A Suicide Letter

A suicide note is an unfair way of having the last word in the argument. But it is the unimaginative that would leave the party without a punch-line. To have the screen drop without an encore seems like a betrayal of the entire act. So, forgive me for dragging the epilogue. If you are reading this, I am obviously dead. Thus, you must also know how I did it.

The most effective way to commit suicide, it seems, is to use a .38 caliber revolver and shoot the back of the head – somewhere just behind the ear. The brain bits would be all over the place, the head slumped sideways – perfectly positioned to land a slot on the prime time news channel. Utterly painless and utterly déclassé. Not my style.

I would have loved to jump off a cliff – very much like The Fool in the Tarot deck. The symbolism would have been complete – not to mention the joy of succumbing to the ultimate temptation of the precipice. But poison seemed the most aesthetically pleasing, spiritually satisfying option. I now belong to that elite company that has sipped the Shiva Merlot – I now rub shoulders with Socrates. The intentional symbolism here too was satisfying. The act of drinking to see new visions is an old, archaic practice. The ancient king Raghu drank the divine cow’s milk to see the way to the heavens. The True Guru gave Kabir bhang to open up the existential bubble.

To say that no one is responsible for my death would be to deny the interconnectedness of everything in the universe. It would have been a shame had I lived without making anyone responsible for my actions. It would have been a deliberate attempt at understating the influence of some exceptional men and women in my life. But in these paranoid times, even a dead man has to censor his words to please the frightened masses. So, let me forgo literary embellishments for political correctness. No one is responsible for my death.

The frugal setting in which my body must have been found might have given you the idea that poverty was the reason for my death. But I had never considered money to be the yardstick of the quality of life. Nor was the reason something as shockingly refreshing as a failed love affair. I believe such cases are a rarity these days. No excruciatingly painful diseases either. In fact, I could dance around here all day like Rumpelstiltskin, and you would never guess.

I did it because I wanted to be the only person to have used Rumpelstiltskin’s name in his suicide letter.

With much love,
Formerly Anonymous