Let Me Finish
Udo Grashoff Headline, 180pp, £12.99
ISBN 0755314433
A few years ago I read a short newspaper report about a 17-year-old girl's suicide. It appeared that she was an animal lover. She worked in a rescue centre and kept horses at the family home. Her parents were farmers. Her suicide note explained that she could no longer bear the thought of cruelty to animals, and so she had hanged herself. I was struck by this: despite her good efforts in creating a safe haven for animals, despite the evidence in front of her - that there was a respite to their distress - she could not come to terms with animal suffering. Then again, perhaps her family's farm brought the wretched reality of animals' lives home to her on a relentless daily basis.
Too much reality can be a bad thing, especially for those who are sensitive. I was reminded of this on reading Let Me Finish, a book that became a surprise bestseller in Germany. Udo Grashoff has gathered suicide notes from police archives and reproduced them together with short accounts of their authors' deaths. He includes a note written by another teenage animal lover, in which she tells her parents why she and her brother are killing themselves. Animals are tortured and killed "for no reason", she writes. "There's nowhere on earth that you can enjoy the peace we both long for." Young suicides, in particular, cannot seem to get over the fact that life involves suffering and sacrifice - in this case, the sacrifice of animals. It is this dumb despair, the incommunicability of acute pain, that comes across in this book. For all suicides, this wordlessness is unbearable - and the young feel it most of all.
Writing a suicide note is part of the process of deciding to kill oneself. The act puts an end to the ambivalence about whether to commit suicide or to carry on. The letters collected here display a constricted view of the world and a turning of aggression against the self. "I wouldn't have made a very good poet," concludes one 16-year-old at the end of a rather good - if overblown - poem.
Some choose suicide as a means of regaining control: "I had no influence on the beginning of my life, but I am going to have an influence on its end." Others hope for control in the afterlife: "If there's any way I can watch over you from the other side, then I shall certainly do so," promises a father to his son. A wife recommends that her husband "pay off all the debts first, then have a family, start a new life. All we can do is learn from our mistakes; you'll soon forget the children and me." This woman killed her children as well, reminding us that some suicides wish to punish those who remain.
The broken-hearted are well represented, and their stark messages are moving because they are true: "Please forgive me for what I have done, but I love you so much that I can't be without you any more." There are many reasons people take this awful decision, but what is certain is that they have no rage left. As Grashoff points out, where there is rage there is life. What comes across most strongly from these letters is an overwhelming sense of loss. It is as if their authors have already said their farewells.
Lilian Pizzichini is the author of Dead Men's Wages (Picador)
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