“All healthy men have thought of their own suicide,” Albert Camus wrote. But healthy people, he might have added, rarely act on those thoughts.
The confounding riddle of why someone does take her own life is explored by Tribune staff writer Monica Eng this week in our cover story, “Flameout.” Monica first heard about author Iris Chang’s suicide from a friend who’d read it on a Chinese news wire. Monica felt a special kinship with Chang: The two had met twice and found they had a lot in common, including having attended the same university and written for the same newspapers. They also enjoyed mutual friends.
For Monica, as for many others, the news of Chang’s death was hard to accept. Could it have been an accident? Perhaps one of the many people she provoked in her books had come after her? In the end, though, Monica accepted the reality of suicide, but tried to find answers. In her reporting, Monica explored Chang’s roots in Urbana-Champaign, and traveled to California, where Chang was living before she died.
Chang wanted to right the wrongs of the past through her writing. In a way, Monica has the same ambition. “I think the message for readers to take away from this story is to slow down, give yourself a break and don’t get so caught up in your own work that you forget to take care of yourself and loved ones,” she says. “And I also believe that mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of. Some of our best and most creative minds deal with it, and it is largely treatable today.”