The Vital Death
June 2, 2009
When the Vitalist stage of social decline sets in, money is no longer the ultimate status symbol. Energy is. To the most dynamic goes the prize. Illness and dying are notoriously non-energetic conditions. Hence the growing intolerance for what was once considered fairly normal – the slow and painful death. Suicide becomes “an end-of-life decision.”
Here’s the sad story of Rona Zelniker, who joined the growing ranks of suicides last March. When she was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 60, she prepared for her self-termination with the can-do energy and efficiency of someone embarking on a trip or new job. According to the account in The Philadelphia Inquirer, she cleaned out her condo, put it up for sale, and bought a biodegradable plastic urn for her ashes, which she placed on the kitchen counter. Her son asked for a bereavement leave from his job – before she died.
It seemed that Zelniker was completely undone by the prospect of a difficult and prolonged illness, as if she had never mentally prepared for the possibility. Apparently, one can lead a full and energetic life for six decades, but escape some of the brute facts of existence. Guy Waterman, the famous White Mountain climber and author, was 67 in 2000. He was so defeated by the possibility of not being able to climb anymore that he ascended Mount Lafayette in February and deliberately froze to death. Here was a man steeled for the worst travails on the trail, but not the simple inevitability of age and his own physical decline.
Zelniker’s children spoke favorably of her decision, critical only that she could not be more upfront about it because of legal complications. The adult daughter of Peter and Penelope Duff, the British couple who traveled to Switzerland to commit suicide in a clinic earlier this year, similarly said they had done “a beautiful thing.” One wonders if their own children had grown ill and decided to kill themselves, they would have taken it in the same way.
This premature termination of age and suffering suits our Vitalist times. Suffering cannot be a beautiful thing when so lacking in dynamism. The Vital death is, if nothing else, a display of energy.
