The End

I read a couple things earlier today that have inspired me to write.

Whenever life gets me down, I try to think that it could be worse, that my problems are, in the big picture, quite insignificant. Of course, being my problems, they take on significance but it’s helpful to step back and gain some perspective – obstacles start to seem less insurmountable. Case in point: imagine you’re Joey Finance. You go to work on one of the upper floors of the World Trade Center the morning of September 11, 2001. A couple hours later you find yourself in the unenviable position of having to choose between two incomprehensible choices. Either A) you burn to death or B) you jump nearly a thousand feet to your death on a Manhattan street. I can only try to imagine the absolute horror of being faced with two choices, both of which lead to your death. A situation devoid of hope in which the end cannot come soon enough. Think about the agony those people faced. Most of us will only have minimal choice in the method and timing of our demise but these people had these forced upon them. No chance to change eating and exercise habits, no chance for a doctor to ply his trade with all the knowledge of modern medicine behind her. Most of those people weren’t able to proclaim their love to family & friends one last time, say goodbye to their children, or set their affairs in order so that those who survived them could be assured of the best possible headstart in getting their lives back on track after the death of their loved ones. When I think about those poor people who died on 9/11, I feel great sadness. I also feel thankful that neither I nor anyone I know was one of them. Lastly, I feel tremendous anger towards the fuckers who hijacked those planes and flew them into the World Trade Center.

In moments of morbidity, I’ve been contrasting the deaths above with the recent suicide of Hunter S. Thompson. Now, I never met HST and cannot speak to the state of his life just prior to him taking his own life. From what I have read, he was not terminally ill, suffering from incurable physical pain, or suffering from a mental malady such as manic depression which would lead him to do what he did. Not that I ever considered HST to be exactly normal but being even highly eccentric is no prescription for suicide. And no statements from his family lead me to believe that he was in any state of mind other than the one the public has know for the past 40 years.

In the wake of his death, encomiums have been published everywhere about HST by friends, former editors, fellow writers, et al that all tend to say the same things: how unique he was, about his pioneering style of journalism, the influence he’s had, lots of crazy stories, and so on. I’ll miss his writing. No more new books, no more columns up at espn.com – it is a real loss. What no one seems to be saying, however, is how cowardly his suicide was. If there was no illness physical or mental to be had, how could he put a loaded gun into his mouth and pull the trigger? He had a wife, a kid, a career – and he threw all of those away and caused tremendous pain for those that knew him. Everyone is romanticizing HST’s suicide as an appropriate end to his life. How so? A drug overdose would seem more fitting. According to some, it was not unexpected but that does not justify a completely stupid and selfish act and no one should be going around glorifying his death. His life and his writings should be remembered and enjoyed but his death should be labeled what was – pointless and stupid. That there is glory in death is a tool of the deceitful or a refuge of the delusional. (Such as those who flew planes into the WTC.) Why will no one come out and ask what the fuck happened to him? Why did he become such a chickenshit and bail on life? People keep speaking of the tragedy. While literally correct, they use it with more of a connotation of misfortune. In this sense, if he’d fallen off a cliff or been hit by a car then his death would have been a tragedy. The fate of those people in the World Trade Center was tragedy. But HST’s hand was not forced. Let us pull no punches let us not pretend that cowardice is a fitting end to one’s life.