Oct 14th —The first cut is the deepest.

We haven’t spoken about him for a long time, but Friend John appears to be no longer capable of sustaining life. Dead, in other words. His blog posts indicate that he may well have taken a self-administered departure. ‘Each day, as soon as I return,’ they say, ‘I cancel the scheduled posts I’ve set up to follow my passing. If you’re reading this, it means that, for whatever reason, yesterday, I didn’t.’ Then he talks about how he often set out with the intention to do it, but would return, unable quite to find what it took to close out the deal.

He was a good person, who lived a quiet life —not just away from the mainstream, but without a proper job, and displaced from what he’d call home, he never created anything like a network of friends, or even acquaintances. Those of us who did know him properly, knew a good person, loyal, decent, and with the sort of instincts that revealed a good and true heart.
He was also very intelligent, but he never got to be heard because of the way he presented his arguments in a non-native language. I think that was a great source of frustration for him.
And he found it difficult to live with his regrets, too. He’d describe his as a ‘half-life’. ‘In the scientific sense,’ he’d say, ‘in that every single important fifty-fifty decision in my life, I got wrong, so here I am, one-sixty-fourth of the thing that I ought to be.’ Then, for a laugh, he’d add, ‘One hundred and twenty-eight, actually, because of that thing I did the other day.’
All this frustration led him into occasional Tourettic outbursts, which increased as he got older —his constrained, circling thoughts, with no one to express them to, sometimes bursting free as expressions of resentment and exasperation.

He’d describe sensations that I was familiar with myself. I guess that’s what drew us together. Instead of relieving the symptoms of an itching irritation, they’d present as a rude gesture that was never meant; or a well-meant effort to fill a silence, that sounded ridiculous as soon as his words met with the air. The haunting shame of a misfired joke, it killed him, all that.
A day later, or more, when he realised how the thing he’d done had landed on the recipient, never intended in that way, he’d spiral into blackness about his perceived failure, unable to forgive himself the sort of error that everyone else made every day.

Bleeding out. That makes you think… we’d often talk about how we’d end it, were we able to access the means, during the dark days. At the time he was a strong advocate for standing in front of a train, but I’ve never been able to look beyond carbon monoxide poisoning in the comfort of a four-door sedan, myself.
Neither of us would jump off anything, on the basis that you could fall before you were ready. Nor would we opt for a drink & drugs-based exit. It being too much of a hit and miss affair —all that fuzzy nausea, and vomit. And the soiled pants! Then, it doesn’t quite work out, or some busybody rescues you, and suddenly, you’ve got some real prolapsarian* issues to resolve when you come back round.
Slashing wrists? The way he seems to have gone, always struck me as being fraught with logistical problems. Once you’ve gone in on one side, you then need that hand to do the same to the opposite wrist, which, by nature of what you’ve just done, no longer functions as well as it once did. And it’s not the sort of thing that lends itself to a dress rehearsal, is it?
I suppose it might turn out to be life’s last great frustration, that you might just have to content yourself by bleeding out through the one decent wound. Listen, all sorts of people have managed it over the years, and you never hear any complaints, do you?

Drowning? —I said I’d be a natural, but he disagreed.
‘You’re not brave enough,’ he told me. ‘And look how much you dislike suffocating. That’s why the car option is so bad for you.’
He had a point. But suffocating on noxious choking fumes aside, the nagging doubt about a carbon monoxide-based exit for me has always been whether you would be tempted to play songs on your way out. And, if you did, how they might alter your attitude to the project?
On the face of it, sad ones seem the most appropriate, but I’m not so sure. They’re all about evoking regret, and death by your own hand might be the only positive thing you’ve ever done with your life —they could bring the mood right down. More importantly, they might remind you of the few good people you’ve known, then it could all get very dark.
I think if I was to take myself off that way, I’d choose a Genesis track, or something by Bruce Springsteen. That way, you’d have no regrets about leaving the earth and all its mediocrities. Then you’d just have to hope that you died before having to listen to the song all the way through****.

It’s all very well talking about these things in the abstract, but until the actual moment arrives, who knows how you’ll act? It’s like shouting out: ‘[insert name of boss] is a retarded ponce,’ in a crowded office —only some of us can do it, when push comes to shove.

Back then, when we used to idle away those endless days which blended nothingness, despair, and fear in a perfect cocktail, when we’d talk longingly of the time when we’d no longer be here, John used to say that death by your own hand would get you a longer sentence in purgatory*** —as much as he professed otherwise, he could never really shake off that element of faith which had been planted in him as a child.
I was not so afflicted, and I spent a lot of time trying to persuade him that the better view was that poor lives are dealt with by a form of living purgatory while you’re still here on earth**, making the one he talked about, something of a doddle, more akin to a positive feedback session, than punishment.
Should it exist. I guess we might find out now that his organic form is no more.

Footnote

*Prolapsarian: prolapsarian describes a moment of realisation —that the impending doom you fear has already arrived. Previously I’ve only ever had a rambling description for the concept —suddenly becoming aware of that mini-blackhole that lives on top of your stomach between your ribs, as if a fast-spinning blade has been set going within it the instant that the news you’ve dreaded, arrives. Or a memory of a misdemeanour returns.
To be a true prolapsarian moment, it needs to happen in a two-stage process, like the way hubris works — the extreme pride, followed by the fall and shame. The two stages of prolapsarianism, being that the present delivers an impairment so sudden and limiting that there’s a critical impediment to normal living now, which, in one form or another, needs to be taken with you into your future, plunging you into a period of pre-death purgatory** until only death can release you from it.
It needs an example:
Say, at a desolate piece of road, the urge came on you to use the bathroom, and in your haste to have it over with quickly, whilst vulnerable and exposed, you forced too hard, and instead of an evacuation, discovered that you’d accidentally ejected a section of your lower intestines, unable either to get rid of them, or draw them back in again. So that from then on, you had to find a way to accommodate them dangling, and rubbing up against your underpants, scared stiff of so much as eating.

**Pre-death purgatory: is where you must atone for your errors by being made to think about them constantly, so that you might consider how, why, and by how much, you have erred. It’s something that is to be suffered here on earth, while you still possess the morals, attitude, and, here’s the thing, finances, that define your earthly form —when you’ll really suffer for your failures on terms you’ll comprehend.

*original purgatory: traditional purgatory is like a walk-in facility, done out in white Formica, and would smell like the verruca clinic. You’d sit on a white plastic chair, and watch a re-run of your life on video, second by second, and you’d have a kindly and wise, but exacting sort, stood at your shoulder, watching it with you, making appropriate observations.
Ideally, they’d have the latest software too, maybe some AI —something that allowed them to show you what would have happened, had you made the right choices.

****What’s your favourite tune to evoke suicide and death? Drop a note, and I’ll try to get the best suggestions up to John via his blog, just in case he’s inveigled his way into the limbo clinic. Here’s a few of the most popular, to get your juices flowing.