This is a dilemma I've been pondering ever since I slipped into suicidal depression and my dithering ass still can't really decide or answer. Closer is the option I've been considering a lot lately though. Like, ok, I don't like the idea of hurting people, let alone the ones you just recently deliberately brought into your life in spite (or perhaps because) of the risks. Call it emotional suicide bombing, so to speak (apologies if that term/analogy is offensive). But, t'is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all, right? The idea of them growing from the grief of your death and viewing it as sort of a reminder to care and cherish the people and things while you still have them and such, and the sentiment that grief is a testament to the quality of your relationship, is somewhat comforting, but nothing guarantees that and I can't expect anyone to navigate grief successfully and rise from the ashes of emotional disasters, as it were.
Again, I don't really know. The suicide of loved ones is the reason some of us are here on this forum to begin with. Suicide is a powerful end. Paraphrasing someone else, it scrambles the beginning, and, like a black hole, everything from that person's life will inevitably revolve around it and be sucked into it. And that's where the questions, rationalizing, etc., pour in: "Where did it all begin? How long were they planning this? What could I have done?" Etc. (The person I'm paraphrasing here is David Lipsky in the introduction of his book "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," the transcript of his interviews with writer David Foster Wallace who killed himself in 2008.)
