Life and Death

A man recently committed suicide... Before doing so, he published a webpage detailing why.

I saw a copy of the webpage (the original was taken down soon after being posted) here http://www.zeroshare.info/

On his webpage, Martin Manley talked about the struggles people face as we age, he decided that he did not want to face those struggles, he wanted to take things into his own hands, he wanted to choose the time and place of his death, so he did.

The term suicide is associated with a great deal of stigma and there have been various reasons offered for this. This gentleman was actually very eloquent. His perspectives on life and death are worth reading. He discusses the fact that he did not commit suicide for any traditional reason, but rather, the end-goal seemed to be control (my words, not his), control of his destiny, control of what he will be remembered for. I'm sure many of us have thought of an "age-limit" where we at this point in time we would presumably be happy to die. For those who have thought of this, it may be that we would ideally live to be 70, for some it would be a lower, or higher number, regardless, very few people with whom I've had this discussion state that they would like to live as long as physically possible, because they don't wish to suffer. They don't want to be a burden on others, they don't want to live, simply for the sake of living.

The arguments Martin Manley makes are very logically sound. Why would anyone want to "push through" their latter years when these years are filled with the greatest challenges?

But then, we look at human nature... It is in our nature to survive. We NEED to survive. People "fight for their lives" regularly... Why? We fight through pain, through suffering, through deprivation and hardship to live. What makes us want to live so badly that we can and do push through terrible circumstances?

I think that if one looks simply at Martin Manley's arguments from the perspective he offers, they seem very sound, but one needs to look at them from a spiritual perspective as well...

At times, even when a person seems to be suffering, we cannot understand their spiritual experiences... in fact, they may not understand their spiritual experiences either. Even a person who is in a vegetative state has some unknowns... We don't know whether that individual can have any experiences, and so, we are unable to judge.

If we look at a human life as a conglomeration of the physical and the spiritual, we may find that the individual undergoes numerous transformations. However, even the negative transformations that accompany injury, age, disease, etc... may still be necessary for a spiritual journey. I know this may not bring relief to a person who is truly suffering, but sometimes that is a necessary aspect of life. Cutting one's own life short is a decision that assumes that there is nothing left to live for, when in reality, there is a spiritual journey still left. If someone looks in the right places, they'll always find something to live for. That is why we struggle to stay alive. Yes, we are instinctively driven to survive at all costs, but we don't choose en masse to die because we all have something to live for, whether we recognize it or not and whether it is physical or spiritual. Life is not simply an obstacle to salvation, nor is death the relief of suffering. Life is a pathway, and death is the gate. The destination depends on where the gate is and where the path has taken you.