, it was suspected that most people survived the fall. They usually died from drowning, because their injuries prevented them from swimming. Or they got eaten by sharks. Which he was sure, if they had known those were the two options going in, they probably would have just bought a gun and shot themselves in their car like most people.
But it’s hard to buy guns in California. Especially if your only purpose is to kill yourself with it. There’s a lot of paperwork. And by the time you’re halfway through all of it, you would probably think to yourself Man, killing yourself feels like a full-time job.
So, to prevent themselves from not killing themselves, the jumpers chose the expedient thing and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge instead. And then got eaten by a shark. Which they really weren’t anticipating.
But you know what’s funny? Most of the people who survived, all three of them, said that right as they jumped, they regretted jumping. They realized that all their problems were solvable. But what they had just done was so permanent.
It’s possible that the people who didn’t survive probably felt the same way. Especially when they were being eaten alive by a shark.
Years later, our main character would meet a girl at the gym he owned who had what looked like burn marks down her legs and arms. After one of the group classes he ran, she confided in him that the scars were from a suicide attempt. She had stepped in front of a train. She even had a picture of herself posing in front of the train before it happened. It was a big train. And she was a small girl.
She didn’t have time to regret her decision because the train hit her far faster than the water hit those who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. But as she lay on a hospital bed days later and was relearning how to walk again weeks later, she realized that she didn’t want to kill herself anymore.
And do you want to know what’s so funny about her story? She didn’t want to kill herself in the first place because she was sad like him. Well, maybe she was kind of sad. But the real reason she wanted to kill herself before the train slammed into her was because she had gotten these horrible migraines all her life that made her life hell. As you can imagine, getting hit by a train would really affect your brain. And it did affect her brain. After the run-in she had with the train, it made the migraines worse.
After the accident, she joined many suicide-awareness organizations. She would go around telling her story to those struggling with their own depressive episodes. She would tell them that despite the even more intense migraines, her attempt only convinced herself more that she should live. And that suicide is almost always regrettable (it’s good to never speak in absolutes).
Through these organizations, she developed a friendship with a young man who was struggling with depression. They had fallen in love. And she was working to help her new lover get through the sadness he was surrounded by. She thought she was doing a good job of helping this guy. And she felt that way up until the day her new love shot himself in the head.
Our main character had thought about shooting himself in the head too. Hemingway went out that way. And Hemingway was one of his heroes. Years before, when he was probably eighteen or nineteen, he had even tried to get the gun out of his dad’s gun case underneath his parents’ bed. When he pulled the case out from under the bed, he had been pretty sure he knew the code for the digital keypad.
Dogs can always sense when something is wrong. Generally, they’re pretty stupid creatures. But they do get human emotions somehow. And as he sat there on the floor of his parents’ bedroom, locked gun case lying before him, Tootsie sat across from him. She barked at him as he cried into his hands.
The fear of pain gripped him again. Algophobia. As he knelt there on his parents’ carpeted bedroom floor, remembered the story of a girl, then eighteen, who had shot herself in the head after a breakup and a lifetime of dealing with gastrointestinal issues. She was beautiful. Well, she was beautiful before she shot her own face off.
And that was the problem with the story. She survived.
You see, the issue was that she shot herself up from her chin. The angle of the gunshot missed all her brain and just took out her face. Her brother was home at the time to hear the shot and got her to the hospital before she died.
Three years later, she was the youngest person ever to receive a face transplant.
But our main character only saw the story shortly after the incident on a YouTube video. The video was filmed before the miraculous face transplant she later received. It had a sit-down interview with the girl and her mother. The survivor mumbled some words, which were hard to understand without subtitles because she was speaking through the mangled hole below her missing nose that was once her mouth.
Sure, he might have been able to guess the code. But he didn’t want to end up like that girl with no face. So, he slid his father’s gun case back underneath his parents’ bed.
No jumping off bridges. No shooting himself in the head. And, of course, hanging himself had always been off the table. If he sat in his Jeep with the tailpipe plugged, what was the worst that could happen? That one guy was able to get out of his truck when he knew the carbon monoxide was going to take his life and text his girlfriend before she told him to get back in and finish the job.
So, he figured that was the best way to go. But the problem was that his parents’ condo was on the second floor. And the garage, where his Jeep was parked, was on the first floor. And the garage shared a wall with the first-floor condo.
He became worried that if he ran his Jeep in the garage with the tailpipe plugged up, that after some period of time with the Jeep running in the garage, his neighbors would get suspicious and come to evaluate the situation. And by the time they checked on the mysterious car running in the garage, he wouldn’t be dead.
Algophobia wasn’t the issue. The fear of someone finding out you’re trying to kill yourself before you were dead was. And there was no word for this fear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
He turned on the Jeep and went upstairs to test out how loud it was. And it was loud. He could feel the rumbling of the engine from the kitchen, which was up a flight of stairs and towards the back of the condo. He figured his neighbors, if they were home, would hear it too. He went to the garage and turned off the car. He sat at the wheel and cried.
I’m so pathetic, I can’t even kill myself, he thought to himself.
He went upstairs, passed the paused TV again, went to his parents’ bedroom in their vacation home, knelt beside the bed, and cried some more.
“God, if you exist, please help,” he said aloud.
There was no answer.
After some time, the tears on his face dried and he noticed that he was starting to fall asleep on the edge of the bed. He got up, grabbed the envelope from the side of his parents’ bedside table, and threw it in the trash. He wasn’t sure what number suicide note that was that he had written over the past decade, but he was hoping it would be one of the last.
Read Next: The Two-Marshmallow Mindset
Oof, that was a dark one…
That was different from what I usually post. But my question is, did you enjoy it??? I’ve never really written a story before. And yes, it was all true.
If you liked it, could you ‘like’ it? Please? It’s literally a tiny little button and it costs you nothing!
And if you have thoughts on it, I’d love to hear them! If you have your own stories to share, you can share those too. You can DM me or drop a comment. Whatever makes you feel comfortable.