Seoulscapade

The two favorite methods for committing suicide in Seoul, and probably throughout Korea, are hanging and tossing yourself out of an apartment building. The first method would appear to be the choice of celebrities. The second method probably scores highest as the one preferred by everyone else. This is partly because thousands upon thousands of people live in high rise apartments, which provides the convenience of a high platform for jumping on any given day.

But it has other merits that put it at the top of the list. Provided that you are up high enough, you are guaranteed of success. It’s probably 95% quicker to implement than hanging, especially if you run to the window. It reveals your considerate nature because ambulance personnel are not obliged to go far to retrieve your body; in many cases, they can pull up right next to you. It also makes a dramatic statement, especially desired if there is any spite in it, for society and those around you.

If I were shopping for a suicide method, I’d want these in the package. The one thing that bothers me, though, is the time it takes before the ground breaks your fall and the lights go out. There’s too much room for doubt there, too much time to reconsider and realize, as you plummet, that maybe you had been just a little bit hasty in your decision.

A dramatic suicide occurred just last week in Seoul in which the person, a 27 year old male, chose this jumping method for his exit from humanity. The story goes that he had been a university student but then was called up for military service. He was living with his mother at the time, and she was under the impression that he was still at university completing post-graduate studies. She believed this because that’s what he was telling her; and he was lying to her so that she would keep giving him money, which she thought was going towards his studies.

Things must have been tense in the household, presumably with not much money to go around. The husband and father of the family had died some two years ago from cancer. The mother was in her 60s, and I guess she probably didn’t have a job or, if she did, it didn’t pay much. So there’s the son, mooching off old mum.

Add to the mix his absconding from military duties, or rather civil duties—the service men have to do if they aren’t fit for real military service. So, the police were after him for another kind of social irresponsibility. It seems like this guy was just spiraling deeper and deeper into more and more trouble (no pun intended).

It wasn’t long before it all came to a head. Three months ago while having an argument with his mother, he killed her. It is likely she suspected his duplicity and the argument was about that. Her death may have been an accident, however—who knows? But he didn’t bother to report it, and instead wrapped her body in bed sheeting and just left her in the apartment. He continued to live there with the corpse for three months, which was probably all he could do, not having a job or a mother anymore to keep up his supply of cash.

Last Sunday night, it seems that he just couldn’t take it anymore. He called the police and confessed his crime. He then added that, before they got there, he would commit suicide. At least, in the end, he was a man true to his word. He jumped from his apartment balcony and fell 16 stories to his death.

We heard his body hit the ground. At first, I thought there had been a minor motorbike accident out on our complex’s back road, faced by our apartment. The sound was like a swishing directly followed by a thud. I’d also heard a couple of people, perhaps women, exclaim cries of surprise. All of it was not that loud, but enough to tear me away from the computer.

Sunah and I looked down from our balcony only to see people walking up and down under street lights on that back road, exercising like any other night. Nothing was untoward. Sunah did see closer in to our building, in the quadrangle of the kids playground, people moving toward the apartment building on our left, which borders the left side of the quadrangle. (That building kind of forms an L with ours.) But people milling about was not unusual. The weather was good, and naturally a lot of parents were out with their kids.

I was already thinking kids were responsible for the kerfuffle, and so upon seeing the road clear, I had gone inside. Then we both just went back to what we were doing.

Not until perhaps forty minutes later, when emerging downstairs with stuff for the recycling bins, did we discover all of the commotion going on. An ambulance was there and what looked like a large fire department bus, all lights flashing. People were everywhere, including others like us attending to their recycling (Sunday nights is recycling night). I did the recycling while Sunah went to ask about what was happening. We still hadn’t put two and one point five together.

After asking the apartment building’s guard, who seemed intent on ensuring nothing more than that the recycling was in order, she told me that some fat guy had jumped from his apartment and killed himself. She pointed to an apartment near the top of the building, from where he had leaped. All of its lights were on. The balcony’s outer sliding door wide open (as you would expect!).

That was enough for me; I headed over to the front of the building to have a look for myself. Not that I could get very close—there were officials keeping people back, plus the well-informed police had finally arrived. I couldn’t see a body anywhere, but I think, if it were still there, it might have been in the dark under trees and bushes. His crashing through the trees first would explain the swishing sound I heard just prior to the thud.

We went back to our apartment. Sunah was pretty upset by the whole thing. I was OK. But I did become slightly unsettled later on. What I mean is that, before long, everything was back to normal; just a tad too quickly for my liking. Actually, throughout this incident, everything remained normal just metres away on the back road; people continued to go about playing with kids and doing their exercise routines, and many probably had no idea that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

I looked out into the night from my balcony and could see the 16th floor apartment from where the guy had jumped, about 40 metres diagonally to my left and a few floors down. It was still all lit up, and still there was no one inside—no cops, no investigators, no one. Little did I know at the time that the mother’s body was still in there wrapped up in bed sheets. To my front, down on the road and even directly in front of our building, the bustle of life continued on.

In a way, the suicide’s overwhelming lack of impact on everyday life probably made it easier to deal with because it was almost like it never happened. Add to that, I’m not at all against suicide and believe that if people want to do it, they should not be hindered. So the thing was not an affront to any sacred beliefs.

No, the suicide did not astounded me, but there was something sad and unsettling in the brief exclamation it represented; after an hour of commotion everything got back to normal, all was calm. There’s a lesson for us all in that.

As a postscript to this incident, Sunah and I happened to see our real-estate friend last night, the guy who helped us get our present apartment. He said he’d heard about the suicide, and that agents in the area were naturally keeping things quiet. There’s nothing like a murder-suicide to reduce the value of a property. Today, before posting this, I saw what appeared to be workmen doing something on the apartment’s balcony; readying things, I guess, for it to be sold.

This apartment complex had a suicide last year as well, I heard, and I’m reckoning that the average would be about one a year for each large apartment complex in Seoul. That doesn’t seem too bad, in my experience.