Fewer than 20% of suicides leave a note.
...
Contained in this volume are 31 case studies -
1. brief case history
2. snapshot
3. photographic documentation of items from the pockets, found clutched in the hands, or arranged to be the last thing the deceased would see on this earth.
Of individuals who, feeling their lives had failed, ended them; and finding that words had failed, abandoned them.
Lauren Simonutti in her introduction to Drowning, Not Waving: 31 visual attempts at a justification for suicide.
Some of the spreads from the book are online at Flickr »
For the first time just now I counted the times that an individual's suicide or suicide attempt has touched my life. People dear to me; people dear to those who are dear to me.
Eight.
I doubt my proximity is anomalous. I suspect many of us have encountered suicide in one shape or another. But I can't recall a conversation I've had in the aftermath of a suicide or attempt that wasn't soaked with a burrowed kind of grief and a terrible loneliness.
via sidereal
