Suicide is nothing at all.

Suicide is practiced apathy, a ready indifference. Diogenes embraces “reason or the noose” and either one will do. Seneca counsels: “If you like, live. If you don’t like you can go back where you came from.”[1]

Some Golden Gate jumpers wrap a note in plastic and pocket it for posterity. One reads: “Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache.”[2]

In her essay, “The Suicidal Life: Attempts at a Reconstruction from Suicide Notes,” Kresten Bjerg describes it as leaving the field at the slightest provocation, or, at least seemingly so. [3]

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[1] Seneca, Essays and Letters.
[2] Friend, “Jumpers.”
[3] Bjerg, “The Suicidal Life,” in Essays in Self-Destruction, 490.

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There is a movie starring Mr. Billy Crystal, with Mr. Jack Palance in a supporting role that won him an Academy Award in 1992. At the award ceremony Mr. Palance famously did one-armed pushups on stage at the age of 73. The crowd went wild. There was a standing ovation.