Closing In on Death

I do not think I will kill myself, at least not until I am much older, or perhaps death-sentenced to a concentration camp. Simply, I do not wish to die. I do, however often wish I was never born. These two wishes are not at all the same. First, suicide seems rude somehow. A former schoolmate of mine once asked, “What could be more selfish than killing yourself?” I remember thinking to myself, “Well, nothing, I suppose.” In a way, he was right. Sure, I was rather cynical by nature, and I believed that most human acts – if not all – preserved or otherwise promoted the self – at least from a genetic, evolutionary standpoint. But he did make a good point. I mean when you get right down to it, suicide was pretty fucking selfish. You have to appreciate the pureness of a suicide’s selfishness – at least with regard to how the word suicide is normally used. (I’m not talking about diving on an active grenade and covering it with your thorax to shied others from the explosion.)

Now, I am by no means a moralist. In fact, my views regarding morality have always bordered on the nihilistic – at least epistemological nihilism. Ever since I can remember, I never really believed in a hell, or right and wrong. I did not disbelieve them either, per se, but the point is that telling me, “But it’s an affront to the Lord to kill yourself. You’ll go to hell,” never really stuck with me.

Nonetheless, I could never seem to shake the guilt. As much as I might like to fall asleep and never awaken, I could not stand imagining my mother’s face upon hearing the news of my death, her shaking my lifeless body to no avail, her grimace of pain – with its pulled-down mouth corners – resembling the masks used by the tragedians of Greek antiquity. It didn’t matter that I thought moralizations were baseless or my guilt too was baseless, or that I never even really liked my mother as a person. None of these facts mattered: the guilt hung over me lurid and unapproachable like the undead clown grotesquery of my childhood nightmares.

Then there was the second reason why suicide seemed less than ideal: that final moment of disillusionment just before the coup de grace.  (By the way, the Peggy Lee song “Is That All There Is” sums up the following line of reasoning rather nicely.) I have often pictured myself holding a revolver or silently swallowing yew seeds with gulps of water, but I could never imagine what I could possibly be thinking as I did so. Sure,  it always seemed romantic to envision being bathed in the divine light of God’s nimbus, a light that would wash over me in a cleansing ablution of relief as I rushed through some gilt wind-tunnel toward the hereafter. But in reality, my closing in on death would probably be as dank and lightless as a crawlspace.

I could not imagine saying to myself, “Is that all there is to life?” Life, even with its sporadic loveliness, always disappointed me overall: war, famine, the limits of my humanity, so on and so forth. But to know for certain that this was all that life offered seemed too much to bear. At least if I lived into my sixties or seventies, I could say with reasonable certitude that I knew the extent of what life had to offer. But I had not lived even to the age of thirty. If life was a bad movie that I was destined to walk out on before it ended, I figured I should at least stay in the theater long enough to know. If I had any chance of dreaming, I thought I might as well take it. The problem was I did not genuinely know what the future held. I did not care so much about signing a document acknowledging my defeat, but I did not want to sign a document that I had not fully read.

Third, I had always promised myself that if I chose to end it all I would at least have a little fun before I died. I felt I owed it to myself to at least exhaust my resources, even if it would only dilute my suffering for a week, day or hour. But I always saw myself emptying my bank accounts, telling off my boss or contracting venereal diseases only to have my will to kill myself fade by the end of all my splurging. I did not want to be the butt of what seemed to be another cosmic joke.

Sure, thoughts of suicide will continue to comfort me vacantly, playing through my mind like television reruns of some situational comedy, but I cannot see myself acting on such thoughts – at least not now. Maybe, when I am older, when more of those who care for me have died and my guilt has left me like some doppelganger of my former self, I will take Death up on her offer.

Until then, I will have to remind myself that what I seek – ephemeral mental states like contentment, peace and happiness -  I can obtain. I can obtain such mental states, because they reduce to neural activity in the brain, which in turn reduces to such commonplaces as tablets, powders and capsules.