Lefty Suicide?

Jeff Jacoby takes a harsh view of Hunter S. Thompson’s recent suicide, calling him selfish and cruel. While Thompson’s preferred method of suicide was indeed strange (blowing his brains out while his wife was on the phone and his family in the next room), Jacoby goes a bit overboard in his vitriolic condemnation of Thompson.

For one thing, he rewords a statement by a Thompson admirer that stated he was “at a high point in his life.” Jacoby sneers, “What warped moral universe is a man's pointless and ignoble death the ‘high point in his life?’” The author was not stating the suicide was the single high point of Thompson’s life, but rather that he was at a single high point in his life. Semantics? Perhaps.

I’ll agree that Thompson’s decision to end his life so bloodily while his 6-year-old grandson was in the next room was a horrid choice. Adults, even family members, can possibly understand Thompson’s decision to end his own life. Children can’t, and they should not have to be subjected to such a scene.

Jacoby attempts to draw a parallel between Thompson and the Pope. The Pope, he says, has a “passionate belief in the sanctity of life remains unwavering, even as Parkinson's disease slowly ravages him.” Living through pain is certainly admirable, especially when one turns it into inspiration, as the Pope has done. But Thompson was not a religious figure; he was just a man -- one who was apparently in a great deal of pain.

Jacoby mocks the writer’s family, refusing to believe that anyone could ever understand his choice to commit suicide. Anita Thompson said, “This is a triumph of his, not a desperate, tragic failure,” to which Jacoby scorns, “That is either unhinged grief speaking or rancid counterculture leftism. Either way, it is grotesque.” How he found a way to relate this suicide to leftism is beyond me, especially because he doesn’t explain himself.

I am not sanctioning suicide. I believe it is perhaps one of the most hurtful acts a person can inflict on their loved ones. But there are instances in which people may be in so much physical pain, their family may recognize why they choose it. Granted, it’s a rare case that a family would be so understanding towards Thompson’s gruesome end, but he was a strange guy. And it’s quite possible that he had a strange family as well.