rh@mit-eddie.UUCP (Randy Haskins) (12/08/83)
About the il/legality of suicide: it's probably due to the fact that most people don't know how to deal with it. Think of how you would react if a loved one of your best friend killed him/herself. You would be pretty stuck on what to say. You would be worried that the person blamed him/herself for it, or any such thing like this. Personally, I think the way we in this society deal with Death in general sucks. Last year, I had to go to two funerals for grand-relatives in my family. Even though I loved them both a lot, I wasn't terribly sad, since both of them had lived full lives and were deteriorating. But everyone else (especially their wives) was all torn up about it. What are people reacting to? Is it their sorrow for the pain of the person's death? (They should be feeling no pain). Or is it more like a selfish feeling of loss of not having the person around? I would tend to say the latter, mainly because there are certain areas in which selfishness is not discouraged in our society (wanting to have the people you love around you is not considered selfish, whether or not it makes them happy....). Oh, well.... -- Randwulf (Randy Haskins); Path= genrad!mit-eddie!rh or... rh@mit-ee (via mit-mc)
grunwald@uiuccsb.UUCP (12/14/83)
#R:mit-eddi:-100900:uiuccsb:16100001:000:360 uiuccsb!grunwald Dec 13 23:34:00 1983 On sorrow at funerals: In a certain sense, it is the sorrow of realising that your won't be able to share your life with the person who died. In another sense, it is the realisation that, yes, your number is coming up too. I suspect that the first is the reason for the immediate tears. I suspect that both contirbute to the eventual depression afterwards.