SadGirl
Specialist
- Mar 24, 2019
- 351
What would you write in the suicide letter, and to which people? Doctors, family, friends, etc?
A work colleague I knew wrote a suicide note and placed it on the boss' desk with his mobile before he hanged himself in my workplace. I didn't take it personally when he complained how me and the other workers weren't paying him much attention. The strange thing about it all was that he knew about a letter I'd given to the boss demanding a holiday. His suicide note was in a strange way his resignation letter to the boss and the world.
A small night storm blows
Saying 'falling is the essence of a flower'
Preceding those who hesitate
— Yukio Mishima
What would you write in the suicide letter, and to which people? Doctors, family, friends, etc?
Thanks for this.I've thought about giving the coroner a hard time by leaving him a Japanese death poem without the English translation. The practice of writing a death poem has its origins in Zen Buddhism. It is a concept or worldview derived from the Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence (三法印, sanbōin), specifically that the material world is transient and impermanent (無常, mujō), that attachment to it causes suffering (苦, ku), and ultimately all reality is an emptiness or absence of self-nature (空, kū). These poems became associated with the literate, spiritual, and ruling segments of society, as they were customarily composed by a poet, warrior, nobleman, or Buddhist monk.
In 1970, writer Yukio Mishima and his disciple Masakatsu Morita composed death poems before their attempted coup at the Ichigaya garrison in Tokyo, where they committed the ritual suicide of seppuku.