Copyright namibian
Imagine a policy so ridiculous it says, “publish them all”. This drew my imagination into a dark place. Someone has had the courage to say what the rest of us pretend not to be thinking: publish the suicide notes, or at least that’s the absurd fantasy rattling around in my head. Content warning: This piece is provocation and satire about public voyeurism; if suicide is affecting you, please seek help. The names, characters and pet names in this piece are all fiction. Now back to the suicide note. You didn’t write it, and let’s be honest, it probably wasn’t addressed to you. I’ll look the other way if it starts with “Dear Mama” or “My Love”, but if there’s no name, no addressee, and your name sure as hell isn’t Patricia, maybe sit this one out. So, you or the police found a note. It’s maybe one of those yellow sticky pads from the office with “Patricia” scribbled neatly in the middle with a smooth ballpoint pen. And in the corner? The cryptic “XOXO FU”. How is that for the family if none of you are named Patricia? This new proposal to make all suicide notes public is brilliant and long overdue. It is public service. Surely, if taxpayers are going to pay for man-hours for investigators assigned to the scene, we, the taxpayers, must have access to the findings. Right? We have been ignoring a wealth of first-hand data that has been languishing in police evidence lockers or, even worse, in Grandma’s dusty shoebox. It’s criminal neglect. We’re a society that worships information, transparency and “learning from mistakes”, yet we let the most brutally honest human feedback ever written go unread. That’s not respect. It is a waste of resources and the most creative literature ever created by humans. Think about it. We’re constantly told to learn from the falls of others. Fine. But how can we do that if we can’t see what they saw on the way down? Huh? We love to talk about “prevention” and “understanding”, but we’re ignoring the manuals left behind. How can I gain insights from someone’s misstep if I am unaware of the cause? Was it debt? Was it the neighbour’s barking dog? Was it a regrettable haircut? Is there a problem with the batch of potato salad that was made? I need to know. We all need to know. Please consider the logic we use for airplane crashes when we study the black box to keep the next flight in the air. When a human goes down, the suicide note is the black box. Right? Now, I can already hear the sceptics whining: “But what about the short or cryptic notes? What good are those?” Oh, please. That’s the fun part. That’s when this grim project becomes national entertainment. A simple note titled “Patricia” serves as a clue rather than a dead end. It’s a full-blown mystery. Who is Patricia? What did she do? Is Patricia even human, or just the neighbour’s dog with an annoying bark? A note that says “Check the bottom drawer” is even better. If the police retrieve an old VHS tape from the drawer, then you should arrange a showing at Ster-Kinekor. You are looking at an interactive tragedy. Netflix could never. Most of you will now raise counterarguments like “privacy!” and I forgive you. You will beg me with “What about the family?” Always with the families. They’ll say the notes are “personal”, “private” and “painful”. And sure, feelings exist. But let’s take a deep breath and become rational. Should one family’s understandable grief really be allowed to block society’s desperate hunger for entertainment disguised as education? Isn’t that just gatekeeping? If the author didn’t address it with “To My Wife ONLY, Do Not Open”, then I’m sorry, but that’s public domain. Finders keepers. And since the state’s the finder, that makes us, the public, the keepers. It’s time we stopped treating these notes as fragile tragedies and started treating them as what they truly are: raw, unfiltered literature. We could have a searchable public database, obviously. But why stop there? Imagine an “S-Note of the Week” section in the Tuesday paper, right next to the classifieds. Oh, please tell me you won’t be buying every Tuesday edition just for the suicide notes. Really, are you that boring? And now that we have the Content Creators Awards, can you imagine the Namibian Golden Exit Literature Awards (Nagel Awards)? The Nagel Awards would celebrate the best in posthumous short-form writing. Categories like “Most Cryptic”, “Best Takedown of a Relative”, and the coveted “Most Economical Use of Language”. The winning pieces would earn the family some needed funds, and some cash would be allocated to building the tombstones of the departed. Perhaps we avoid asking the far more terrifying question: Why do planes keep falling from the sky? So here is a truly radical idea: Keep the notes private. Fix what broke the writers. And build a society that doesn’t need new ones.
