My mother had worked out the details, and my father, given to careful planning, went over the whole thing as though a dress rehearsal would exhaust in advance some of the pain of the event itself. We planned how my brother and I would come to the house, how my mother would take the antiemetics, what time of day would be best for this exercise; we discussed every detail down to the funeral home. We agreed to hold the funeral two days after the death. We planned it together much as we had on previous occasions planned parties, family vacations, Christmas. We discovered, there as elsewhere, an etiquette within which a great deal would be determined or communicated. My mother quietly set about making her emotions completely clear to all of us, intending in the course of a few months to resolve every family difference into transparency. She talked about how much she loved us all and unearthed the shape and structure of that love; she resolved old ambivalences and articulated a new clarity of acceptance. She set aside individual days with each of her friends—and she had many friends—to say good-bye; though few of them knew her actual agenda, she made sure that each knew the large place she occupied in her affections. She laughed often in that period; her sense of humor, warm and encompassing, seemed to spread to include even the doctors who poisoned her monthly and the nurses who witnessed her gradual demise. She recruited me one afternoon to help buy my ninety-year-old great-aunt a handbag, and though the expedition left her exhausted to the point of collapse for three days, it also renewed us both. She read everything I wrote with a mixture of acuity and generosity that I have not encountered elsewhere, a new quality in her, softer than the insight she had previously brought to my work. She gave little things away to people and made order of larger things that were not for giving away yet. She set about having all our furniture reupholstered so that she would leave the house in reasonable order, and she selected a design for her tombstone.
Bit by bit, that her suicide plans would become a reality seemed to settle on us. Later she was to say that she had considered doing the whole thing on her own, but that she had thought that the shock would be worse than the memories of having been with her for this experience. As for us—we wanted to be there. My mother’s life was of other people, and we all hated the idea of her dying alone. It was important, in my mother’s last months on earth, that we all feel very connected, that we none of us be left with a sense of secrets kept and agendas hidden. Our conspiracy brought us closer together, closer than we had ever been.
If you have never tried it yourself or helped someone else through it, you cannot begin to imagine how difficult it is to kill yourself. If death were a passive thing, which occurred to those who couldn’t be bothered to resist it, and if life were an active thing, which continued only by virtue of a daily commitment to it, then the world’s problem would be depopulation and not overpopulation. An awful lot of people lead lives of quiet desperation and don’t kill themselves because they cannot muster the wherewithal to do it.
My mother decided to kill herself on June 19, 1991, age fifty-eight, because if she had waited longer, she would have been too weak to take her life, and suicide requires strength and a kind of privacy that does not exist in hospitals. That afternoon, my mother went to see a gastroenterologist, who told her that large tumors were blocking her intestine. Without immediate surgery, she would be unable to digest food. She said that she would be in touch to schedule the surgery, then rejoined my father in the waiting room. When they got home, she called me and called my brother. “It was bad news,” she said calmly. I knew what that meant, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to say it. “I think it’s time,” she said. “You’d better come up here.” It was all very much as we had planned it.
I headed uptown, stopping to collect my brother from his office on the way. It was pouring, and the traffic was slow. My mother’s absolutely calm voice—she used the logical tone she had always used for things she had planned, as though we were coming up to the apartment for dinner—had made the whole thing seem straightforward, and when we arrived at the apartment, we found her lucid and relaxed, wearing a nightgown with pink roses on it and a long bathrobe. “You’re supposed to try to have a light snack,” my father said. “It helps to keep the pills down.” So we went into the kitchen and my mother made English muffins and tea. At dinner a few nights earlier, my mother and my brother had pulled a wishbone, and my mother had won. “What did you wish?” my brother now asked my mother, and she smiled. “I wished for this to be over as quickly and as painlessly as possible,” she said. “And I got my wish.” She looked down at her English muffin. “I got my wishes so often.” My brother put out a box of cookies just then, and my mother, with that tone of fond irony that was so much her own, said, “David. For the last time. Would you put the cookies on a plate.” Then she reminded me to collect some dried flowers she’d had arranged for the front hall in the country. These matters of form had become intimacies. I think that there is a certain natural drama to death from natural causes: there are sudden symptoms and seizures, or in their absence the shock of surprises of interruption. What was so curious about this experience was that there was nothing sudden or unanticipated about it. The drama lay in the absence of drama, in the choking experience of no one’s acting out of character in any regard.
Back in her bedroom, my mother apologized again for involving us all. “But at least you three should be together afterwards,” she added. My mother—who always believed in having an adequate supply of everything—actually had by then twice as much Seconal as she needed. She sat up in bed and dumped forty pills on the blanket in front of her. “I’m so tired of taking pills,” she said wryly. “That’s one thing I won’t miss.” And she began taking them with a sort of expert’s finesse, as though the thousands of pills she had had to take during two years of cancer had been practice for this moment—as I have since learned to take antidepressants in handfuls. “I think that should do it,” she said when the heap had vanished. She tried to down a glass of vodka, but she said it was making her nauseated. “Surely this is better than your seeing me screaming in a hospital bed?” And of course it was better, except that that image was still only fantasy and this one had become reality. Reality in these instances is actually worse than anything.
Then we had about forty-five minutes, while she said all the last things she had to say, and we said all the last things we had to say. Bit by bit her voice slurred, but it was clear to me that what she was saying had also been thought through. And it was then that the drama of her death came, because as she became hazier she also became even clearer, and it seemed to me that she was saying even more than she could have planned. “You were the most beloved children,” she said, looking at us. “Until you were born, I had no idea that I could feel anything like what I felt then. Suddenly, there you were. I had read books all my life about mothers who bravely said that they would die for their children, and that was just how I felt. I would have died for you. I hated for you to be unhappy. I felt so deeply for you whenever you were unhappy. I wanted to wrap you in my love, to protect you from all the terrible things in the world. I wanted my love to make the world a happy and joyful and safe place for you.” David and I were sitting on my parents’ bed, where my mother was lying in her accustomed place. She held my hand for a second, then David’s. “I want you to feel that my love is always there, that it will go on wrapping you up even after I am gone. My greatest hope is that the love I’ve given you will stay with you for your whole life.”
Her voice was steady at that point, as though time were not against her. She turned to my father. “I would gladly have given decades of my life to be the one who went first,” she said. “I can’t imagine what I would have done if you had died before me, Howard. You are my life. For thirty years you have been my life.” She looked at my brother and me. “And then you were born, Andrew. And then you, David. Two more came along, and then there were three people who all really loved me. And I loved you all. I was so overwhelmed, so overpowered by it.” She looked at me—I was
crying, though she was not—and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. “Don’t think you’re paying me some kind of great tribute if you let my death become the great event of your life,” she said to me. “The best tribute you can pay to me as a mother is to go on and have a good and fulfilling life. Enjoy what you have.”
Then her voice became dreamily torpid. “I’m sad today. I’m sad to be going. But even with this death, I wouldn’t want to change my life for any other life in the world. I have loved completely, and I have been completely loved, and I’ve had such a good time.” She closed her eyes for what we thought was the last time, then opened them again and looked at each of us in turn, her eyes settling on my father. “I’ve looked for so many things in this life,” she said, her voice slow as a record played at the wrong speed. “So many things. And all the time, paradise was in this room with the three of you.” My brother had been rubbing her shoulders. “Thanks for the back rub, David,” she said, and then she closed her eyes for good. “Carolyn!” my father said, but she didn’t move again. I have seen one other death—someone shot by a gun—and I remember feeling that that death did not belong to the person who died: it belonged to the gun and the moment. This death was my mother’s own.
The contemporary American philosopher Ronald Dworkin has written, “Death has dominion because it is not only the start of nothing but the end of everything, and how we think and talk about dying—the emphasis we put on dying with ‘dignity’—shows how important it is that life ends appropriately, that death keeps faith with the way we have lived.” If I can say nothing else of my mother’s death, I can say that it was in keeping with her life. What I would not have anticipated was how it would tempt me toward suicide. In his “Requiem,” Rilke wrote, “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” If I had been able to absorb that lesson, I would perhaps not have fallen into depression; for it was this extraordinary death that precipitated my first episode. I do not know what my level of vulnerability was, or whether I would have had a breakdown if I had not been through such a desolating experience. My attachment to my mother was so strong, our sense of family so impermeable, that perhaps I was always being set up to be incompetent to tolerate loss.
Assisted suicide is a legitimate way to die; at its best it is full of dignity, but it is still suicide, and suicide is in general the saddest thing in the world. Insofar as you assist in it, it is still a kind of murder, and murder is not easy to live with. It will out, and not always in savory ways. I have not read anything about euthanasia, written by those who have taken part, that was not at some profound level an apologia: writing or speaking about your involvement in euthanasia is, inevitably, a plea for absolution. After my mother’s death, I was the one who took on the cleaning up of my parents’ apartment, sorting through my mother’s clothes, her personal papers, and so on. The bathroom was thick with the debris of terminal illness, including instruments for the care of wigs, salves and lotions for allergic reactions, and bottles and bottles and bottles of pills. Back in the corner of the medicine chest, behind the vitamins, the painkillers, the drugs to calm her stomach, the ones to rebalance certain hormones, the various combinations of sleeping pills she had taken when the disease and fear conspired to keep her awake—behind all of them I found, like the last gift out of Pandora’s box, the rest of the Seconal. I was busy throwing away bottle after bottle, but when I got to those pills, I stopped. Fearful myself of both illness and despair, I pocketed the bottle and hid it in the farthest corner of my own medicine chest. I remembered the October day my mother had said to me, “I have the pills. When the time comes, I’ll be able to do it.”
Ten days after I finished clearing out my mother’s bathroom, my father called in a rage. “What happened to the rest of the Seconal?” he asked, and I said that I had thrown away all the pills in the house that were in my mother’s name. I added that he seemed depressed and that it disturbed me to think of his having ready access to the drug. “Those pills,” he said, his voice breaking, “you had no right to throw away.” After a long pause, he said, “I was saving them for myself, in case someday I was ill also. So I wouldn’t have to go through that whole process to get them.” I think that for each of us it was as though my mother lived on in those red pills, as though whoever possessed the poison by which she had died retained also some strange access to her life. It was as though by planning to take the remaining pills we were somehow reattached to my mother, as though we could join her by dying as she had died. I understood then what suicide epidemics were all about. Our one comfort in the face of our loss of my mother was to plan to repeat her departure on ourselves.
Not until some years later could we reverse that formulation, by making a better story for ourselves. My recovery from depression was for my father a triumph of his love and of intelligence and will: he had tried to save one member of the family and failed, but he was able to save another. We had participated in one suicide and averted another. I am not intensely suicidal so long as my situation, psychological or otherwise, seems to me or to those around me to allow of improvement. But the terms of my own suicide, should matters change too far, are entirely clear to me. I am relieved and even proud not to have bowed down to ending my life when I felt low. I plan to stand up to adversity again as necessary. Psychologically, I will not have to seek far if I decide to kill myself, because in my mind and my heart I am more ready for this than for the unplanned daily tribulations that mark off the mornings and afternoons. In the meanwhile, I have got the gun back, and I have checked out sources for more Seconal. Having witnessed the comfort my mother found in her final dominion, I can understand how, when the misery seems great and recovery impossible, the logic of euthanasia becomes incontrovertible. It is not savory, in political terms, to conflate suicide in the face of psychiatric illness with suicide in the face of physical illness, but I think there are surprising similarities. It would have been dreadful if the paper had announced the day after her death that a breakthrough discovery could cure ovarian cancer. If your sole complaint is suicidality, or depression, then to kill yourself before you have tried every expedient is tragic. But when you get to the psychic breaking point and know, and have the agreement of others, that your life is too awful—suicide becomes a right. Then (and it is such a fragile, difficult moment), it becomes an obligation for those who are living to accept the will of those who do not and will not wish to live.
The question of suicide as control has not been sufficiently well explored. An attachment to control motivated my mother’s death, and that motivation exists for many people who kill themselves under very different circumstances. Alvarez writes, “Suicide is, after all, the result of a choice. However impulsive the action and confused the motives, at the moment when a man finally decides to take his own life he achieves a certain temporary clarity. Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgment on a life as one long history of failure. But it is a decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. There is, I believe, a whole class of suicides who take their own lives not in order to die but to escape confusion, to clear their heads. They deliberately use suicide to create an unencumbered reality for themselves or to break through the patterns of obsession and necessity which they have unwittingly imposed on their lives.”
Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, once wrote, “In war, in the camps and during the periods of terror, people think much less about death (let alone suicide) than when they are living normal lives. Whenever at some point on earth mortal terror and the pressure of utterly insoluble problems are present in a particularly intense form, general questions about the nature of being recede into the background. How could we stand in awe before the forces of nature and eternal laws of existence if terror of a mundane kind was felt so tangibly in everyday life? Perhaps it is better to talk in more concrete terms of the fullness or intensity of existence, and in this sense there ma
y have been something more deeply satisfying in our desperate clinging to life than what people generally strive for.” When I mentioned this to a friend who was a survivor of the Soviet punitive system, he confirmed it. “We opposed those who wanted to make our lives bitter,” he said. “To take our lives was to be defeated, and almost all of us were determined not to give that satisfaction to the oppressors. It was the ones who were strongest who could live, and our lives were opposition—that is what fueled them. The people who wanted to take our lives were the enemy, and our hatred for and resistance to them kept us alive. Our desire became stronger in the face of our suffering. It was not while we were there that we wanted to die, even if beforehand we had been somewhat moody people. After we came out, it was another matter; it was not uncommon for survivors of the camps to kill themselves when they returned to the society they’d left behind. Then, when there was nothing to oppose, our reasons for living out our lives had to come from within our selves, and in many cases our selves had been ruined.”
Writing of Nazi camps rather than of Soviet ones, Primo Levi observed, “In the majority of cases, the hour of liberation was neither joyful nor lighthearted. For most it occurred against a background of destruction, slaughter, and suffering. Just as they felt they were again becoming men, that is, responsible, the sorrows of men returned: the sorrow of the dispersed or lost family; the universal suffering all around; their own exhaustion, which seemed definitive, past cure; the problems of a life to begin all over again amid the rubble, often alone.” Like the monkeys and rats that disfigure themselves when they are subjected to inappropriate separations, overcrowding, and other appalling conditions, people have in themselves an organic form for and expression of despair. There are things you can do to a person to make him suicidal, and those things were done in concentration camps. Once you have crossed that boundary, it is hard to sustain good spirits. Concentration camp survivors have a high rate of suicide, and some people express surprise that you could survive the camps and then end your life. I do not think that is surprising. Many explanations have been given for Primo Levi’s suicide. Many people have said that his medications must be to blame since he had manifested so much hope and light in the later years of his life. I think that his suicide was always brewing in him, that there had never been an ecstasy of being saved, never been anything comparable to the horror he had known. Perhaps the pills or the weather or something else loosed in him the same impulse that would cause a rat to chew off its tail, but I think that the essential caprice was always there after the horror of the camp. Experiences can easily trump genetics and do this to a person.
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