To Sinnead O’Connor, regarding suicidal thoughts

By now, my dear Sinnead O’Connor, you have managed to grab the headlines once more with a well publicized stream of hype, according to which you were located safely in Dublin after posting a suicidal note on Facebook on Sunday. The notes in the newspapers state that you wrote “I have taken an overdose. There is no other way to get respect. I am not at home, I'm at a hotel, somewhere in Ireland, under another name. If I wasn't posting this, my kids and family wouldn’t even find out. Was dead for another fortnight since none of them bother their hole with me for a minute. I could have been dead here for weeks already and they’d never have known”.

With all due respect, but this writer seriously doubts your claims and statements that you really had a bona-fide intention of taking away your own life. Persons who are really serious about committing suicide very seldom go public with their intentions. Quite the opposite, they usually are very secretive about their suicidal fantasies and hide their intentions quite well even from their own families. They don’t go to the social media saying “Hey, world! I plan to kill myself! Please save me!”. When they really mean it, nobody finds about it until it is too late. There are many well-known cases documented on famous people who really meant it, with Marilyn Monroe leading the way and more recently Robin Williams, being among many other cases of people in the entertainment business who have chosen to take their lives into their own hands for whatever reasons only known to them. Up until the very day they took their own lives, nobody had the faintest clue of their true intentions. As a matter of fact, they didn’t even bother to leave behind a suicide note. They simply decided to go ahead and do it. They didn’t want to be “saved” just like you did.

There are countless millions of people around the world who are holding on to life in spite of being in far worse conditions than you are. Such as people who live in many poverty-striken regions around the world who have no source of income and who have to survive on mere pennies a day, people who live in perpetual hunger. When was the last time, my dear Sinnead O’Connor, you had to face a dire economic situation such as this? And such as young people who have been diagnosed as being terminally-ill and who are putting up a fight against their illness by subjecting themselves to all sorts of nearly barbaric medical procedures that in many cases will only prolongue their lives perhaps just a few months at best. Are you terminally-ill, my dear Sinnead O’Connor? Do you think you are as bad as these people? Perhaps you should pay a visit to a hospital (and there are many hospitals around the world) to meet and have a chat with some of these people who are fighting for their lives instead of toying with the idea of bringing a quick and comfortable end to their misery. Perhaps all of your life you were a spoiled brat. Some spoiled brats are usually prone to grabbing the attention of their parents, their co-workers and their friends by warning them well-ahead of time about their intentions to commit suicide, and thus allowing them the privilege of “saving” them in the nick of time.

Nevertheless, giving you the benefit of the doubt, and assuming that at times you really do fantasize with the thoughts of taking away your own life, if you really want to do it then at the very least don’t do it like a coward. At the very least, you should do it with courage and with some honorable purpose in mind so that you can be remembered kindly instead of going down into the statistics as just another coward. There are better ways of doing it which may even take away from you the guilt of putting an end to your life since the act itself would not be done by your own hand. Here’s one: grab a Bible and go to Syria in a mission to convert as many Muslims as you possibly can to Christianity. Furthermore, do it in a region controlled by the lunatics of the Islamic State. Given the hatred these people have against all those who are not followers of the Qu’ran, you can be absolutely sure that they will seize you and they will most certainly put you to death for the “horrendous sin” of attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity. In the Muslim world, any attempts to convert Muslims to Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter) is consider to be a crime without pardon, and any Muslim who does so can consider himself a dead man (or woman). Likewise, any preacher who dares to spread the Gospel in an attempt to make Muslims embrace another religion thus abandoning Islam will surely be executed even without the need of a trial. That’s how things are in that part of the world. This way, you would not need to swallow any pills or learn how to build a noose in order to finish off your own life, they will do it for you, and they will do it in such a manner that even if you plead for mercy or compassion you will get nothing of the sort. After all, they’re crazy, and you cannot argue or reason with crazy.

Even if you are not much into religion (which you most certainly aren’t), dying in Syria at the hands of the Islamic State (ISIS) would immediately put you in very good company. You would join all the Apostles of Jesus who perished while spreading the Gospel. As a matter of fact, you would be in the same category of those considered candidates for sainthood after dying while attemping to spread the Word in pagan countries. One such saint is Philip of Jesus. He died while attempting to convert Japanese unbelievers to Christianity. His evangelical efforts in Japan where not successful, there were no known converts to Christianity in Japan after his short time there. Nevertheless, he was raised to the level of sainthood by the Catholic Church.

It must be remarked that preachers of the Gospel, for the most part, do not have a death wish. They are not seeking to die per se. They want to live long lives just as many other human beings. However, they are willing to put their lives at risk in order to spread the New Testament even in hostile places. That is precisely the faith that guided the twelve Apostles of Jesus and even Jesus himself. Martyrdom is an unintended consequence of spreading the Word but is a fate accepted by those who believe in Jesus. Those who die as Martyrs do not die as cowards but die as true heroes. And in many cases, their deaths are not in vain; it is a well known fact that during the times of persecutions of Christians in the Roman Empire many of those among the public who watched the first martyrs die on behalf of their religion were converted right there, and there is now a famous saying that states "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church" (Apologeticus, Chapter 50).

Granted, Sinnead O’Connor is certainly not what we might call a true believer. But if Sinnead O’Connor no longer finds some worthwhile purpose in her life, if Sinnead O’Connor wants to put an end to her existence, let someone else be the willing executioner, the option given here is as good as any, with the exception that Sinnead O’Connor would be remembered as a martyr, as a hero, and not as a coward. Unless, of course, Sinnead O’Connor wants to be remembered by future generations as a coward. Pick your choice, Ms. O’Connor.