A Nilosophy of Suicide

April 23, 2015
Who dies there? 

Quietly they put poor Cleveland Sandy in the ground this morning, but then it was back to the Presbyterian Church for all the bells and the whistles, the pomp, the circumstance, and the general hoopla. I half-expected the angels to descend with their trumpets to join the organ postlude. It was fitting: Cleve was a pomp and a hoopla and a trumpets-blaring kind of guy, a local grand poohbah; and his friends and his neighbors, even his few enemies, wanted to see him out right.

   Nothing like that for me, I hope. A quiet death, somewhere in a corner. Lamented by a few, object of no one’s curiosity. Then, bury me in an empty field alongside a seldom traveled road. Let four or five gather, knowing for certain only that it’s the right thing to do to commit a body to the ground and commend a soul to the God of the road and the field and the sky.

          “He was a sinner,” someone can say, “but he did try.” Then, an “amen” or two; and the men put their hats back on, the three of them, and the two women whisper “amen,” too, as they turn away to walk to their cars, then back to town.

Philosophers : those that love knowledge – not clever solutions or bons mots or cant ; those that recognize that knowledge is messy, not only because there is too much of it to grasp, but because it hides still more.

          (Knowledge : fat and shapeless and slippery as the giant blanc-mange in the old Monty Python sketches.)

* * * * *

We have almost no control over what comes to mind; what just comes. I am thinking on my way home from the funeral about Dutourd, and his apparent fascination with Ovid. Or, I am thinking about Ovid and how in his world everything is changing, or liable to change, all the time. Young women become trees and rivers. Men turn to stags or clusters of stars. All in an instant!

You are walking between the church and work in small-town Virginia; you close your eyes against the sun bouncing off the sidewalk, and you wake up behind the wheel of a strange car, lost on a gravel road somewhere on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Maybe. You could be in Wisconsin, or Ontario, or driving down the wrong side of the road north of Glasgow.

Wherever you are, there she is – not just in glimpse like on the Plaza Mayor in Madrid – but as present as if she is sitting in the seat next to you, both young and warm, funny and free, delightfully, delightedly confused, and dead by her own hand, dangling from a rope, wrapped up in a sheet, chopped up by flames into dust and bits of bone and scattered along the beach.

   Now she’s dangling her hand out the open window. “Why?” you say to her again. You mean: “Didn’t we – didn’t I – love you enough? Didn’t you love us; love me, your brother, enough to stay alive, not to choke yourself to death?”

   She looks straight ahead, still dangling her hand in the air. You stop the car, but you can’t get away by doing that: by stopping, shutting off the engine, and getting out of the car. By walking away into the gray-brown field alongside the deserted road. There she is, ahead of you, running, awkwardly as she always did, one of Ovid’s sad nymphs, who ran from life and metamorphosed into a shaft of light bouncing from the sun to the sidewalk and into your eyes, and you close them against the glare. And,

Here is where philosophy and science and technology part company. For the scientist is thinking, “How?” And, the philosopher wonders – constantly – why?

  I wonder if Moira, having figured out the how – put together the technology and the equipment – knew why she tying the rope to the ceiling fan, putting the noose around her neck. She was no doubt in no mood for philosophy; but a little might have saved her. Only might have, though. For philosophers – I was going to write – “not only love knowledge, they love life.” But that’s not strictly, always true. They love knowledge enough that they won’t give up looking for it, but no one is ever sure where he or she will find it.