Suicide must be one of the most unusual forms of death. While it is intended to end one single person’s suffering, it almost always causes and immeasurable amount of suffering for the people around the deceased. Suicide never accomplishes its purpose of stopping the pain, because it starts a never-ending cycle that affects all people involved. Suicide is a selfish act committed by people that are blinded by their own pain so that they don’t realize the pain they will bring to others around them. They don’t realize how deeply they will scar their friends and family or the second-guessing that will fill their friend’s and family’s lives after the fact. This second-guessing is as Roberts puts it, “the devil’s game for there are no answers and infinite questions.”(Roberts 110) She also says it is like a bad song that plays over and over in your head no matter what you try to do to get rid of it. Suicide is a horrible act that causes pain, suffering and angst for everyone except the deceased.
The emotional appeal of Roberts’ essay is very evident throughout the entire work. She talks about how the pain of the deceased is not even comparable to that of the people around the deceased.
While Roberts uses her emotions well she also uses facts and statistics to give much credibility to her essay. When she says, “By the time you finish this article, another person in the United States will have kill himself”(Roberts 107) it really catches the reader’s eye and makes him or her think more seriously about the topic. Also, by using the numerical figures of 30,000 people dying a year from suicide and one person every fifteen minutes committing it she helps bring such a far away, “it can’t happen to me” topic back down to earth and into the reader’s lap. While these two methods of displaying facts grab the reader’s attention she uses facts in another way to really make the reader think about what is being put down. She talks about how December is the loneliest month and April is the cruelest, while May is the peak time for people to commit suicide. This is extremely intriguing and when she adds her thoughts about why she believes this is, “You’ve made it through another winter, but your world is no warmer”, it really snares the reader and guarantees the he or she will continue through the rest of the essay. All in all her facts and statistics really help the reader believe what she is saying about such a fuzzy and controversial topic.
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