The S Word

A friend who used to listen to me on the radio reminded me that there was once a code in the broadcast business to the effect that when people committed suicide, you didn’t mention that particular cause of death on the air. My friend wished we could go back to it. I disagree. The facts, even the unpleasant ones, have the virtue of ending speculation, at least most of the time.

The practice of never saying the S word wasn’t a question of just being “nice.” Suicide has had a long tradition of being unspeakable. If you offed yourself, you were not entitled to burial in the consecrated part of the cemetery. It was a mortal sin, and you were going to hell. You slammed the door on the way out, a major no-no.

Suicide is just one of several things that we once had a tradition, or a convention, of not discussing. Sex, of course, is another. Now, it seems, we discuss everything. Dr. Oz did a whole segment about human waste products on a daytime show not long ago. On his daily nationwide radio program, Dr. Dean Edell used to talk about every physical condition imaginable. You would be surprised (or would have been in the early days of the show) at the subjects people raised.

Talking or not talking, showing or not showing, may actually be cultural. News stations in this country generally did not show the bodies falling out of the burning World Trade Center towers on 9/11, but many foreign news outlets had no such compunction.

As a reporter, I used to have to interview people after disasters. I began to notice a pattern. When white people’s houses burned down, the last thing they wanted to do was talk to the media. But it seemed that homeowners from other ethnic groups actually sought us out to talk to us. I hated to do this particular part of my job – but maybe my own reluctance was cultural. I simply thought I was feeling “respectful.”

While we are more open-minded now, we remain sensitive to the notion that there is an appropriate time and place for raising certain issues. In the case of death, we of course have to be mindful in some measure of the departed’s survivors.

But making nice all the time, or categorically shutting down the discussion of any form of human experience, in the end accomplishes nothing beyond prettifying the scenery. All kinds of things happen to us all the time, pleasant and unpleasant, and the more we learn about them by discussion, the better we can process them – and find out about how Human Being 1.0 actually works.