Suicide: The OTHER Pro-Choice

Are you fucking kidding me? If you need a sports-themed coffin, then you have some serious issues, which maybe need to be resolved BEFORE you die.

I know I’m going to piss some people off. But, here goes.

Okay, I admit I’ve tried to commit suicide a few times. So shoot me. No, really. My insurance will pay, like, double if I don’t do it myself and it’s accidental.

Oh, God. Now some cray fucker who sees this post is going to take me literally and pull a stalk-n-kill on my ass. And just my luck, too, craytard will catch me on a day when I’m not particularly suicidal. But it’s not like YOU’RE getting any of the above mentioned financial benefits, so save your ammo, asshole.

The thing is that I question life expectancy v. what-good-a-body-is-doing-still-kicking.  Right this very second, I’m not hankering to die, but I often experience an overwhelming realization that I’m just killing time. I’m taking up space—a LOT more of it lately, too—and not making much of a contribution to anything other than denting the couch. Because I MUST (so that I don’t appear to be a freaking loser), I get enough accomplished to function at bare-minimum mode because the amount of spiritual, physical, and emotional energy required for BMM turns out to be monolithic. I’m like a cat constantly working in a sandbox, expending enormous toil to cover up one little piece of shit.

Now, I expect that only a handful of folks will understand this line of thinking. Most people believe in the sanctity of life—and I don’t take that lightly either. (Unless we’re talking about the life of a roach or this mosquito that has been dive-bombing me all evening. The first good chance I get, that biting sumbitch is going to be nothing but a blood-smear. Sorry, Dalai Lama.) I hold OTHER people’s lives dear. But who’s to say when one has reached the expiration date of usefulness? Who’s to say that it isn’t time to go when one has met his or her highest potential? Look. When there is no other direction to go but farther down, why stick around to feel nothing but low?

Yes, yes. I know. Think of the survivors and how awful they will feel! But death and survivorship are inescapable. It’s all a matter of choosing the “when.” It may make my survivors feel a bit better if I wait to shuffle off this mortal coil when I’m a 110-year-old relic who doesn’t remember who the hell they are. Death would be a nice relief for the survivors at that point. But I will have grown way tired of applesauce and adult-diaper-rash by then.

Oh. I remember the BIG argument. Eternal flames. Yeah, yeah. I’m not being cavalier. Just realistic. I think God loves us. I don’t think He causes any of the turmoil we endure, and I don’t think He means to torture us for eternity. Consider a case of protracted and heinous child abuse. Some poor kid suffers unthinkable shit for so long that she can’t take another second. So she takes a permanent dirt nap escape. Are you honestly going to argue that our loving God would then subject that ruined child of His to even more agony? Forever? I just don’t buy that. Our Lord did not put us here and gift us with beauty and laughter and music so that we could choose to suffer by avoiding the bounty. This life is not some cruel game of keep-away.

But sometimes our own limitations and choices make it impossible for us to enjoy the heaven we have right here on earth.

So. How can I reconcile the idea of a power greater than myself and the preciousness of creation with the belief that it’s okay to throw in the towel when one is ready? Mercy-killing and assisted suicide get folks all in a dither. It’s easier to stomach the ideas when the “victim’s” death is imminent. But aren’t ALL of our deaths imminent? Ain’t no immortality last I heard, no matter what that Twilight shit says.

Now, listen. I am NOT advocating that angsty teenagers should knock themselves off at the first whiff of feeling a little depressed.  YOUNG folks should NEVER commit suicide because they have no possible way of knowing whether the best is yet to come. And odds are, it IS.

And I’m not saying that ALL sad people ought to pack it in. Sad is normal sometimes. What isn’t normal is when one bad situation after another piles up on a fellow, and there is no legitimate end in sight. What isn’t normal is the bottom-of-the-barrel feeling that one’s ship of dreams has passed on by, and it ain’t coming back. When there is nothing but shit on the horizon, WHY should one stick around to greet it?

What I’m saying is that when an ADULT human specimen has had enough mediocrity or worse; when a person recognizes that he or she has achieved all he/she is going to do this time around, and that there IS NOT going to be something better over the next hill; when a fellow decides that his quality of life—whether it’s physical, emotional or spiritual life we’re talking about here—is so diminished as to make existence unbearable, then WHY shouldn’t the enlightened one get to opt out of the misery?