Time to Go
It was late in the afternoon when the man left his message on the answering machine at his lawyer's office. His call wasn't answered personally because it was a busy time, being the week before Christmas and everyone was on other calls. But when they retrieved his message a few minutes later, everything shifted. He said he was going to kill himself. Immediately they called 911, but by then it was too late. He had walked out to the back of his property, climbed into his rowboat, tied a cinder block to his legs and dangled it in the water. Then he shot himself with a shotgun. His body dropped into the swift flowing current, and was discovered downstream two days later.
He had not just called his lawyer. He had mailed letters explaining his action to a good number of people in town. He had also called the coroner around the same time he'd called his lawyer, these last phone contacts coming as he walked to his boat.
The reason for his suicide, according to the notes he left, was the acrimonious divorce he was going through, ending a marriage that had lasted more than four decades. His wife was getting a very fair settlement, and then she had asked for more. He had written a suicide note a month earlier, but had decided not to take his life at that time because his lawyer had intervened in a way to induce the wife to back off from one of her extraneous demands. This time, on the verge of settling a rather considerable estate that would have left them both with a lot of money, the wife was suddenly demanding spousal support. The amount wasn't huge, but the insult was; enough to push him over the edge.
A lot of people are outraged with the very idea of suicide. Some don't understand it. Some consider it selfish. But that may not be a fair description. I, and others I have spoken with who have contemplated suicide, talk about intolerable pain and no foreseeable change in their circumstances. Usually, it's about not seeing alternatives, along with no reason for continuing an existence that is outrageously self-corrosive.
Perhaps I should say here that while I have thought about suicide, I have never taken any steps toward killing myself, despite feelings of extraordinary anguish, disgust, futility. I rejected suicide because it would be too final a failure after too much work. I felt that it would be petulant toward the unheeding godhood within, and irrelevantly retributive toward my own deeper self. Also, I believed that I would have to come back in another life and atone for this regrettable intervention.
I read once that 97% of those who attempt to kill themselves and fail take major steps to turn their life around. That indicates to me that they hadn't given up on life, they just didn't know the order of opportunity, i.e., which path to take. For some people, however, I would infer the man discussed above was of this category, the act was punitive. He was so angry with his wife that he was ready to punish her with the "fact" that she had killed him. In a way, in fact, she did, and though she denied culpability, she will never escape the knowledge of her role in his death.
Suicide is not always wrong. People who are terminally ill and in pain certainly can be understood to make the decision to shuffle off this mortal coil. People who are crazy can make the decision to leave and it will make perfect sense to them. In this case, it sounds like a woman who had stopped listening, probably a long time ago, and a man who needed to be heard. They both lost.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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