They call us the selfish ones, we who want to kill ourselves. We leave behind tears and heartache for our families and friends, so they tell us. Before we do anything "rash", we should consider the feelings of those who love us.
There is nothing "rash" in our attempts to end it all. Most of us spend weeks, even months planning the perfect way to die. We think about which buildings to jump off and where. In a suburban neighborhood? Easy access to the twentieth floor, true, but to have little children to have to see the wreckage of human bodies? Sky-scrapers? They don't really have windows that open these days. Smart move, heaven knows how many number-crunchers staring at their Excel spreadsheets in their 5 by 5 ft cubicles would gladly end the mind-numbing tedium of their dead-end jobs...
Poison's a long and painful death... why go through purgatory when you're going straight to hell anyway? Hanging? Drowning? A drug overdose?
Do we want our bodies to be intact enough to be identified? Unzip the body bag, take a quick look, yes, that's our son, or do we want to spare them the trauma, have our bodies so mangled they can only be identified by forensic science or our DNA and dental records?
Selfish. Us. We're selfish for not wanting to live in agony, for not forcing our irredeemably broken hearts to keep beating, selfish for choosing to end the utter misery of being instead of living like zombies so the people who vaguely care for us while we live and will remember us once a year when we die can have their peaceful, guiltless sleep unbroken.
