“Coming to Terms with the Chris Cornell Suicide, My Own Way”

People used to say that I was suicidal. For a while I was, but these sessions didn’t always correspond with people’s claims of this. I have no reason for saying this other than that it potentiates my ability to discuss the subject.
Chris Cornell committed suicide last night. Oddly, it surprised me that he did this. This incident, though, illuminated certain things to me about the term “suicidal” — its anatomy and its utility, which as two complimentary facets of the term work with intriguing disparity. That is, to say that somebody’s “suicidal,” per the usual tenets of the English language, would seem to mean that they’re associated with suicide-related things, like how a mention of someone as “tribal” clearly implies the exhibition of tribal things like headdresses or rituals. On the other hand, to be “suicidal” all a person has to do is contain the cognitive desire to commit suicide.
The term, then, is clumsy. Well, that’s nothing too new — the English language is full of puzzling idiosyncrasies such as the ambiguity of whether to use “of” or “on” to precede titular subject matter in essays or memoirs.
But suicide is naturally a compelling subject, especially when it befalls the dude who sang “4th of July,” so a deeper examination of the aforementioned term’s provenance is practically obviated. When people claim that somebody’s “suicidal,” per the term’s anatomy, they’re suggesting some strict correspondence between the given individual and the act with which the word is associated, but again, no action is required for the assignment of the term. If you can prove that someone thinks about suicide then there’s proof that they are suicidal; if you can suggest that someone thinks about suicide, a suggestion of suicidality follows. Whereas thinking about tribes does not make someone tribal — a rite of some sort is required. What this variation presupposes is a fear on the part of the populace of people prone to suicidal thoughts (to say nothing of “tendencies,” necessarily). The threshold is lower at which the term is used.
To me, herein lies, if not THE foundational, at least one foundational problem with humanity. And even in Chris Cornell’s marriage, I notice a lack of communication, a lack of forthrightness, evidenced if only by the fact that his wife claimed the singer to have exhibited no implications of suicidal thoughts in the days or weeks leading up to the event. By assigning the term “suicidal” in all its scientific definiteness, we make troubled people’s problems taboo — we create a chasm between them and the world, one obligatorily noticed for the victim’s explicated separation from “normalcy.” But in order to qualify as “suicidal” by the prevailing guidelines of adjectival semantics, one would have to commit suicide, hence annihilating the potential for applying the term “suicidal.” It’s nothing.

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