Reflections: An Excerpt

I find this to be exactly right:

"I do not think of suicide as the act, the death, the fall from a height or the trigger pulled. I see it as a long illness, an illness with origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging. It is a disease of the body and the brain, if you make that distinction, a disease that kills over time."

        ~ Donald Antrim, "Everywhere and Nowhere, A journey through suicide"; The New Yorker; Feb. 18 & 25, 2019