Tony DeyalACCORDING TO a British law passed in 1845, attempting to commit suicide was a capital offence. Offenders could be hanged for trying. An Irish legislator, a very strict Catholic and opposed to suicide, said in Parliament that the only way to stop this suicide wave is to make it a capital offence. Had this been the case in Trinidad, a man named Garnet Romany, would have been tried and convicted instead of being remanded to the St Anns Psychiatric Hospital for evaluation. According to the evidence presented in Court, Romany started choking and dragging his ex-girlfriend inside her home. Then, according to a newspaper report, the semi-conscious woman later saw him choking himself.
The impression given in the article is that he tried using his bare hands to do so. This is, at best, a difficult feat to accomplish. Even with the aid of a rope, it can still present a problem. One man tied a rope around his neck, stood on a chair, and threw the rope around a thick overhead pipe. A friend, who walked in and found him on the chair, asked, "Why don't you put the rope around your neck tighter?" The man answered, "I tried that, but I can't breathe."
Another, with more courage, tried the same thing when things got really bad for him. His job was unrewarding, his bills were mounting, and he had no money for food or rent. Deciding to end it all, he put a rope around his neck, stood on a chair in the family bedroom, and said, "I must die. All I have given my poor wife is 14 children and no way of supporting them."
At this point, his wife burst in through the door shouting, "Don't do it. You're hanging an innocent man!"
While Mr. Romany was considered by the Magistrate to be far from innocent, his attempt at manual auto-asphyxiation ranks alongside shooting oneself in the back with a bow and arrow as a form of suicide. Perhaps he might have stuck one of his hands in his throat and pretended it was a fish-bone. It is like the man who wasn't sure whether he wanted to commit suicide, so he threw himself in front of a parked car. In an actual case, a 28-year old male attempted suicide by downing several nitroglycerine pills and a bottle of vodka. When asked about the bruises about his head and chest he said that they were from him ramming himself into the wall in an attempt to make the nitroglycerine explode.
In such institutions as the one to which Mr. Romany has been remanded, suicide while rare is still a possibility. After hearing that one of the patients in a mental hospital had saved another from a suicide attempt by pulling him out of a bathtub, the director reviewed the rescuer's file and called him into his office. The Director said to the man, "Mr. James, your records and your heroic behaviour indicate that you're ready to go home. I'm only sorry that the man you saved later killed himself with a rope around the neck."
"Oh, he didn't kill himself," Mr. James explained, "I hung him up to dry."
Some people who have actually committed suicide have done so for reasons that the rest of us might consider trivial. There have been several cases of children scolded by their parents who took their own lives. In Japan, a 15-year-old student rang his mother and then started arguing about who should hang up the phone first. The young man committed suicide when he failed to convince his mother that it was those who received the calls, not those who made them, who should put down the phone.
Dennis Christian was a devout believer in God. To prove that God would save him because of his great faith, Christian confidently stepped off the balcony of his 13th-floor London flat. A coroner's inquest was informed that the aptly-named Christian's faith had not, in this world at least, proved particularly efficacious.
In 1976, Leonard Dodge, a railway worker, hanged himself because he was worried about metrication. An Australian, Herman Holt, worried obsessively about his income tax. One day he received a letter from the Inland Revenue Department. He became convinced that he was behind in his taxes. He killed himself by standing in front of a train. The irony was that far from being in arrears, Holt had been sent the letter to inform him that he was owed a refund of $1,400.
Perhaps the best thing for would-be suicides to remember is that regardless of how bad things are, they could be worse. There is a story about a country sheriff who always said, "It could have been worse". No matter what happened, he always had the same answer, "It could have been worse". One day, two deputies in the Sheriff's Office answered an emergency call at a farmhouse. When they walked in, they found the nude bodies of a man and a woman in the bedroom. They had been shot to death. When they went to the living room, they found the body of a man with a gun at his side. "No doubt about it," one deputy said to the other. "This was a double murder and suicide. This guy came home and found his wife in bed with somebody else and shot them both. Then he shot himself."
"You're right," the other deputy replied. "Double murder and suicide. But I'll bet you when the sheriff gets here he's going to say, 'It could have been worse'".
Sure enough the sheriff came along, took in the scene and said, "No doubt about it. It was a double murder and suicide". Then he added, "It could have been worse".
The deputies asked simultaneously, "How could it have been worse?" Well, the sheriff drawled, "You see that guy there on the floor? If he had come home yesterday, that would be me in there in that bed!"
Tony Deyal was last seen talking about the man whose psychiatrist determined that he had suicidal tendencies, so the psychiatrist made him pay in advance.
