Checking Out
I just read that a successful real estate development executive who lived in Los Angeles and was 66 years old (that would be a few years younger than me) came to the decision that life was no longer worth living, and he chose to voluntarily check out. The reason I was reading about it as a news item was not because it is an isolated incident or that suicide in today’s society is so unusual, but rather because this man had become involved in the Varsity Blue scandal where a number of parents were convicted of doing various fraudulent things in order to gain access to university admittance for their children. In his case he had paid a standardized testing proctor to falsify and boost his daughter’s ACT test score and paid $75,000 to juice her odds of acceptance to some presumably decent quality school or other. His conviction involved his spending one month in a Federal prison in Arizona and paying a fine of $50,000. By all calculations, that penalty should not have thrown a guy like that for a loop, but obviously, that’s a highly superficial analysis. It’s just that neither the money nor the one month incarceration (which he did and returned home from) were not particularly oppressive once you get over the stigma of having been caught doing something wrong and getting publicly embarrassed by all that. I doubt if it really even hurt his developer career. In fact, it may have made his a more interesting meeting to take and thereby increased his street cred. Real estate developers are not usually a high pedigree crowd, but rather a street smart crowd. So, who knows what went bump in the night for this unfortunate man.
But other than the obvious personal pain that he was feeling that led him to his tragic end, it seems that the real victims here are his family, as it always seems to be. Those left behind are the ones that truly suffer the slings and arrows of woulda, coulda, shoulda that inevitably accompany survivorship in those sorts of circumstances. Obviously I know nothing of this man’s personal circumstances. Maybe he had money problems. Maybe he had an unhappy marriage or a difficult family situation. Maybe his life just didn’t go the way he had expected it to go. I imagine his family and friends understood him well enough to have some idea of what he was about and what led him to the point he ultimately got to. But then again, maybe it was as much a shock to them as it is to us voyeurs out here that get this peak into the last act of his desperate life.
What causes any of us to get out of bed in the morning? To a certain extent, we all organize our lives so that we have things to get up for. Work. Children. Pets. Projects. Hobbies. Those are the everyday things to get us up and going. And then there are the things we look forward to or specifically plan in order to have things to look forward to. Both Kim and I are big believers in always having things to look forward to. They are often things like trips or vacations or family visits, especially around one holiday or another. We space out and plan those events to suit our preferred lifestyle. When I was working, I used to think in terms of planning some sort of event every two months or so and that was the pacing that appealed most to me. If I went longer, I got anxious and if I went shorter, life seemed to be a bit too busy. We all find our ideal rhythms. I’m not certain yet, but I think that as we get older and slow down, we tend to let our rhythms slow down or space out as well. I say that with a degree of uncertainty because I’m not sure Kim and I feel that way just yet, but it seems to be getting closer.
The cycle of life is a funny thing. As the youngest each of our respective families, we tend to look at our siblings and consciously or subconsciously try to figure out where we are on the path of life relative to them. My siblings are both sisters and they are only a little older than me since we are all only three years apart. I don’t find I get a lot of guidance from them on this issue because they are both so different from me (or at least I think so). Also, neither has any disability to speak of and they are just going on with their existence like I am. Kim is a somewhat different story. Twelve years separates her from her sister and she is five years younger than her brother. That makes her brother more or less my age (he’s 8 months older). Both of Kim’s siblings are having a bit of a rougher health road at the moment than we are, so there is some information content there to be observed as to what life gets like with more restrictions. Once again, differences are easy to rationalize as good luck or perhaps less than perfect life choices, but there is some pondering that goes on due to those issues. I find myself occasionally thinking about where my mother was when she was my age and that makes for an interesting observation or two, but since my mother lived to 100, I tend to think of her as an outlier, rightly or wrongly. My father died at 70 or about a year older than I am now, but he was a smoker and I choose to believe that he too was an outlier for that reason. There is no point for me dwelling on whether my path is more like my mother’s or father’s, so I just choose to split the difference in my thinking. That gives me 85, which is afar enough out so I don’t worry about it too much. Kim’s average parental lifespan is more like 80, so that’s a bit more ponderous but still out there a ways. I suspect humankind longevity may not allow many of us to automatically assume we will outlast our parents’ lifespan any more as prior generations did.
My real point in all of this is to say that mortality is a subject that at this stage of life seems to be prone to more pensive analysis rather than the brushing off or anxiety-inducing concern that it brings in younger age. I feel I have accomplished most of what I truly wanted to accomplish in life and while it is unkind not to think about actively participating in my grandchildren’s lives more than I have (both for the two I have and those which may yet come), I’ve done a bit of grandparenting and I’m not sure any of us should expect to see so very much of their lives through anyway. I tend to have more of a “birds gotta fly” attitude when it comes to offspring and while I love mine dearly as I believe my mother loved me, like her, I am prone to letting them all live their lives and make their own paths.
And I suppose that brings me back to the man in L.A. who took his own life after failing in a rather public manner to manipulate the path of his daughter. We all walk a delicate path in life and make decisions at every turn. I always remember the game of Life (I mean the actual board game Life) and the way someone thought through the sorts of decision points that most of us come to and how we start by setting our goals of balancing 100 points between happiness, fame and fortune. While that rubric was probably determined with little debate, I feel it has stood the test of time as the three axis we all must navigate to guide our lives. What else is there, broadly speaking? In my ethics course I have said that there are four foundational causes of ethical issues: money, power (control), ego (love and emotion) and fear. My students have suggested adding sex and justice, but I plan to convince them that those are subsets of ego and power, respectively. So, the one that the game of Life doesn’t capture is fear or what we can consider a contra-quality rather than a sought-after quality. I’m not sure fear, or for that matter, suicide has a decision-point place in a children’s board game so maybe its something other than a foundational cause as I’ve suggested. What did John Dunn say in his poem, “Never have I seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself.” And there may lie the very root of our humanity, even though there is no option for checking out in the game of Life.