Reading Thelma San Juan’s Sunday column and the entire section of first-person accounts of people who dealt with or are still coping with the effects of depression, chemical imbalance and bi-polar mood disorder made me wonder why suicides seem to be common these days. In the past, suicides only happened to other people, never people you knew personally, but in recent years some suicides came close enough to matter.
In my father’s extended family we had a teenage relation who lived with a spinster aunt while in college. Overwhelmed with love or school problems, she considered suicide. The story is unclear because nobody wants to ask but we learned that she had been scolded and resented it. To get even, she waited for my aunt to leave for work before composing a suicide note. Then she chose a bottle from the medicine cabinet, consumed the contents and lay on my aunt’s bed for maximum effect. She did this in the late afternoon and knew death would fetch her as soon as her stomach turned sour inside. By nightfall my aunt returned from work and found her writhing in pain. A sharp pinch in the thigh was all it took to revive her drooping spirit and when she opened her eyes, she saw my aunt standing over her, glaring, holding the suicide note in one hand, and the empty bottle of ascorbic acid in the other. She got a scolding so bad she didn’t try suicide again. Moral of the story: Not all acid in the medicine cabinet is poisonous.
In 2011 I was on a six-month Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship where death followed me through three cities I visited: first, in Kyoto University where I was advised not to stay late on campus because my office was on the same floor where a professor hung himself in his room. He was not discovered till some days after and the cleaning lady recalled seeing his silhouette from a window but presumed it was a doll hanging from the ceiling.
Second was in Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, when my host professor took me out to dinner on the day of my arrival and advised me to move from the apartment assigned me in the faculty guest house to a higher floor. He was visibly agitated but didn’t want to tell me what the problem was and since I had already unpacked I assured him the room was spacious and comfortable, not knowing that the unit next door—occupied by an equally clueless visiting professor—was the scene of a recent crime. A member of the Faculty of Medicine booked the room and invited his wife over to sort out their marital problems. He killed his wife, chopped her corpse into bits, with surgical instruments he brought from his clinic, and flushed these down the toilet. Some parts were too big and clogged the toilet. So he packed the remains in his suitcase, checked into a nearby Novotel and completed the disposal there. Needless to say, I was not bothered by anything ghostly the two months I lived there, but a friend from Manila who stayed over a few nights would get up at dawn, and describe a recurring nightmare about being pursued by a man with a knife. He was sensitive to spirits so I didn’t tell him about the murder next door till he had returned to Manila.
Bad luck, as they say, comes in threes. A week before I returned to Manila for a break, a man in the apartment next door jumped off the 16th floor balcony and landed on our driveway. That was the end of my brushes with death and suicide during my fellowship period. These didn’t affect me since they happened to strangers unlike the suicide of two students in 2008. The first killed himself by sealing a small room with duct tape and lighting a bag of charcoal. The second was found hanged on the gate of their home. The first was a former student I knew only by name in my records, the second I knew even if my lecture classes are very large because he was an A-student and would often speak to me after class.
When colleagues informed me that the mother of the A-student asked to see me, I assured everyone that I was not the cause of death because the student had good grades under me and seemed like a happy well-adjusted person. I was thus relieved when the mother thanked me for being one of her son’s favorite teachers. He enjoyed my course and would often share what he learned from my lectures at home. She could not accept her son’s suicide and asked if I had noticed any changes in her son prior to the incident. Frankly, I did not see this coming because I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist who would know the warning signs.
Then I remembered that he had attended World Youth Day in Australia and gave me pasalubong—a Spanish bible that he picked up in a church bargain bin. I had not opened that bible since he gave it to me so when I got home I looked for it and found signed photographs inside. In one he posed with a Rizal monument. Written on the back: “Sir, papasa na ba? Hehe.” Inside the bible he wrote: “Sir Ambeth I dug around for this at Mary MacKillop’s chapel in Sydney. Hope I can keep on digging for historical breakthroughs and rediscoveries in the same way.” It is a promise he did not keep. How could an outwardly happy young man, fresh from World Youth Day, take his life? I will never know or understand.
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