It goes in cycles

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090323/wl_uk_afp/britainusliteraturesuicide

Yahoo notes the suicide of the son of Sylvia Plath, who killed herself as well. So did the next wife of Sylvia's husband Ted Hughes.

For many in American culture, suicide is unthinkable - but really, once you've thought it, it is a thought impossible to "unthink." Of course it's impacted by generation on generation of a tendency to clinical depression, but I believe the nihilism and narcissism inherent in my mother's suicide was imbued in our lives together for a decade before that event, just as the nihilism and violence of my father's suicide was. The outlook itself, valuing life little enough to be able to throw it away, was woven slowly and steadily through our entire lives. My uncle had committed suicide when I was still young, and it was not a surprise to me that my sister tried to commit suicide, even predating my parents' successful efforts (inasmuch as they may be called "successful"), because she absorbed this thread, felt it tie itself around her hands and arms and eyes. The rope grew as thick as a boa constrictor, sinuously twined itself around us and settled in, breathing with a life of its own, its scales a cool comfort to the touch because even if death was a moment away, embracing it was all its own kind of defense. I may have been less susceptible only because my sister was more sensitive to begin with.

Even before my parents' death, I used to annoy my friend Dan with a simple acceptance that some day I am going to die - I used to tell him that death is nothing to worry about, it's only dying itself that's the difficult part. After drowning at nine and living in the family I had from five until sixteen, I was honestly quite surprised to make it to sixteen in the first place. And surprised again at 21, and 30, and these days just about every day of my life. There are days when the world seems nothing more than reflection on water, and on those days I think of dying. They are misted with a melancholy so old it seems distant, faint, and soaked into everything like a water stain on a hundred-year-old photograph. I do not die, because I have life flowing like an antivenin in my veins, am so swelled full of taste and smell and sound and touch and sight that it pushes away the water. But I'm full of memories too, and many are still sore things, coming and shaking me in waves some nights so it is as if every loss was new. Dan was frustrated at the very thought that I might think that dying was going to happen some day and when it does I might not think it was wrong. Dan thought all death, any death, was wrong and he was fierce and fiery as a torch burning in the heart of life. Dan wrote a beautiful poem at one time, when a friend was stabbed to death in front of a cathedral on what was then the main strip through town and still might be. The last line, alone, was "I will never cease to fly in the face of the sound of her wings." I would walk that road and see the stain of the blood on the sidewalk; they never cleaned it away fully until the next time the Pope came through town. Dan's words flowed and continue to flow in my veins, along with a few other phrases, circling with my blood and guarding me from a despair that masks itself as careless fatigue, a tsunami masquerading as a morning mist.

Thanks to people like Dan, instead of seeing my life as a sepia toned memory, most days I pick up hundred year old photographs and am painfully, beautifully aware of just how much life there is in those faces gone.