We tend to talk about suicide most when a famous person kills himself. There was, we all remember, the flurry of argument about suicide — much of it indignant, even outraged — when David Foster Wallace took his own life. His friends were deeply hurt, and many of them were writers, so they wrote about it. “[E]very suicide’s an asshole,” wrote Mary Karr, in a poem about Wallace’s death. “There is a good reason I am not/ God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.” Suicide, seen as among the most selfish of acts, pushes a button in us that even murder doesn’t. That self-destruction should be morally blameworthy because of its selfishness is, if not paradoxical, at least a bit odd. After all, if there is one thing I am entitled to as a human being, only one right I am permitted, it ought to be the right to life: this right, it has often been argued, is a kind of necessary precondition for any other right one might claim. But does it make sense to say that I have the right to life if I don’t have the right to end it when and as I choose?
more from Clancy Martin at Harper’s here.