April

April is the cruelest month.

— T.S. Eliot

I remember reading "The Waste Land" in college, just so I could say I'd read it.

The poem made little impression on me, despite its reputation as T.S. Eliot's masterpiece and the only 20th-century book to rival James Joyce’s Ulysses, the greatest work of modernist literature.

One line of "The Waste Land" stuck with me, however. 

The first.

That's because I read separately that, indeed, April is the cruelest month: April is the leading month for suicides.

It's hard to understand depression—the clinincal kind—until you have experienced it yourself; and harder still to understand suicide.

Perhaps that's because, in a real sense, no one experiences suicide.

April is the season of blossoms and regeneration, a joyous occasion for most of us.

But blossoms and regeneration can be painful, because they recall fertile and happy days forever gone by, as Eliot makes clear:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Suicide, on the other hand, is painless.

NOTE: "The Waste Land" turns 100 years old in October. You can read philosopher David Hume's 1755 defense of suicide here.