"I'm 90, I don't think I'll be 95, 94. I don't think I'll be 91.
"I've expressed disappointment at arriving alive at the ER where I sobbed with disappointment, ‘Oh damn!'
"It was the perfect time to die I believe, Enough already!"
These are the recent words of Edwin Shneidman on an audio slide show at the LA Times, "Waiting for Death."
Shneidman did make it to 91, dying last Friday, Mar 15th, two days after his birthday.
Aside from his poignant remarks, Shneidman spent most of his long life contemplating death, being a professor of thanatology at UCLA, and the founder of the American Association of Suicidology.
Shneidman became fascinated with suicide when working for VA as a psychology intern, after being asked to write a letter to the family a soldier who had hanged himself. He came to believe with Camus that suicide is the "one truly serious philosophical problem. He went on to work in suicide prevention, believing that two simple questions are key to treatment:
Where do you hurt?
How can I help you?
Shneidman also challenged Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's idea that death follows an orderly progression through phases--denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, believing but involves a "hive of emotions."
As someone who devoted his life to suicide prevention, Shneidman was no Szazian, but did not rest his ideas on a religious faith. Rather, he was an atheist who believed--somewhat consistently with his Jewish upbringing--that after death we live on genetically, and in memory and influence, but not in any spiritual realm. He called that a comforting fairy tale.
I recently read Julian, by Gore Vidal, a novel about Julian the Apostate, the last non-Christian Roman Emperor. One of Julian's mentors wonders why we fear the loss of consciousness and the darkness after death, when we have no fear about the lack of consciousness and darkness before our birth. What's the difference?
But he did not fear death, as can be discerned by his bitter disappointment in arriving live at the ER. He said that dying is easy. One of the things in life that is done for you.
"Dying is easy" reminds me of the actor Edward Gwenn--Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street--who on his deathbed quipped, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
But that's another story. Or maybe that's this story. Dying is easy, whatever we do in life--comedy or tragedy--is hard.
Shneidman's remarks, "Enough already!" calls to mind the work I do with very old people in nursing homes. It is quite common for me to hear, enough already. Or as one of my clients put it, "I don't plan to kill myself, but if I woke up dead, I wouldn't complain."
We clinicians, unfortunately, put a diagnostic label on these utterances, passive suicidal ideation, and have drugs and procedures ready to go when we hear this.
I'm not necessarily a Szazian either but who am I to medicalize this most intrinsic of human conditions?
Enough already! quite simply, works for me.
In my personal life, there was my Aunt Fanny, Faiga, illiterate in English but we could talk about the Tolstoy she read in Yiddish.
In her nineties, she went blind, probably the diabetes, and she's in a nursing home. Times have changed. The old and the frail are no longer hanging on at home with family--a change from my own childhood with my grandmother, Bubbe, Fanny's mother. My cousins, Fanny's sons, Heschy and Schimmy, are old and frail themselves and in Florida. Fanny stayed on as the Williamsburg of her youth went through its American changes, new immigrants, new cultures, and new foreign languages. My mother would visit regularly on the bus with her sister, Estelle. When I was in town, I'd drive the two of them over to Aunt Fanny's nursing home on Coney Island Avenue--a busy commercial strip. The boxy-looking, nondescript home was jammed between high-rise housing projects, upholsterers, junk shops, and delis of various ethnicities. The blooming buzzing confusion of the home matched the hectic streets in which it was embedded. There was little separation from the street. You opened the front door and there it all was, no lobby, the nursing station to your right, the residents' rooms directly in front of you.
Aunt Fanny proved to me that sound minds do not always live in sound bodies, and they can wind up living in homes that are not home. Aunt Fanny would sit in the hall outside her room while her sisters would fuss and ask around to get a glass of water.
No more Tolstoy for her.
I asked about books on tape. They had them in Yiddish.
"She's not interested," my mom said. "All she says is ‘Genug shoyn!' Enough already!"
Genug shoyn is Yiddish for passive suicidal ideation.
A kindred spirit to Edwin Shneidman, and who can argue with that?
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You can hear me discussing my book, Nasty, Brutish, and Long, at the Penguin Podcast. Also available on Itunes.
