It is reductive to say that suicide is sad, or unfortunate, or a tragedy, and I say this because saying anything after a suicide—particularly a highly public one, where most often, the commentator doesn’t have an actual relationship with the commentatee—is reductive. Yet we insist on saying things.

I bring this up in the wake of the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, whose infamous marriage has probably surpassed the fame of either’s poetry. His parentage, but mostly his mother’s immortalized suicide, makes Nicholas Hughes a special case—or not, as an article I refer to later from The Guardian points out. The point is that after a suicide, there seems to be an overwhelming need on behalf of the public to theorize. It is perhaps blasé to ask why people insist on weighing in on it, and one could simply chalk it up to a coping mechanism. But, by and large, it seems a little bit irrelevant and not a little bit distasteful to the people who actually knew the person, when the masses dredge up context clues in an attempt to explain something that is, when it comes down to it, largely inexplicable.

Most of the handful of articles reporting Nicholas Hughes’ death on March 16^th include a statement from his sister Frieda, stating that Nicholas had suffered from severe depression for many years. Thereafter, the prevailing tendency of the articles was to speculate about how his suicide may or may not relate to his mother’s. For example, in Anahd O’Connor’s NY Times article, the majority of which catches the reader up on the tumultuous Plath-Hughes history, recalls how in one in one of his poems, Hughes “seemed to indicate that Nicholas, who was only one at the time of her death, was pained even as a small child.” The key word is O’Connor’s “seemed”—this, her own insight extracted from a Hughes poem to perhaps show how Plath’s suicide might have affected her son at a young age and made him especially vulnerable. In slight contrast, Judith Flanders in The Guardian article insists that “the ‘curse’ idea is repellent. Repellent to those afflicted with depression; repellent to those whose friends or family have been so burdened; even repellent to lovers of poetry.”

Melodramatics aside, my point is not to suggest that either journalist is wrong, or that the media should treat suicides with indifference. I only find it curious that the deeply personal issue of suicide is such a publicly debatable subject—so much so that people that have no immediate relation to the subject can’t seem to help themselves, digging up whatever clues they can, when the rationalization of a suicide is all but futile.

I’m not trying to accuse anybody of wrongdoing, necessarily. Good art evokes emotion, and it seems only natural that the audience of said art would form a bond (though no matter how “real” it feels, is still imagined) with the artist. I, for example, read The Bell Jar in high school and spent many a class in college fervently defending Plath’s poetry against those who thought she was so dreadfully morbid, perhaps not for my love of the poems so much as for the romance of the novel, and consequentially, of her suicide. I say romance not in the traditional sense, obviously, but because it is my opinion that just about anything that appears as art is by definition romanticized (even when it’s deliberately unromantic, but that’s a whole other article). I was that girl that would walk around with a copy of Ariel, listening to Fiona Apple and cursing Ted Hughes to hell.

I like to think that I’m less dramatic now, and by extension, less pretentious. The recent suicide of David Foster Wallace was tremendously sad. But, in contrast to the time that I took insults to Plath’s poetry as an affront to her memory and thus to me because of my “connection” with her writing, Wallace’s death seemed tragic simply because the world lost a very good and prolific writer at a young age. I didn’t know the guy, and to insist that my sadness is more profound than that would seem almost an insult in its conceit. Sure, I could go through his collected works and make it my mission to gain access to his journals in order to get some insight as to why he did it, but what for?

There will be those who insist that studying suicide is important in the prevention of further suicides and in developing our understanding of depression. And, to a certain extent, I agree; it seems like we don’t really know much about it. The general idea is that it is a drastic measure taken by a very depressed person, but in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, he references the suicide phenomena among young men in Micronesia, and how, after the dramatic suicide of one high-profile youth caught in a love triangle, it has become a symbolic gesture that is often set off by the smallest of adolescent crises; serious depression is not necessarily a factor in some instances.

I will repeat myself in stating that good art forms a connection with the consumer, etc., and my aim is not to detract from the clad iron connection you have with Hemingway’s novels or your crush in the 90’s on Kurt Cobain, but to wonder why, after a suicide, the masses jump into analysis mode. Objectively, I understand the concept that as an observer, suicide seems like the ultimate drastic decision. When Elliot Smith stabbed himself in the heart, you couldn’t help but wonder what could have driven him to do that, especially in that way. Depression is the short answer, but it’s an abstraction that isn’t hugely helpful, and while an attempt to understand why somebody would make that decision may be engrossing, there is, ultimately, no relief.

By Deena Drewis