I Don't Mind Dying, But I Would Prefer Not To
Interpersonal Connections Delay My Advancement To the Final Stage
Content Warning: death, death of family, suicide
“Mind” is a word with little weight, in my view. It is used to ask people for trivial permissions like “Do you mind if I open the window?” or “Would you mind holding the door?” The first time I learned this English word, I was confused by its passive-aggressiveness. A person would ask me, “Do you mind if I sit here?” and what am I supposed to say? “Yes, I mind it”? The question doesn’t render an option. It’s an epitome of formality that doesn’t vibe with my directedness.
Nicole Chung shares a conversation in her memoir All You Can Ever Know when her friend introduced her to a married couple who was considering adoption. Knowing that she was a Korean American adoptee, the couple asked Chung whether she had minded growing up as an adoptee. A wrong word choice for the wrong context. Or maybe it was a perfectly fitting one for such a context. An adoptee doesn’t have a choice of being one. They have no option of minding it.
I do not mind dying. It took a long time to even get to this place. At my starting point last summer, I wanted to stop feeling, trying, or experiencing. Then I went on a journey of learning about my suicidal thoughts. I wrote many pages in my journal with prompts from The Suicidal Thoughts Workbook: CBT Skills to Reduce Emotional Pain, Increase Hope, and Prevent Suicide by Kathryn Hope Gordon.
Many people do not ponder about death, at least not the death of themselves. They are quite determined to live, at any cost. “You only live once. Why would you want to die?” Talking about death or suicide is not a popular dinner table topic. When my parents-in-law saw my suicidal thoughts workbook during my visit, they questioned whether I was reading it for my students. “No,” I said, “I’m reading it for myself.”
My tendency is non-obsessing, similar to detachment. I imagine my life without an X and see how it would pan out. For many things (including individuals), I will suffer, but I will eventually become okay. I don’t need to obsess over having it in my life. My life can go on, just in a different way.
It becomes trickier when the subject of my non-obsessing is my life itself. Would I be okay if my life ends tomorrow? Of course, I will be okay. I will be dead, and in my worldview, this means poof: disappearing into thin air. Unfortunately, people around me won’t be okay. They will experience grief for a long time.
This kind of close relationship with others can deter suicidal attempts. In the 3-step theory of suicide by Klonsky and May, the second question asks, “Is your pain greater than your connection to life?” If the answer is yes, you move on to the next question. The reason why I am still alive is that my answer to this question has always been “no.” The unfortunate sorrow that my death will bring upon many people who love me, on the flip side, is a fortunate connection that has held me back from progressing to the final stage of dying by suicide.
Recently I was working through old photos and came across one from 2016. It was a photo of my partner Chris walking alone on a beach at sunset. At that moment, I got a strong conviction that I wanted to live longer than Chris. I did not like the idea of him suffering from grief alone.
Shit! All of a sudden, I am scared. What scares me about death the most is leaving loved ones behind in grief. I don’t mind being dead. I really don’t because I don’t think I will have a conscience to mind anything. However, let’s imagine for a moment that my spirit does go somewhere after I die. I would be in limbo as if trapped in a waiting room before entering the afterlife space, tasked with a question, “Do you want to continue forward or go back to your life?” I mean … I’m already in the waiting room. If I came this far, I might as well keep going. But if anyone shows me, like through a crystal ball, a live streaming of how my people are grieving, I will go back in a heartbeat. What defines me more than anything is being an empath.
When I was about to turn 40, as my birthday gift, my friend sent me a video of a tarot card reading for the year. One of the three cards she drew was the death card. As she pointed out with a laugh, it was an odd card choice for a person’s birthday. She assured me though that it didn’t mean literal death. It may mean loss: loss of something old, something that is holding me back, and something that might push me toward a rebirth. I accepted her interpretation of my tarot cards. I would go through a major life change. It might be painful in the process, but in the end, it would be a worthy experience.
Two days after seeing the tarot card video, I heard the news of my maternal grandmother’s passing. Then I realized the death card doesn’t have to mean literal death, but it can mean that in some cases. It was a death I had been waiting for and praying for. Grandma was staying at a hospice in South Korea after spending three weeks of precarious time in an Intensive Care Unit. Her days were filled with physical and mental suffering.
Processing my grief over Grandma’s death has revealed valuable pieces of information about my suicidal thoughts. She was initially sent to the ER after a suicidal attempt and never returned to her home. My mother was beaten by her mother and became an abusive parent herself. My tiny legs frequently bore bruises from my mother’s beating until I graduated elementary school. My teachers’ beating continued for several more years, and I was bullied by my classmates. My mental illness made sense to me.
Perhaps due to my childhood exposure to violence, I grew up with hypersensitivity and extra empathy. I agonize as I witness the suffering of people, animals, and the environment. Even when I watched Howl’s Moving Castle, a whimsical anime directed by Hayao Miyazaki, I could not enjoy it because its backdrop of ongoing war kept me preoccupied. I am full of compassion, but often I suffer from high anxiety and depression. It takes a lot of energy to carry on.
Despite the difficulties of living with debilitating empathy and chronic illness, I have been choosing life. Often people talk about setting goals, creating action plans, and celebrating achievements. For me, I had no other goal in the past few years but to stay alive. That is my primary goal. I have come to accept that I might die by suicide, but contemplating death (and writing this much about it) means that I have not given up yet. I may not mind dying, but I will resist and delay it as long as I can. Like Bartleby, the Scrivener in Herman Melville’s short story used to say, “I would prefer not to.”
More on my childhood trauma, grief, and suicidal thoughts:
