It was at 6.25am on 2nd February, 23 days after she told me it was over, that I made up my mind to die.
I was walking out on the Icknield Way - the oldest road, they say, in Northern Europe. There were no stars and a wicked wind, straight off the Fens, lacerated my face.
The Way is a straight, broad, rutted chalk track, too lonely even for ghosts. It occurred to me that I was treading upon the skeletal remains of countless billions of diatomic lives, each one without record or recognition. During my customary three-mile route, I must have trodden on more corpses than there have lived humans on the planet.
I found this somehow consoling and for a short time my grief receded to a manageable level. And I used that brief window to agree with myself upon the remedy of self-extinction. Then I struck out for home with a sprightly step and a real sense of purpose.
Settling before my computer with a cup of water, I Asked Jeeves all about suicide. Apparently it’s a proud old tradition and one unique to our species - the lemming thing is a myth.
It would be interesting to know at what stage in our evolution the possibility of ‘ending it all’ suggested itself. Was it before or after we invented Reason? Come to that, does Reason have anything at all to do with killing oneself? You’d have to ask a clinical psychologist. But I do know (thanks, Jeeves) that the single most popular motive for suicide is not, as you might think, unrequited love, but debt.
In fact, a Danish survey suggests that financial difficulties account for 93% of all suicides. (How does one conduct such a survey? It must involve an analysis of the notes left by the successful, and/or in-depth interviews with the failed.)
It’s different in Japan, where ‘dishonour’ is the prime cause for falling on your sword. Then again, debt is Japanese dishonour.
At any rate, it doesn’t leave much room for lost love... |
