Suicides are to be honored by the living.

At Thermopylae, the epitaph by Simonides of the 300 is inscribed into rock: “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie.”
The day of death is to be memorialized as a day of birth, a birthday, instructs Augustine, bishop of Hippo. The bishop admonishes: “The birthday of the blessed martyr has dawned, and it is God’s will that we share with you in celebrating it.”

For “the martyrs were filled with charity, they endured all suffering in charity.” “That is why it is not the punishment that makes a martyr, but the cause.” They are given “crowns of indescribable beauty”; “honoured among the angels”; and, “glorified on earth.”

In his “sermon on the feast of a martyr,” Augustine concludes: “make the invisible goals of the martyrs your aim … prepare your spirit to endure …”[1]

On April 14, 2004, Corporal Dunham was killed in action in Iraq while saving members of his squad. The Medal of Honor citation reads, in part:

As they approached the vehicles, an insurgent leaped out and attacked Corporal Dunham. Corporal Dunham wrestled the insurgent to the ground and in the ensuing struggle saw the insurgent release a grenade. Corporal Dunham immediately alerted his fellow Marines to the threat. Aware of the imminent danger and without hesitation, Corporal Dunham covered the grenade with his helmet and body, bearing the brunt of the explosion and shielding his Marines from the blast. In an ultimate and selfless act of bravery in which he was mortally wounded, he saved the lives of at least two fellow Marines. By his undaunted courage, intrepid fighting spirit, and unwavering devotion to duty, Corporal Dunham gallantly gave his life for his country, thereby reflecting great credit upon himself and upholding the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service.

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Augustine, “The sermon of the blessed bishop Augustine on the feat of the martyr,” Sermon 335C, in Political Writings, 53-57.

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With the word given the moral examiners proceeded to textualize the skin.

The corpse sans head and head sans body had been fished out of the lake and delivered to the lab by Randolph and Randolph who were waiting eagerly at the lab to take receipt. The lab was an old fish hatchery on the edge of town. Kind ov fi-ing, don you ‘hink, said the lead examiner in a Cockney accent. Our lil fishy come ‘ome ‘o roos’. 

Randolph and Randolph stood ready in rubber boots with rubber gloves and rubber aprons. Let’s do it cleanly this time, they both agreed. The corpse lay on the tile floor with arms stretched out and legs slightly spread.

Into a recorder Randolph dictated notes:

Slim yet powerful frame with delicate and noble hands so that in another life probably wielded a scepter or healed the sick. 

Legs match the torso in muscle and tone and present strength and nimbleness.

Corpse stands, lays – chuckling – at five feet and nine inches if head, but currently just under five feet calculated as torso plus legs minus head. 

The head sat on a crate on a Formica table in the corner of the lab.  The head was shaved clean but photos of the living head reveal a full and healthy garden of raven black hair that could cover the heads of ten men.

And yet, interrupted Randolph, aren’t the legs somewhat stumpy and stout? Less elf and more dwarf? he noted. Less dwarf and more troll who probably struck out with the ladies more often than not? if we’re being honest. They were being honest.

The feet of the corpse were lined up beneath two shiny meat hooks hanging from a steel beam six feet above.  

The examiners, Randolph and Randolph, took their places on either side of the corpse and with proper technique that utilized quads, knees, hips, and arm extension they prepared to execute a synchronized clean and jerk so that the body would be hoisted up and suspended in mid-air with the Achilles tendons of the heels poised just above the hooks.  The razor points of the hooks twinkled with expectation.

On the count of one twooo threeeee the examiners lifted, drove upward, set into position, and released the dead weight as one releases a dove into the sky, while quickly ducking out of the way as you would if a burned and headless corpse was swinging at you for no good reason.

Fortunately, the steel hooks drove through the heels, came bursting out the front through that weird dimple at the ankle that has no name, only to dive back into the tops of the feet before driving out the bottom pads, which were now the top pads, of the corpse turned upside down.

The corpse gyrated ildly, then mildly, then, after a minute or two of spending all fight it swung not at all. The arms hung lifeless from the upside down corpse to feebly acknowledge a perfect maneuver. The two examiners were overjoyed and shot their hands straight up as well.  Perfect 10!, they shouted. The lead examiner clapped and barked.

Next came the skinning. 

Normally we use traditional methods to produce workable vellum, said Randolph. Roman scribes. Medieval monks. The craft has not changed all that much. But in this case the skin was torched by fire and the hot fire parched the skin to perfection.  Then the waters of the Alpine lake quenched this largest of membranes as the balance of two opposites and a ready equilibrium of wet and cold contra hot and not wet into dry but cool. 

The first examiner ran a straight razor in the circumference of the arm just below the shoulder, first the left and then the right. He ran the same razor around the neck below the Adam’s apple, and along the circumference of the waist just below the slight belly of this beast.

He then made vertical slits from pit to waste on both sides of the equation.

With that the second examiner produced a knife with a gentle curve along the spine of the blade.  We call this design the “scoliosising of the blade,” explained Randolph. The curvature matches the contours of the body.  As we draw the knife right to left the scoliosised blade slices cleanly subcutaneously.

Randolph used the crescent blade to demonstrate on the corpse, first front and then back.  The examiners pealed each page off the corpse and laid it on a bed of archival tissue paper to fortify the vellum.  A thin coat of Elmer’s glue affixes skin to the backing material.  While glue was once made from horse hoofs, it is well known that Elmer is in fact a bull with a cow wife named Elsie and two sets of twins. If you’ve ever heard a bull mounting a cow it sounds like she is being skinned alive, not unlike this operation, with soft mooing after it’s over.  

And now, he announced, we have two very big pages on which to tell the story. The pages were laid on human-sized lazy Susans at either end of the long wooden table at the heart of the old hatchery into which salmon once slid down from a fun chute the chute to be bludgeoned on the head with an oak mallet — bam! bam! bam! — so they could be beaten senseless so their bellies could be slit open so their eggs could be extracted for incubation and hatching of tiny little fishes in the nursery and then released into the wild. The circle of life.

But with the vellum prepared for writing the examiners faced several decisions.

The first decision was the direction of writing on the page. The obvious answer is the incorrect answer, said the lead examiner, in that that life does not happen left to right top to bottom page after page.  For instance, when you cross a street you look both ways and then walk straight ahead.  When you travel in an airplane you sit down to go up and then down again, called “landing,” after which you stand up and leave. There is no rhyme or reason to dictate direction. And when someone dies they end up right where they started as a kind of big round period

Full Stop

Life proceeds so many which ways so we don’t impose our own directions. We let the corpse tell us whence and how hence. 

Sometimes the first letter of the story sprouts up from the bellybutton and radiates in spirals outward to the farthest margins until the story concludes.  We call this method Spurting from the Natal Hole. If writing starts on the outer margins and spiralizes inward toward the bellybutton we called this Circling the Drain.

I think we can all agree that this corpse was circling the drain long before we fished it out the lake.  The lead examiner chuckled and shifted to a Cockney accent again.  I’d say ‘his bloke was circlin ‘he drain bo’h li’erally an’ me’aphawically. He chuckled again.  The two medical examiners chuckled too.  All three chuckled and then stopped chuckling. 

To write the story we also need un stylo.  The choice of the stylo is important.  If we are writing on someone who thought they were born in the late-eighteenth century then we will use a quill and ink well and sometimes we will dress in period like Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. 

If the suicide fought in the American Civil War we will dress like Abraham Lincoln.  Do you remember in elementary school the teacher would dress up as Old Abe and read the Gettysburg Address.  We love doing that. It just adds authenticity. 

If, on the other hand, we are writing the suicide of a known illiterate then we use an giant pencil much like those absurd instruments clutched awkwardly by elementary school children. I don’t think that will be necessary here, said the lead examiner with a quick appraisal. In this case a common ballpoint pen will work just fine.

Randolph picked the pen-designate from his protector of the pocket and pressed the plunger smartly. Out bolts the captive ball with a touch of blue ink already leaking from the tip.

Now comes the readiness to writing which is just as important.  This is a matter of mood, said the lead examiner. Like a romantic evening, the mood needs to be just right. Otherwise it’s ruined. It’s just completely ruined. He paused and pouted with crossed arms.

For this there is the smoking or, more precisely, hashashing. To a gram of hashash we crush a pinch of toasted skin to produce a fine tobacco, which is not really tobacco. It’s human skin mixed with hash. Then we roll it and smoke it.  A touch of savory.  The hint of earth.  Spice on the lips.  Finest draw.

Apropos of nothing, added the lead examiner, before suicide was the word for suicide — su-i-cide as three slashes of the tongue — we used many alternatives.

Suicide was self-murder.  Suicide was self-homicide.  Suicide was self-slaughter.  Suicide was self-killing.  Suicide was self-death.  Suicide was self-assassination.

As you can see, most often people just linked two existing words together with a hyphen suggesting they didn’t really know what they doing and were still fumbling around to find the right formulation.

For Hamlet, Shakespeare coined self-slaughter” having used self-slaughtered in The Rape of Lucrece and retreading self-slaughter in Cymbeline.

Round about the same time, John Donne described suicide as biathanatos, the death of life, and more specifically, as self-homicide.

Randolph lit up and took a puff as the lead examiner continued.

So anyways, these Englishifications had their roots in more Roman terms like occidere se, homicidium sui, and occisio sui.  Much more beautiful to the cultured ear, isn’t it?

That’s right, said Foxy the Bear. And the Latin derives from ancient Greek, such as autocheir meaning own-handed death. The fifth century playwright Euripides has Orestes quitting life by way of autocheiri sphagei or slaughter by his own hand, which also suggests a plate of spaghetti as if to say, Look at the tangled mess of pasta we made for ourselves.

Medieval German employed mild phrases like sich toten, sich umbringen, and sich ums Leben bringen, continued Foxy, since the view was that suicide was a sickness. 

Then came grimier ones like sich ermorden or murdering oneself, which was fashioned by Catholic satirist Thomas Murner in 1514, and adopted by that heretic Martin Luther soon after. By the mid-seventeen the century Selbstmord or self-murder ruled the roost and remains common for the civilized German tongue.

What about the French, asked the lead examiner?

You will find that the French modeled itself on the Latin, said Foxy. The French employed se tuer or s’occire, to kill oneself, and se defaire, to do away with oneself.

French played the snappy sounds of mort volontaire and homicide de soi-meme or de lui’meme.  Meurtrier de soi-meme emerges in the late Middle Ages.

Mondu!, exclaimed the lead examiner. A buffet of language.  It was clear we needed one word to replace them all to tell us what suicide really is. 

And of course we got our word, said Foxy, which is its own interesting …

Randolph took another puff and coughed twice.  That was the signal. 

… story, said Foxy, to be continued …

Foxy and the lead examiner turned to Randolph. Randolph turned to Randolph.  Randolph trained his eyes on the skin, lifted the pen, opened his mouth as if to listen carefully, and began to write, while Randolph just behind and to the right, read aloud over Randolph’s shoulder for all to hear.

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