Suicide is entitled to a helping hand.

It is a right especially because some cannot exercise it themselves. It is a right that some should not have to exercise alone. The Final Exit Network exists as support for those suffering from cancer, Lou Gehrig’s Disease, Alzheimer, Huntington’s, multiple sclerosis,  muscular dystrophy,  emphysema,  congestive heart failure,  stroke, and AIDS, among other conditions.

To raise the awareness of all Americans concerning the basic human right … of competent adults to choose to end their lives on their own terms when they suffer from irreversible physical illness, intractable pain, or a constellation of chronic, progressive physical disabilities.

The criteria for support requires that:

1. You must be cognitively functional.

2. You must be physically strong enough to perform the required tasks.

3. You must have an irreversible, physical medical condition which causes intolerable suffering.

4. You must understand the “window of opportunity” which exists while you still have the mental and physical capability to perform the required activities.

5. You must be able to procure the items required for your use.

6. You must be approved by our Medical Director.

Through volunteers around the country, the Final Exit Network provides, to qualified individuals, guidance and education on procuring and administering the means and method of “self-deliverance,” and a supporting presence as the individual takes her own life.

A good death is one in which the individual lays down and falls asleep.

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Now that we can sing along to neverness we are ready to appreciate what neverness means. Neverness means a miracle you must make for yourself. For how is neverness even possible, you wonder? How many give in? How many fail to stand firm?

There is no mystery to it. Neverness means a labor of love as a lifelong commitment with the deepest determination. Neverness means performing the miracle of a lifetime so that what remains of neverness is only me. Simply me. The trace of neverness. I am the trace of what is not and what never will be. I am the presence of their absence. I am the word neverness as flesh and blood. I am a miracle maker by not making a miracle. It is a labor of love where even the best of men fail and so become the worst of them.

Exhibit, for instance, the philosopher’s philosopher, who criticized the fathers of the sons of Athens for failing to teach the lessons of wisdom and justice, only ultimately to declares death to be the cure for life, though not before bringing three young sons into the sickness of life that he now exits in the grand gesture of condemning the very gift he gave his progeny.

Witness the Hippo impregnating an nameless girl only to send her away to advance his own career and because his mother told him to, only to keep the unwanted son for his own, only to call this son the sin of his flesh, only to take another lover to fill the void of a lover discarded. God grant me chastity and control, prays the Hippo solemnly, but not quite yet for I love lust too much.

Recall a certain Marxists who could absolutely not stay off his wife named Jenny. The spectre of doing it seemed to descend upon them both day and night. A total of seven mini-Marxists issued from his revolutionary loins as perhaps the diagonaletic corrective to the reproduction of class being the reproduction of revolutionaries.

The philosopher’s philosopher exited the sickness of the world leaving sons behind, while this Marxist reproduces presumably to help heal the world by volume, if nothing else, into the better tomorrow. Permanent revolution underwritten by the permanent production of enough of us to overthrow however many of them. And he certainly did produce socialist journalists, lawyers, and scholars, along with a few dead ones. These offspring all died eventually, with a few by suicide. The note on suicide of one progeny, also named Jenny, ends with the declaration, “Long live Communism! Long live International Socialism!” And still capitalism rises.

Observe in 1942 a famous storywriter who published his own myth to make the point that life is absurd and meaningless and that happiness is pushing that rock up a hill time and again. There is no other aim or purpose in life, says the mythmaker. Life is punishment that we must accept and endure. Three years later and amid this cosmic meaninglessness within and all around, the mythmaker made twins, twins! for chrissake, who are now entered into the absurd theater of the punishment of just being alive. In real life the storywriter’s infidelities pushed his wife to breakdown and at least one suicide attempt, perhaps in the spirit of Caligula to show his wife the heartless punishment that life has to offer and not simply to tell about it. Then, in 1960 the writer dies by car accident leaving his young children to face a world that his daughter called very dark and very sinister. So there’s that.

If there is an exemplar to neverness, note the haunted Danishman as that rare breed to complete the labor of love. But my god the ceaseless pining and regret by that tormented hunchback. And could you imagine this artful thinker as a father? At some point he will have the talk. For you see, son. You are being. But what is being, asks the son? Being is a relation that relates itself to itself. No, you are not the relation. Listen to me. Being is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation. It’s so simple. Why do you not understand? Or, early one morning the Dane arises and awakens the child. He takes the little lamb out to the wilderness and slaughters it as an offering to God. Slits the throat and burns the flesh on an altar and calls it a leap of faith. QED