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(In years past, suicide might have positioned this story behind a red line, but that taboo seems to be eroding. “Most any time someone takes their own life, it seems to me there’s a case to be made for ‘overriding public interest’ in seeking to understand why,” wrote, er, English in 2012.)

I can’t blame her for being conflicted. I can understand why she and many of Aulakh’s friends and colleagues would want to respect her desire to vanish into thin air, and I can understand why many would not want to — hence the many glowing tributes published online and reported by Sean Craig this week in the Financial Post.

My only close-up personal experience with suicide, that of a classmate in Grade 11, provoked in me what I can only describe as psychedelic grief, entirely out of proportion (I didn’t know him well), mutating unpredictably by the minute and not just angry, but intensely reactionary. If he had left a note like Aulakh’s, I have no idea what I would have thought about it. I can’t recreate the mindset. But I know I would have shouted at people who disagreed with me.

Viewing the awful situation at the Star dispassionately, however, I think the answer is very clear: Aulakh’s request to be neither written nor spoken of is simply an irrational artefact of an irrational act. She can be respected by granting her wish, but not honoured, and her colleagues have certainly not dishonoured her by sharing their grief publicly.

If we could react to a friend’s or a loved one’s suicide rationally, I think we would respect that she felt there was no other option, but grieve her loss in certain knowledge that there was, and celebrate her life as we would any other cut far too short. Society seems increasingly to believe that talking about suicide is a better preventive measure than not talking about it. If that’s true, I suspect the Star will in future come to realize it did exactly the right thing, if not entirely willingly.

National Post

cselley@nationalpost.com

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