Suicide is loyalty and love. It is lifelong commitment.

In the Falkland Islands, Uckland geese mate for life. When a partner dies the living goose will remain at its side and wait to die.

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The death loop advances the story of human hunger, of course, on how best to survive to thrive by eventually reaching a better tomorrow. The loop is teaching as secret preaching and often contains the moral of valuing human life that is so easily taken for granted and then simply extinguished. The loop means the chance to practice for better life by truly living. But is there not another lesson hidden within? Do you not also become practiced in death and dying, which is its own kind of gift?

The first death can often be frightening and traumatic. Or it is sudden and shocking. Always it is monumental. But as loops pile up the going-to-die and having-died that cues the startover is coupled with a growing fearlessness of death itself as experience and knowledge and memory. I have been here before and I can do this again.

The lesson of the loop is the chance to do death better each time. You can picture years after the endings of the movies when final dying arrives how effortless and without trepidation it will be for Major Cage or Frank to answer the call, as if death pulls up in a Rolls Royce with light chamber music bubbling up from the very rocks and trees and asks politely whether you would have any Grey Poupon. But of course, you reply, in a most cultured manner as you proffer the Grey Poupon — one of life’s finer pleasures — meaning death comes calling and you proffer yourself in reply meaning you die in what can only be described as a manner that is refined and assured, well-practiced, perfected even.

Now imagine a loop allowing you to suicide better and better each time. A constant refinement of mis en place. The setting, the steps, the means, and method, all settled upon only after experimenting with different recipes and ingredients and instruments. An electric toaster in a hot bubble bath. A cold bath, no bubbles. Heavy traffic. Light traffic but with heavy machinery. High places and falling. Higher places and falling falling. Variations on themes distilling to the economy of design and movement. The state of mind throughout becomes nothing if not calm in its focus and sheer commitment. All informed by looping accumulations of experience and knowledge and memory of suicide as death and dying, and death and dying as suicide toward a better ending. What a gift that is. The gift of suiciding over and over in the manner of working out a piece of music or an entire program. Suicide that is practiced practiced practiced. Suicide played truly and fully with minimum gravity. Nothing holding you back. The gift to oneself with no consideration.