Post by Graveyardbride on Jan 11, 2014 10:13:55 GMT -5
Man kills self to play chess in afterlife
The basic instinct of man is survival. However, since the 1950s, the suicide rate has almost tripled for people between the ages of 15 and 24. Self-harm now takes more lives than war, murder and natural disasters combined.
According to the World Health Organization, suicide is a major worldwide epidemic, killing more than one million people a year, according to the World Health Organization. The common link among people who kill themselves is the belief that suicide is the only solution to a set of overwhelming feelings. The attraction of suicide is that it will finally end these unbearable feelings. There are some exceptions though.
In general, people try to kill themselves for several reasons. Depression is the most common. Psychosis and those who are impulsive and aggravated by drugs, are also major factors. There are also some who have a philosophical reason to die such as terminal illness. They wish to control their own destiny and are neither depressed nor psychotic. There are also altruistic reasons such as the kamikaze pilots of Japan, the suicide bombers and the self-immolations among Buddhists and Hindus.
Another unique reason is narrated here: “Recently, two men in their 50s were found dead in Jinhua, China. One had been strangled and the other consumed pesticide. The younger man, surnamed Liao, had left two suicide notes indicating he was lonely and wanted to have someone to play chess with in the afterlife. The first suicide note was about his family. He had been divorced more than 10 years and his daughter refused to see him or talk to him by telephone. The second suicide note was brief, indicating he wanted his best friend to die with him so that they could play chess together in the afterlife. Some said the two men wouldn’t be playing chess together, because they wouldn’t be in the same place.
Here are some famous chess masters who committed suicide:
(1) Curt von Bardeleben was a German master, journalist and member of the German nobility who committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1924.
(2) Josef Cukierman was a Russian master who committed suicide in 1941.
(3) Carl Theodor Goering was a German professor, philosopher and chess master who died in 1879.
(4) Karen Grigorian of Armenia and jumped from the highest bridge in Yerevan in 1989.
(5) Norman Willem van Lennep from Holland killed himself by jumping into the North Sea at the age of 25.
(6) Lembit Oll was an Estonian grandmaster. Oll, who fell into severe depression after he was divorced committed suicide by jumping from the fifth-floor window of his house in 1999.
(7) German Rudolf Swiderski committed suicide shortly after his 31st birthday, allegedly because he could not face an operation.
(8) Alvis Vtolis, a Latvian master, killed himself by jumping onto the frozen ice of the Gauja river from a railway bridge in 1997.
(9) Former national sub-junior champion and four-time state champion IM Sankar Roy,36, was found hanging at his residence in Tala Park in North Kolkata May 9, 2012 .A suicide note was found in the room.
(10) Jessie Gilbert, 19, downed a cocktail of drinks with a friend before apparently jumping from the window of her eighth-floor hotel room July 26, 2006, during a chess tournament. The child chess prodigy was depressed because her father was on trial for raping her. Another version of the story is that she was a sleepwalker and had accidentally fallen from the window, however, her mother insisted her daughter had taken her own life.
Source: Frank 'Boy' Pestaño, The Sun-Star, January 9, 2014.
