Jennie Kermode on Death

Dorothy Parker's famous poem says it well; sometimes, indeed, it's the only real defence of life available. The thing is, those moments when depression is so severe, or the pain of living so great, that suicide seems the only sane solution, are usually those moments when we are also at our least creative, and are least able to summon up the will to do more than fall out of the window that happens to be there or swallow the pills which were already lying on the dresser. It's hard to care for comfort or elegance in such a position. The only time I tried it properly myself, I threw myself down a flight of steps and smashed my head against the concrete until forcibly restrained. It's not pretty, but it's logical: dying will make the pain stop. Choice doesn't really come into it.

I suppose some people find it peculiar that others of us experience this state of affairs, whilst they spend their whole lives running from death, using one means or another to try to prolong life against the odds. It reminds me of Woody Allen's Love and Death, wherein the hero struggles to understand his beloved's distinction "I'm scared of death - I'm not frightened of it." In the modern Western world, death has been, as far as is possible, eradicated from our view. We have rest homes and hospitals for people to die in. Most people never have to see it. While making the concept comfortably remote for many, this enhances others' sense of panic; it's even more of a mystery, removed from simple practical, biological understanding, something which can perhaps only be justified by recourse to spiritual or religious traditions of some kind. Whilst people are quite happy to accept the absurdly complicated puzzles surrounding those functions that keep them alive in the first place, they seem peculiarly unable to comprehend that those functions might cease.

Death doesn't scare me. It does make me angry, which I suppose is simple and natural enough; healthy, I think. I acknowledge that my life is only a chemical process and one aspect of that process is its resistance to stopping. I'm not suicidal these days. When we first realised that Donald's illness had returned, and we were spending our last night of his freedom together, lying side by side in the darkness, I did consider that perhaps we should take poison together and just let that be it, let it all end peacefully while we were together, falling asleep and never waking up - but fuck that! That would deny us any chance of it getting better. How fucking stupid it would be to do such a thing when Donald might recover from his illness and our future might still be bright? The whole point about the future is that one can't know until one gets there; how stupid to let go when times are bad, and thus miss out on what might still be glorious.

I suppose one might also say (and I myself might once have said) stupid to go on living when there's nothing but suffering. I don't know... I'm not sure that I care. If this is all there is then I still want more of it, because if there is no Heaven, and no state of grace, then every moment of our mortal existence must be lived for all it's worth, and every tiny detail of its beauty must be appreciated, in the name of beauty and of life, that those concepts might continue to have meaning. If we can still imagine happiness, so much as to be aware of its absence, then we have something to fight for.

I think that a lot of people forget that the process of living is about fighting, that we are always struggling against the odds to remain in equilibrium. When I fear for Donald, I do appreciate the concern and support of my friends, but I don't want glutinous sympathy, great speeches from strangers who can only speak in greetings card quotations and who seem incapable of any kind of normal interaction; I don't want endless hugs; I don't want to be persuaded that the suffering I am coping with perfectly well (albeit narrowly) is something that I can't be expected to cope with. Such impositions mire me in self-pity, which is the most destructive emotion. On a chemical level, they suffocate me with depressant serotonins, doing nothing to relieve the adrenaline poisoning I accrue in my moments of real stress. Hugs are no use to me. I would rather be fucking or fighting, or both (consensually, but that should go without saying). I would rather work out that adrenaline and get those endorphins flowing. I want to be reminded that I am alive, and to glory in life, to glory in my own anger at our absurd predicament, not to be pacified and understood and crushed. Last time Donald got ill, my partner Ian didn't think I would be interested in sex, quite sympathetically, because I was so hurt, but I wanted that sex more than anything - sex is the only way that we can fight against death, allowing chemical processes to interact and trigger new processes. That's the very nature of life. I wanted to keep the baby that I lost at that time and I will have another. In the meantime, I will live.

A Discourse on Method

If I were to choose the manner of my own death, then for a start, I wouldn't use the razors. I'm far too squeamish to consider subjecting myself to that amount of pain (outside of a consensual sexual context, where a different hormone balance causes the brain to interpret such sensations more favourably), and I'm not at all sure that after the pain started I would be able to force myself to continue the cutting. I guess that's probably one of the reasons so many people fail with this method. That, and the fact that most people have no idea how to do it properly; a simple horizontal cut will not work. One has to slash right through the arteries, which necessitates cutting vertically or, to be certain, diagonally across the wrist. Besides which, arteries, especially in the young, are notoriously springy things which can be difficult to access at the best of times. A healthy body doesn't give up its grip on life that easily.

Despite Dorothy Parker's advice, I would in fact quite happily opt for the rivers. I have experienced drowning three times in my life, to the point where, but for training (I was a competitive swimmer at the time) which had altered my instinctive reaction, I would almost certainly have required recussitation, or I would have died. In one case I went into shock due to unexpected cold; in another I los I lost control after banging my head; the time I recall most vividly, I simply dived too deep, hitting the water badly and knocking all the air out of my lungs, but sinking a long way under nevertheless. As I have done on other occasions, I took a breath or two of water into my lungs, because it is possible to extract some oxygen from water, albeit not much; it buys a little time. The water going in hurts, but once there it feels heavy and soothing, as oxygen deprivation always does; it makes one sleepy. Hallucinogenic concentrations of carbon dioxide can change one's priorities. The water has never looked so blue as on those occasions when I have drowned; perfect blueness with bright little bubbles spiralling upwards and away, towards a shining ceiling of surface that marks the edge of the world. It is a beautiful, heavenly place to be, and I shall be ready to go there one day, and not come back. Surfacing is painful and ugly, everything suddenly harsh and bright, air tearing itself into hacking lungs; saying goodbye, for now, to death; like being born.

Acid just sounds frankly horrible; I have never heard of anyone trying to die this way, except perhaps by swallowing it; but that's not a very practical method of suicide, as most of the time the impact of such a substance in the stomach will cause immediate vomiting, and if promptly treated the agonised victim will often survive; survival in such a damaged condition is not a very pleasant prospect.

As for drugs, I'd be happy enough to use opiates, for my own solution. Two reasons. They don't hurt, and they don't allow for one to change one's mind after it's already too late. I've dived off high boards and played at jumping off eighty foot cliffs into soft sand in my time. I know perfectly well just how many times "Oh shit, I really shouldn't have done that!" can run through one's mind in a brief second of panic. No thankyou. Dreaming my way into oblivion without danger of caring seems far preferable to me.

That said, it all depends on one's choice of drugs. Many people seem to persist in the naive notion that all pills, when taken in excess, will just make one go peacefully to sleep and not wake up. Paracetemol is a particularly stupid popular solution. Of course, it's not possible in the States, where the pills include the antidote; but here in the UK the NHS buys the cheaper form, anrm, and I have a lot of friends who've tried it. The required dose, of course, is much higher than advertised, so most fail and simply require their stomachs to be pumped, a horrid enough process in itself. Those who succeed, however, face a slow death, taking approximately three days, in increasing agony as the liver dies and septicaemia finishes them off. If they get away with it at that stage, they'll have liver pains and intolerance to most mild poisons (alcohol etc.) for the rest of their lives.

Guns are another choice which people notoriously get wrong; the gun in mouth thing is easy to mess up (I was impressed that Kurt Cobain angled it correctly); a lot of folk just blow off half their faces and live. Yuck. Another thing to remember if you are going to use a gun is that most bullets are not designed for maximum impact at point blank range. It's a difficult method to get right. The best bet is under the back of the skull, blowing out the cerebellum first, thus reducing the chances of being a brain-damaged survivor.

Suffocation can be an interesting pursuit, sometimes pleasurable if practised with the right people, and with, of course, a sensible degree of precaution. It can cause hallucinations as the brain is flooded with carbon dioxide; in the past, these have sometimes led people to believe they were undergoing religious experiences. When the body expires due to hanging, it immediately ejects all its fts fluids; hemlock was traditionally believed to grow most abundantly under trees used as gallows, where it would be fertilised by the semen of dying men. Hemlock, of course, is often shaped like male genitalia, and itself offers a particularly violent and unpleasant means of death if consumed in any quantity.

Hanging, however, doesn't necessarily mean death by suffocation. Sometimes it means death from thirst and starvation whilst remaining suspended in the air, unable to do anything about it. In order to kill instantly and certainly the rope needs to be placed just beneath the third vertebra, such that it will snap the neck and ensure the immediate cessation of the blood supply to the brain. In general, though, it's not a very certain or comfortable way to die; it's mostly useful if you want to distress whoever finds you, which is somewhat of a poor motive for giving up your life; if things are that bad, you're probably hurting the wrong person.

I'll admit I never liked the idea of gas. The film director John Waters said that if he were ever on Death Row in a state which allowed him to choose the manner of his execution (from the official options available) then he would go for the gas, because that way one can "press one's face up against the glass and make hideous faces at people watching." This may have its merits from a dramatic point of view, but the idea of feeling the poison go into one's lungs, unableable to escape it, and feel it burning through arteries and veins, poisoning every cell with which it comes into contact, strikes me as one of the most torturous and horrible ways to draw down that final curtain. And like the lady said, it smells.