Erin > Recent Status Updates

It wasn’t that I was opposed to the idea of friendship; it’s just that if you don’t get close to anyone, you can’t lose them. And I’d already lost enough people.

Shepherding a dying person through the last days of their life is a privilege—especially when you’re the only thing they have to hold on to.

In a way, I consider Jimmy to be very courageous. He faced death eye to eye—he controlled his destiny, not the other way around.

“Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” —Common adage

…the solution to the puzzle of suicide lies exclusively with the people who have killed themselves, rational explanations and logical conclusions are of little comfort to survivors. We are unsettled and confused in grieving for the very person who has taken our loved one’s life. Guilt and blame serve to offer us a context for our mourning, connecting us to the experience of death by including us in the process.

Not only do survivors feel powerless and inadequate in the face of suicide, we also feel hurt and betrayed by our loved ones for making such an irrevocable decision without consulting us or turning to us for help.

The decision to commit suicide creates a sense of utter helplessness for those of us who are left behind. In order to maintain a sense of control, we often blame the deaths of our loved ones on actions 𝘸𝘦 took or omissions 𝘸𝘦 made.

It is very distressing for suicide survivors that the 𝘩𝘰𝘸 of our loved one’s deaths, as Annie describes it, comes to represent the sum total of their lives. Even as we move cautiously to reveal the truth about their suicides, we still remain defensive about their decision to take their own lives.

Guilt suffuses every aspect of a survivor’s healing process. Yet, in order to move on, we must begin to separate our loved ones from their suicides.

Coping with any death is traumatic; suicide compounds the anguish because we are forced to deal with two traumatic events at the same time.

“I refuse to make two tragedies out of this,” says Carol, a woman whose husband drowned himself when she was nine months pregnant. “As much as I want to die, I know I want to live. The choice is as simple as that.”

…we childless ones, whether through bravery or cowardice, constitute a kind of existential vanguard, forced by our own choices to face the naked question of existence with fewer illusions, or at least fewer consolations, than the rest of humanity, forced to prove to ourselves anew every day that extinction does not negate meaning.

Is it possible that I will regret not having had children when I am old and dying alone? … Since I already regret every other thing I have ever done or failed to do, I don’t see why this decision should be exempt. … But I am long practiced at pursuing paths I know lead inevitably to regret.

I’m afraid that if I ever did have children of my own I would love them so painfully it would rip my soul in half, that I would never again have a waking moment free from the terror that something bad might ever happen to them.

Most people’s operating motive in life is pretty obviously not the pleasure principle, given the joyless choices they make; what they want is to be needed, to have a compelling reason to get out of bed every day.

If the ultimate purpose of your life is your children, what’s the purpose of your children’s lives? To have your grandchildren? Isn’t anyone’s life ultimately meaningful in itself? If not, what’s the point of propagating it ad infinitum? After all, 0 x ∞ = 0.

“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another one of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” Every time I read that note, I’m glad that Woolf didn’t have children.

Life is such a complex, treacherous matter, so quickly lived and difficult to experience fully 𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘺 because it is so crowded with diversity and choice. I decided to live what was left of my life in my own extreme, lopsided way and spare my child my worries and neuroses.

He shrugged, raised his chestnut-brown hands toward the overhanging sun, and with a surprisingly tender blend of pity, sympathy, and resignation, he said, “ότι θέλει ο Θεός. Whatever God wants.”

The perfect life does not and never will exist, and to assert otherwise perpetuates a pernicious fantasy: that it’s possible to live without regrets. There is no life without regrets. Every important choice has its benefits and its deficits, whether or not people admit it or even recognize the fact…

… I was perturbed by the message, and by upbeat catchphrases like “having it all” and “childfree,” which seemed to imply that denying a loss makes it disappear, or that acknowledging it means one feels incomplete.

Selfishness and generosity are not regulated to particular life choices, and if generosity is a worthy life goal—and I believe it is—perhaps our task is to choose the path that for us creates its best opportunity.

Nobody gets to have it all… You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.

It seems unreasonable, not to mention sexist, to suggest that because all women have the biological capacity to have children, they all should; and that those who don’t are either in denial or psychologically damaged.

Nan Nowik didn’t once tell us that having it all meant we would win the National Book Award and then give birth to 2.3 babies.

But the decision to honor that desire, to find a way to be whole on my own terms even if it means facing the judgement, scorn, and even pity of mainstream society, is a victory. It’s a victory I celebrate every day.

I have been grateful for the freedom not to have children — it is a relatively new freedom, unknown to most women throughout history. At times, I feel like a pioneer, a woman who has had access to countless new opportunities, including the chance to craft a life best suited to her own skills and temperament.

(I take an inordinate amount of pride in my own emotional intelligence, but that particular gift has little to do with my parents and almost everything to do with the tens of thousands of dollars I’ve spent on psychotherapy over the past twenty years).

Now that I have passed the age Woolf was when she died, I can look back and say, thank God, I do not feel that my life has been a failure because I didn’t have children.

Do I think it’s a shame that this genetic inheritance won’t continue? Yes, I do. I’m arrogant enough to actually think that the world will be a poorer place without my genes in it.