The Sense of an Ending

both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. There was practically a QED at the end. Adrian had asked the coroner to make his argument public, and the official had obliged.

Eventually, I asked, ‘How did he do it?’

‘He cut his wrists in the bath.’

‘Christ. That’s sort of… Greek, isn’t it? Or was that hemlock?’

‘More the exemplary Roman, I’d say. Opening the vein. And he knew how to do it. You have to cut diagonally. If you cut straight across, you can lose consciousness and the wound closes up and you’ve bogged it.’

‘Perhaps you just drown instead.’

‘Even so—second prize,’ said Alex. ‘Adrian would have wanted first.’ He was right: first-class degree, first- class suicide.

He’d killed himself in a flat he shared with two fellow postgraduates. The others had gone away for the weekend, so Adrian had plenty of time to prepare. He’d written his letter to the coroner, pinned a notice to the bathroom door reading ‘DO NOT ENTER—CALL POLICE—ADRIAN’, run a bath, locked the door, cut his wrists in the hot water, bled to death. He was found a day and a half later.

Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. ‘Tragic Death of “Promising” Young Man’. They probably kept that headline permanently set up in type. The verdict of the coroner’s inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed’. I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would have sworn on oath that Adrian’s was the one mind which would never lose its balance. But in the law’s view, if you killed yourself you were by definition mad, at least at the time you were committing the act. The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide’s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian’s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.

Adrian had apologised to the police for inconveniencing them, and thanked the coroner for making his last words public. He also asked to be cremated, and for his ashes to be scattered, since the swift destruction of the body was also a philosopher’s active choice, and preferable to the supine waiting for natural decomposition in the ground.

‘Did you go? To the funeral?’

‘Not invited. Nor was Colin. Family only, and all that.’

‘What do we think?’

‘Well, it’s the family’s right, I suppose.’

‘No, not about that. About his reasons.’

Alex took a sip of his beer. ‘I couldn’t decide whether it’s fucking impressive or a fucking terrible waste.’

‘And did you? Decide?’

‘Well, it could be both.’

‘What I can’t work out,’ I said, ‘is if it’s something complete in itself—I don’t mean self-regarding but, you know, just involving Adrian—or something that contains an implicit criticism of everyone else. Of us.’ I looked at Alex.

‘Well, it could be both.’

‘Stop saying that.’

‘I wonder what his philosophy tutors thought. Whether they felt in any way responsible. It was his brain they trained, after all.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘About three months before he died. Right where you’re sitting. That’s why I suggested it.’

‘So he was going down to Chislehurst. How did he seem?’

‘Cheerful. Happy. Like himself, only more so. As we said goodbye, he told me he was in love.’

The bitch, I thought. If there was one woman in the entire world a man could fall in love with and still think life worth refusing, it was Veronica.

‘What did he say about her?’

‘Nothing. You know how he was.’

‘Did he tell you I wrote him a letter telling him where to shove it?’

‘No, but it doesn’t surprise me.’

‘What, that I wrote it, or that he didn’t tell you?’

‘Well, it could be both.’

I half-punched Alex, just enough to spill his beer.

At home, with barely enough time to think over what I’d heard, I had to fend off my mother’s questions.

‘What did you find out?’

I told her a little of the how.

‘It must have been very unpleasant for the poor policemen. The things they have to do. Did he have girl trouble?’

Part of me wanted to say: Of course—he was going out with Veronica. Instead, I merely replied, ‘Alex said he was happy the last time they met.’

‘So why did he do it?’

I gave her the short version of the short version, leaving out the names of the relevant philosophers. I tried to explain about refusing an unsought gift, about action versus passivity. My mother nodded away as she took all this in.

‘You see, I was right.’

‘How’s that, Ma?’

‘He was too clever. If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything. You just leave common sense behind. It’s his brain unhinged him, that’s why he did it.’

‘Yes, Ma.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say? You mean you agree?’

Not replying was the only way to keep my temper.

I spent the next few days trying to think round all the angles and corners of Adrian’s death. While I could hardly have expected a farewell letter myself, I was disappointed for Colin and Alex. And how was I to think about Veronica now? Adrian loved her, yet he had killed himself: how was that explicable? For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn’t work out—perhaps especially when it doesn’t work out—promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes, there’s nothing like it, is there? Agreed?

But Adrian didn’t agree. Perhaps if it had been a different woman… or perhaps not—Alex had testified to Adrian’s exalted state the last time they’d met. Had something terrible happened in the intervening months? But if so, Adrian would surely have indicated it. He was the truth-seeker and philosopher among us: if those were his stated reasons, those were his true reasons.

With Veronica, I moved from blaming her for having failed to save Adrian to pitying her: there she was, having triumphantly traded up, and look what had happened. Should I express my condolences? But she would think me hypocritical. If I were to get in touch with her, either she wouldn’t reply, or she’d somehow twist things so that I’d end up not being able to think straight.

I did, eventually, find myself thinking straight. That’s to say, understanding Adrian’s reasons, respecting them, and admiring him. He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. Did I think Adrian’s action an implied criticism of the rest of us? No. Or at least, I’m sure he didn’t intend it as such. Adrian might attract people, but he never behaved as if he wanted disciples; he believed in us all thinking for ourselves. Might he have ‘enjoyed life’, as most of us do, or try to, had he lived? Perhaps; or he might have suffered guilt and remorse at having failed to match his actions to his arguments.

And none of the above alters the fact that it was still, as Alex put it, a fucking terrible waste.