By his own hand – Telegraaf.nl

The news about the “self-chosen death of writer Joost Zwagerman threw me thirty years back in time. I was fourteen years old when my father at the age of 47 committed suicide. The expression “self-chosen death” I never understood. My father chose not death, it was a stopgap. He struggled, like Zwagerman, for years with depression

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Photo: Gregor Servais

Photo: Anko Stoffels

<- rspeak_start -> With me relive many tens of thousands of survivors and children of suicide bombers by the news of a suicide a black day in their lives again. Joost Zwagerman knew exactly how that feels: his father survived a suicide attempt. He wrote in 2005 book “Through their own hands on, the only work of Zwagerman still unread state in my closet. Probably because I do know the content, but rather for runaway: the suicide of a parent harms a child’s confidence in humanity and the world, or as Zwagerman so beautifully said, “the commitment of the heart run damage on ‘ .

I think of the three children of Zwagerman. They may wonder if they are of their father were not worth the effort to live by. If they know their father very well, they will not be angry. Depression is an illness, an elusive but all-consuming disease, cancer of the mind.

Fortunately, since the 80s of the last century much has changed. There rest no longer taboo on suicide. In the reformed Ridderkerk, where I spent my childhood, literally began to close the curtains when I walked down the street. They turned away from suicide and condemned the act. I was infected. None of my girlfriends and friends attended the funeral. At school was not talking to me about my father’s death. Did ask the teachers behind my back to my friends how he had done it. They knew, because I did not taboos. My father jumped from the eleventh floor of a building in the south of Rotterdam. That was not as bad as the pitch-black world in which he lived. Can you imagine. Zwagerman also saw no other way out. Rest in peace, big gloomy writer

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