Checkout Times

Let's face it. All of us, as we age, start contemplating our deaths, and hardly in the way young people do. Dying becomes less a scary idea than a strange kind of relief, a letting go. Of course, when one has arranged his life in such a way that he still has very young ones depending on him by my age, savoring death is a luxury one cannot afford.

But there is an undeniable urge to depart this tortured planet.

***

I remember answering the phone one night at a friend's house. I was housesitting; he was overseas, maybe in China. The caller was a very depressed man, seeking my friend. His name was Phil Ochs. Since I didn't know him except by name and his reputation as a famous folk singer, and since I was very young, in my 20s, I didn't offer any words of comfort, even though my intuition told me he needed that, even from a stranger...

Not very long afterward, probably just a matter of weeks, I learned that he had committed suicide. He was 36 years old. It was reported he suffered from depression and alcoholism.

I never met the man but I felt certain that what he really suffered from was a broken heart, broken by the failure of a social revolution all of us in those years felt was inevitable. But it never came. So the most vulnerable among us took their own lives, offering themselves as sacrifices to a culture that didn't seem to care anymore.

Why is it that we keep having to lose our artists in this way?

***

One of the people who used to call us collect at Rolling Stone was Abbie Hoffman, then on the run as a fugitive in Mexico. He was a founder of the Yippies, a brilliant activist and writer. When he was 43, Hoffman took his own life.

***

Many people have taken their lives by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. One night, as I was driving across the bridge in the fog, I saw a man with a frantic expression weaving his way through traffic toward the side facing land. I will never forget the terrible look in his eyes. The next day I read that a man had jumped to his death from the bridge at just that time, from just that place.

***

Sons and daughters of friends have committed suicide. During my recent trip to Japan, I heard of many other suicides.

Strangely, I have always felt protective of anyone’s choice to end his or her own life. Whose business is it other than their own? But slowly, over the years, I have come to realize it is the quintessentially selfish act. Whether you believe in a god or not, we are here, either for a purpose or due to the random beauty of genetic selection.

No matter how depressed you may get, please do not ever take your own life away from the rest of us! Furthermore, I won't if you won't. Let's agree to keep struggling toward a better future until our natural checkout time, when it will feel good to finally let go.

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