A similar thought occurred to me while observing a devastated friend and his wife trying to deal with the suicide of their son. So it goes the other way, too. Almost anything is better suicide; it leaves a very deep and wide swath of emotional destruction through those who loved you most. I think few of them ever fully recover from it.
My stepsister found her father hanging from the rafters in the garage when she was six or seven. Screwed that girl and her brother up for life. Very selfish thing to do.
How horrible. I guess there can be profound depressions that probably put one in a state that is virtually like madness and probably then suicide isn’t really something that they have chosen with free will.
But most of the suicides I have known (and for some reason, I’ve known 3) were known for fantasizing or talking about it or using the threat of suicide to control family members, and it wasn’t a sudden first-time thing. In fact, one of them actually set it up so he would be discovered before he died and thus be brought to the emergency room and saved. Unfortunately, the person he thought would discover him was out of town...
In my opinion, suicide is a last-ditch attempt for attention and pity, or an attempt to place guilt on people around the suicide for not having been attentive enough to his or her “needs.” And children and family be damned.