It's Not Just About Me

Giles Fraser writes:

I won't speculate about the reasons for L'Wren Scott's suicide. There has been way too much prurient interest in this already.

She was, it seems, a private person, and the intrusion by the British tabloids into the public grief of Mick Jagger and her family makes it seem as though Leveson never happened.

But, nonetheless, privacy and suicide have a complicated synergy.

To explain, I am afraid I am going to have to over-share. There are times in my life where I have felt suicidal.

I have walked up to the edge of the train track. I have fantasised about the release that might be offered by the end of a rope.

Sorry, that may be too much information. But I suspect this tendency to over-share is precisely what has saved me.

Perhaps those people more concerned with their own privacy are more likely to succeed in taking their own life – as opposed to those, like me, who allow their suffering to be messily on show to others.

Because even when I have felt unable to see a way out of the darkness, I am grateful that there are others who I have told about it and who have fought for me even when I have felt unable to fight for myself.

These are the people who have left busy and important meetings to sit with me over coffee as I doodle aimlessly in an exercise book.

These are the people who have kept me company in the middle of the night when they also were in desperate need of sleep.

I know I am being a pain in the arse to them. And it would be terribly easy for me to hear the message that I ought to get back in my box and not burden them with all my emotional nonsense.

It's also pretty embarrassing to share this level of pain and sense of failure.

So the pressure to shut up and deal with it is huge.

My worry about the assisted dying bill, for instance, is that it subtly adds to this pressure, that it reinforces a sense of my life, my choice, my death.

And this can easily be heard as the more troubling message: my pain, and the solution, is in my hands.

But this misses a vital dimension of human lives: that we are embedded in a whole network of relationships.

It is not just all about me. I am not saying that suicide is selfish.

Clearly, the shame that some cultures have attached to suicide is pointless and cruel. Religion, once again, has had a less than distinguished hand in all of this.

But, nonetheless, to stare at a piece of empty paper that begins Dear X – where X is your child or the person you love – and try and compose some explanation that justifies what you fear you are about to do, makes you think extremely hard about the impact your behaviour will have on the lives of others.

No, it's not just about me.

Of course, the assisted dying bill focuses on the existence of terrible physical pain in the last months of a terminal illness.

It proposes that we ought to have the legal right to decide not to have to face that pain – and, if necessary, to enlist others in helping us commit suicide to avoid it.

And the argument from a compassionate point of view is extremely powerful.

But this bill also forms a part of a whole culture that cannot deal with the suffering of other people and would prefer it to be out of sight and out of mind.

In such a culture, those who suffer are given subtle signals to shut up and leave the stage quietly. They call it dying with dignity.

Well, I suspect I won't go with dignity. In my (not inconsiderable) experience, many people don't.

And I hope that, when the time comes, there will be people around who will give me permission to go like that and to be strong enough to hold my hand when I do.