The Whispers Of Strangers

Today is my 76th birthday," the letter began. "Unassisted and by my own free will, I have chosen to take my final passage." Suicide. My friend Frances died in a cold, impersonal hotel room after taking an overdose of sleeping pills, with a plastic bag tied over her head suffocating the life out of her body.

Frances was not a happy woman. She had family troubles. She suffered from chronic lymphatic leukemia and was facing the difficult prospect of a hip replacement. She also had a chronic nerve condition that caused her to feel a burning sensation on her skin. But Frances was lucid, aware and involved. And she certainly was not terminal, at least not in the sense of impending death. In all likelihood, she had years of productive and meaningful life ahead of her.

I am still in control," she wrote. "The choice is mine--this act is not one of 'suicide'-I consider that it [is] my final passage."

Why would Frances want to do such a thing? Those of us who knew her best understood. She had been talking about killing herself for years. She was a follower of Derek Humphry and was a member of his Hemlock Society. She approved of Dr. Kevorkian. She held a schoolgirl's romanticism about suicide, seeing it as noble and an act of strength. For Frances, suicide was not only an answer to life's miseries, it was her cause.

Those of us who considered ourselves Frances's closest friends spent years trying to dissuade her from killing herself. It was like some perverse dance. She would plan the thing, we would change her mind, and then for no apparent reason, she would announce that she was planning it again.

I had come to believe that she had a whisperer quietly urging her on. After her death, I learned there was indeed such a "voice." I discovered it among her possessions that her executor sent me. Frances had a suicide file (ever the organizer, she kept a file for everything), filled with publications from the Hemlock Society and other writings extolling the moral correctness of self-termination and euthanasia. That these writings had a major influence on Frances there can be no doubt. They were carefully clipped and highlighted in yellow marking ink. Many were dogeared from frequent reading.