Tara Condell and this blog

The word "blog" is short for "web log" and in their original form blogs were for people wishing to share the daily happenings in their and their family's lives ("Janie hit a homer!"), to post about their hobbies and activities ("Local philatelists went to the show in big numbers this weekend ..."), or to share their ideas and beliefs with like minded people ("I've got a good one about those 'round earther' morons!").
This was before Facebook usurped those functions. Now, blogs not designed to sell something are about as common as non-workplace landlines.

Tara Condell

I started this blog in 2009 to write about myself and to practice ordering my opinions and beliefs into coherent prose. I've never told any family or friends about it because I wanted to write with no filters. I wanted, for example, to be able to put down how I felt about my aging, then ailing and finally dying parents without having to think of them reading it.
Why not keep a journal instead? Actually, I do have a journal I write in using cursive and, believe it or not, with a fountain pen. I make entries in it about as often as I do here. I use this forum because there will always be something about writing something theoretically for all to see that makes me think and write more consciously than I would in a journal. This is likely a holdover from my years as a reporter.
Of my over eight hundred entries, the one getting the least number of hits was "Summer is ending" (8/27/12) with just two. The one getting the highest was "Bissextus" (2/29/16) with 2,461. (It has a picture that you should not look at if you're at work or around the kids. The picture is the reason it's gotten so many hits and is there as a joke about the title, a word that sounds racy but isn't.) Entries on this blog often get hits just in the single digits. However many an entry gets, it's clear, judging from the average number of comments entries get—a number barely above zero—that all but a few of those hits are accidental.

Amy Winehouse

That record high number changed this week after I wrote about the suicide of Tara Condell on January 31. That post has gotten over 5,600 views and several comments. I'm an extreme introvert and unused to having people judge what I say or write. I've always been surprised how deeply it hurts when people insult or disparage me, even when it's on the internet, and even at my age, sixty. Simply having lived that long should have thickened my skin, but it hasn't. Part of that is probably because I never married or had a successful relationship, so I can't, like most, go to the loving embrace of a partner after being called a mean-spirited idiot elsewhere.

Jimi Hendrix

I moderate the comments and usually publish them all, even, in this case, the one that called me an asshole and recommended that I "give it a try." Most of the comments have been civil, even when they find fault with my opinion or disagree with me to an extent that they get angry.
The sum of what I said in the post is that with the right intervention and treatment, Ms. Condell could have gone on to live a long, happy and productive life. Some comments on that defended or semi-defended her action, saying things like, 

• She'd seen and done it all, and met all her goals 
• It was her life, and her decision 
• She was in pain. Give her a break, poor thing  
• The suffering can become unbearable and suicide the only option 
• Never judge or assume it would be that easy of a "fix" 
• Sometimes depression never gets better despite decades of the best treatment
• If you haven't been there YOU DO NOT GET IT AND CANNOT GET IT and you should be thankful for that but shut the fuck up with your "help" 
• We did not walk in her shoes, and each person's path is their own. She theoretically had so much more life left but who knows? She could choose to go on and be struck by a bus the next morning.

Ms. Condell did seem to live a full life and achieve many of her goals. I can see how a young person could argue that it's best to go out on a high, and the number of people who have died at her age, 27, is well known. Most died from unintentional drug overdoses, but I'd argue that those who truly want to live are more careful when taking drugs, making those deaths a small step removed from flat-out suicide. Among the famous to die at that age are Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. 

Kurt Cobain

Ask anyone who's sixty if they'd rather had died over thirty years ago and ninety-nine out of one hundred will look at you as if you've gone mad. Some of those ninety-nine would even include people who tried to kill themselves when they were around that age. No matter how much you've done or how finished you are doing it, you will never make a convincing argument that killing yourself is a valid thing to do, unless you're in extreme and incurable chronic physical pain, in the last months of a terminal illness, or doing it to save others as in throwing yourself on top of a live grenade in a crowded room.
In my reply to one who commented, I mention Kevin Hines, one of the thirty-six known survivors of an estimated 1,700 people who've jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, which Hines did in 2000. Of that, he said something like, "As soon as I was over the railing I realized that everything broken in my life could be fixed." The first time I contemplated suicide was when I was thirteen. There were times after that, of course, but I never attempted it. The closest I came to doing that was in 1987, when I was in my late twenties, freshly rejected, and several stories up a tall building with an easy jumping off spot. Every time I thought of jumping off a building, I saw myself changing my mind a second or two into it, thinking of how I could have moved to Paris or Sydney, tried hard drugs, taken up meditation, written a book. Anything but falling toward a hard surface. In general, I'm not going to write approvingly of suicide. Ever.
A few of those commenting mentioned faith and their god. I have no religion, but I think that casting suicide in this light is valid because Ms. Condell mentions her faith in her letter, though in my opinion hers is an immature "Family Circus" comic strip version of it (your grandfather sitting on a cloud, playing checkers with Benjamin Franklin, smiling down benevolently on his grandchildren). Most religions have severe strictures against suicide. This makes sense; if you can kill yourself and spend eternity in bliss, why not kill yourself when your fifteen? 
Some of those comments:

• She is now where she wants to be...for whatever reason.  
• Lack of faith leads to suicide when a person becomes unable to endure the stresses of the contemporary life. Faith broadens the horizons and gives hope and confidence in the creator of this universe. The most Merciful, the most wise
• I am very saddened by this Story my Prayers go out to her Family and Friends
• Perhaps she believed she is not leaving us, but joining him. We mortals can only shake our heads and hope we make our choices differently, because the finality of death, whether accidental or intentional, is irrevocable
• She's definitely in pain now because she's in HELL. I am so sorry for her and any other that is tricked by the devil to perform such a foolish act

Some commenting chastised me for not recounting the good things Ms. Condell had done in her short life. Fair enough. I was reacting to one article in a daily newspaper and to what she'd written about herself on her website. I was not trying to eulogize her and will leave that to others who knew her better. No matter how much good she may have done, though, I still think that doing more may have saved her. Maybe I'm completely wrong about this. Perhaps what I should have said was that she should have put in more time and effort into finding enough meaning in her life to make her put off its termination for at least a few more decades. My own death from disease is probably going to come in a year or two, a fact that has made me think of these things. You can see this by scanning a few previous entries. One features (but isn't about) Fatima Ali, a chef known for her appearance on a TV cooking show, who died of what I have at the age of twenty-nine. How she would have loved to have the good health Tara Condell possessed.