I dated Amanda during my sophomore year of college. She was a freshman. We started seeing each other in September of that year and kept it going all the way through the following May, at which point we parted ways for the summer. Amanda had an internship lined up back at home in the Bay Area. I was staying in Boulder to work a construction job and take summer classes.
At the moment of our parting, everything was fine. Saying goodbye seemed to bring out the best in us. We said we’d call, we said we’d write. We told each other we loved each other—the first and only time we’d ever done so. We said that we’d keep it going, but it didn’t wind up working out that way, which was my fault entirely. I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. Somewhere along the line, I experienced a change of heart. The summer apart was no good for me. My imagination took over. I had too much time to think. I convinced myself that I wasn’t ready for anything long-term, told myself that things were getting too serious, that I was too young to be this involved. I needed time, I needed space. Felt trapped. Got nervous. Didn’t want to be tied down. At that point, Amanda was a thousand miles away. I was nineteen. I figured I’d deal with it later.
I went to visit her once that summer, on Independence Day. Amanda showed me all around the city—her favorite museums, her favorite parks, her favorite neighborhoods. She took me to her favorite café in Hayes Valley. On the night of the Fourth, we watched the fireworks from a hillside in Marin. I was feeling awful, completely phony. I wanted to tell her that I was having my doubts about continuing the relationship that night, but I didn’t go through with it. I told myself the timing wasn’t right.
When she got back to Boulder that August, I broke up with her poorly. First, I dodged her for a week. Then I returned her phone calls slowly, much more slowly than normal. It went on like this into September. We’d see each other, here and there. I slept with her a couple of times, knowing that I was going to break up with her. I pretended.
When I finally got around to telling her that I wanted to end things, it caught her completely off guard. She wept. She called me once a day for the next week, asking questions, hoping to reconcile. She wrote me a long, emotional letter and put it in my mailbox. In the letter, she told me that she didn’t understand, that she hadn’t seen it coming, that she wanted to try to fix things. She told me that I was breaking her heart.
I told myself that she was being dramatic. I called her up and we talked. It was painful and uncomfortable. I told her that I didn’t think it was in our best interests to continue dating. I told her that I just wasn’t feeling it enough, that my heart wasn’t in it all the way.
“So why have we been sleeping together these past few weeks?” she said. “Why have you been having sex with me if you knew you were planning on ending it?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. I tried to give one anyway, stumbling my way through a stilted and embarrassed response.
Amanda told me she needed to get off the phone because she thought she was going to be sick. We hung up a few seconds later. I felt awful. I wrote her a long letter that night, apologizing, trying to iron things out and put some sort of amicable end to everything. I walked it over to her mailbox at about two in the morning.
After Amanda read the letter, we had one more phone conversation. I told her once again that I was sorry, that I really wanted for us to be friends. Amanda said, “Sure.” She sounded tired and wounded. I think she was crying. No sobs, just tears. I knew they were there by the sound of her voice. A little while later, we hung up. And after that, she stopped calling. In fact, she never called me again. Ever.
I called her one more time, a few weeks later, but hung up when I got the answering machine.
We hardly saw each other for the rest of our college days. She avoided me, I avoided her. The University of Colorado is a big school. Our circles didn’t mix much. I didn’t know how to approach her. I felt she didn’t want to be approached. I wanted her to approach me, but she never did. Maybe she felt I didn’t want to be approached either. Maybe she didn’t know how.
We never approached each other ever again.
Last I’d heard, she was dating a wealthy ski bum up in Crested Butte, and they had a good thing going. Then she was gone.
suicide n.
1 The act or an instance of intentionally killing oneself.
2 The destruction or ruin of one’s own interests: It is professional suicide to involve oneself in illegal practices.
3 One who commits suicide.
In imperial Rome, taking your own life was considered honorable.
In ancient Greece, convicted criminals were permitted to off themselves.
In France, suicide was illegal up until the Revolution.
In England, failed suicides were hanged right up until the nineteenth century.
Greenland has the highest per capita suicide rate in the world, with 127 out of every 100,000 people choosing to check out voluntarily. China is home to 21 percent of the world’s women. More than half of all female suicides take place there.
In the United States of America, suicide is the third-leading cause of all teenage deaths. A teenager commits suicide in the USA about once every two hours or so.
In 1997, a former music teacher named Marshall Applewhite convinced thirty-nine people to kill themselves in Southern California. Applewhite was the leader of a doomsday cult called Heaven’s Gate. He and his followers believed that a UFO was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet. They thought this UFO was four times the size of the earth and that it was on its way to pick them up; so instead of waiting around for it, they drank apple juice and vodka laced with pentobarbital and died.
The sheriff who arrived on the scene discovered all thirty-nine bodies. Resting beside each one was an overnight bag and five dollars cash.
Suicide was naturally the consistent course dictated by the logical intellect. (Is suicide the ultimate sincerity? There seems to be no way to refute the logic of suicide but by the logic of instinct.)
—William James
Back in 1993, a book called Kanzen Jisatsu Manyuaru was published in Japan. I happened to read about it in the news one day. Kanzen Jisatsu Manyuaru means “The Complete Suicide Manual.” The book offers detailed instructions on ten methods of suicide, including hanging, overdosing on drugs, electrocution, and self-immolation. It compares and contrasts the different methods in terms of pain, speed of completion, and level of disfigurement. In addition, the book offers readers tips on the best places to kill themselves, naming Aokigahara, a thick wood at the base of Mt. Fuji, as “the perfect place” to die.
In 1998, seventy-four corpses were found in the woods of Aokigahara.
The suicide rate in Japan rose by 35 percent that year alone.
Suicide prevention groups in Japan were convinced that The Complete Suicide Manual was a big part
