Even in the warmest of months, life can seem cold and dreary. So it was, presumably, for some anonymous fellow on a bright and sunny Tuesday morning a few weeks ago. As I made my way unsuspectingly to the tram at 8:10 that day, incidentally, without yet having had any coffee, I suddenly came face to face with self-inflicted death, splattered unsympathetically across the tram tracks directly underneath the Nusle Bridge. A shocking sight, to be sure, and one which made me rather unfashionably late to work, not to mention the fact that it's haunted me ever since. The crude outline of the victim has long since faded from the pavement, but it remains forever etched in my memory, from time to time bringing to the surface ruminations on suicide and what would cause a person to end his own life. I mean, it's a harsh world out there. Leaving aside the uncertainty of living in a major city in the age of "sacred terror," millions of horsepower zoom past us everyday as we cross the street; diseases threaten to gobble our t-cells; earthquakes rend holes in the very ground beneath our feet...Isn't it enough to leave death to chance?

Apparently not for the hundreds of thousands of people who kill themselves every year, citing -- presumably in suicide notes -- marital problems, depression, mental or physical disease, or fear of police (yes, really) as reasons for their "take no prisoners" attitude toward their own lives. In the Czech Republic in 2003, the last year for which records are available, approximately 1700 people committed suicide, thankfully not all from the bridge above my house. When one researches global trends in suicide, which I discovered is a much less repulsive task than one might imagine, certain interesting facts emerge. One is that women are anywhere from 2 to 6 times less likely to die at their own hands then men are (except in China, where women are more inclined), but that they're at least two times more likely than men to try.

The statistics on suicide also point to the high numbers in European countries versus Latin American and Middle Eastern nations. This would seem to lend truth to the popular opinion that a religious commitment all but inoculates a person from committing the act. Church and other religious leaders claim that integration in that kind of social network provides worshipers the necessary support system and sense of belonging to choose life. More likely, fear of burning eternally in hell is the predominant deterrent for conscientious churchgoers. Whatever the case, the claim that atheists and agnostics are more likely to kill themselves out of desperation falls apart when one takes into consideration Poland, a country that boasts a population wherein 97% of citizens are strictly Catholic. Poland has a comparable suicide rate to that of the Czech Republic, a country, as we all know, that is one of the most atheistic in the world.

Moreover, neighbors Czech Republic and Poland share their status as high-suicide-rate nations with the entire region of Eastern Europe, including Lithuania, which lays claim to the highest global rate of suicide. So maybe it's not about religion, and it's not about girls and boys; maybe suicide is just another social phenomenon to be put neatly in the "it's because of Communism" box. And true enough, Prague's Suicide Bridge, giving fatalism an inconvenient potential energy just above my apartment, was built from 1968-1973 by Communist authorities not only to alleviate traffic congestion but also as a grandiose display of military and cultural authority. But as the thousands who jump, hang, shoot, suffocate, and overdose to their deaths in the former Eastern Bloc can attest, Big Brother left his legacy in the region in far less showy, but just as pervasive, ways.