The unsanctified burial ground
Any immediate action from Susie was, I thought, unlikely as she had invited her grandchildren and great-grandchildren out for a holiday a month hence, in August; I doubted she would kill herself before then. Unless of course she was planning for them to come not for a vacation but for her funeral, which with all the accommodation and flights booked would be churlish to miss. It would certainly ensure a well-attended service, which would look impressive to her French friends. But I doubted this was the strategy. I had already seen Susie preparing menus and meal plans, so I thought it safe to nip back to Britain to attend to some business, though I couldn’t get her situation out of my mind and talked about it to anyone who didn’t know her and would be unlikely ever to meet her.
Extraordinarily, I found that virtually everyone I brought the subject up with had a relative or friend who was either contemplating killing themselves, or had actually done it. Johnno, the carpenter fitting windows in my barn, had a mum who had killed herself, quite deliberately, with whisky. Ian, the electrician, said an old man whose immersion heater he had fixed recently had gone out in his pyjamas on a cold night to feed his llamas and die. William, the record producer I sat opposite to on a plane had accompanied his aunt to Dignitas. My friend Nicky’s mother threw herself out of her bedroom window, though she had forgotten she had been moved from her country house into a bungalow, and had just got a bit muddy and scratched by the cotoneaster. Her first words upon being rescued were ‘I’m so sorry. My parachute can’t have opened properly.’ And at a lunch party I attended under the Tor at Glastonbury, of eight people present, three of us were involved with the same activity.
One had an aunt with Parkinson’s who had lost her voice, was bedbound and thought it was time to go, but the other had a story more chilling.
‘Sarah Seymour got the doctor to do it,’ a sexy 70-year-old woman with thick white hair and a twinkle in her eyes said. ‘She had cancer but didn’t do anything about it. You know what she was like …’ The other guests nodded. ‘He prescribed her the drugs and told her to take them all at one time. She got Jeremy and Joshua there, and her sister too, and went upstairs while they were all in the house, and died in her sleep.’
Everyone said ‘Ahh,’ sympathetically.
‘She was a great a fan of your books Guy,’ the woman continued. ‘She turned us all on to One People. She was always talking about it.’
And she decided to bring her life to a dignified close. A hard-core fan, who had spread the word among the unconverted. Couldn’t she have gone into a hospice and stretched it out for a few months so she could talk about the brilliance of my novels while tenderly holding the hands of nurses and distant relatives? Oh no. She had to kill herself, with no care at all for my book sales.
Despite the huge number of people apparently plotting with friends and family to do away with themselves, the official figures I found online seemed to say that very few of them actually did it. And the number was in decline, whereas from the talk around the dinner tables and in the pubs I frequented, you would expect it to be increasing. In the 1930s, 50 in every 100,000 people over 65 ended their own lives. Now it was a mere 37. It’s men around 35 who are saying they’ve had enough. But a young man killing himself is not the subject of this book.
When I dug deeper into the unsanctified burial ground of old suicide statistics, I found a report that reviewed the figures between 1963 and 2009 and drew the general conclusion that officially recorded suicides were only about a third of the true number. I learnt that the old canard that Sweden has a high suicide rate was almost certainly due to their more accurate reporting of the event. Many countries have ceased defending the reliability of their suicide numbers. All of this also goes under-reported, like the suicides themselves, the whole subject not lost in the long grass but deliberately fly-tipped into a gully.
One of the principal problems was that two very different activities, viz. deciding the time and manner of your death at the end of a life, and cutting short a life half-way through, shared the same word: suicide. This was akin to classifying surgery under knife crime.
But even non-geriatric suicide has not always had such a bad reputation. In Roman times, those citizens who wanted to kill themselves merely applied to the Senate, and if their reasons were judged sound, they were then given hemlock on the house. It was specifically forbidden in three cases: those accused of capital crimes, soldiers and slaves – because it was uneconomic for the latter two to die. Not an argument you could use on old people hoovering up scarce NHS resources.
It was that beacon of kindness and sensitivity the medieval Roman Catholic Church that decreed suicide should be punished in all cases. In France, the dead person’s body was drawn through the streets, face down, and then hung or thrown on a garbage heap. Elsewhere, suicides were excommunicated and buried alone, on the outskirts of the city, without a headstone or marker and never in consecrated ground. Additionally, all of the person’s property was confiscated. I wondered whether by chance it was forfeited to the Church.
The secularisation of society questioned attitudes. David Hume denied suicide was a crime as it affected no one and was potentially to the advantage of the individual. In his 1777 Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul he wrote: “Why should I prolong a miserable existence, because of some frivolous advantage which the public may perhaps receive from me?”
In 1786 The Times initiated a spirited debate on the motion “Is suicide an act of courage?” In 1832 The Burial of Suicides Act abolished the legal requirement in England of burying suicides at crossroads. In 1882 the deceased were permitted daylight burial in England, and by the mid-20th century, suicide ceased to be a criminal offence with the passing of the Suicide Act, which received Royal assent on the 3 August 1961; the same Act made it an offence to assist in a suicide. When I was reading the Act, the penalty for being caught assisting a suicide leapt out at me: a maximum term of 14 years in jail. I wondered whether anyone had actually done the stretch that I was looking at, and was alarmed to discover that two had, though in neither of those cases was the person planning to die old. Assisted suicide is now legal in Germany and Sweden, though the person has to administer the act themselves. Lone suicide is now legal in much of the Western world, though the stain poured over it by the Church has still not been washed out.
Martin Amis, who by his own admission writes a great deal about and around suicide, calls it ‘the most somber of all subjects – the saddest story.’ He says that the writer is the antithesis of the suicide by ‘constantly applauding and creating life.’ He goes on to say ‘suicide is omnicide … The murderer kills just one person. The suicide kills everybody.’
He is wrong. For a start, murderers often kill more than one person, metaphorically and literally. And suicide does not always kill everybody. Very often, with the interminable geriatric care we now have, it releases. Diana Athill, at 100, wryly said this morning on Radio 4 ‘at my age, life is somewhat overrated and people make too much of a thing about death.’
I heard of an elderly woman who on being told by her doctor she had a year to live replied ‘A year? I only want 4 months.’ She reminded me of a group of upbeat American seniors I had been shown on the web who had not only formed a club to help each other design and build their own coffin but had made a musical about it.
Amanda’s granny was being kept alive by the Nottingham care home, if by the definition of being alive you mean breathing, eating and blinking. She barely recognised Amanda but confidently identified Amanda’s son Haruka as his uncle, Mike. She could not in any manner look after herself, but was still strong and looked like lasting a good few years.
We really need a second word or phrase to describe what Susie and her fellow travellers were contemplating. And it requires a nomenclature that evokes the reasonableness – and even wisdom – of those who did it.