On August 7, 2013, the comment Suicide Rates Are High Among the Elderly by Paula Span in The New York Times caught my attention. Standard stuff, suicide considered as an social event to be prevented, elderly or not. Why? Why, when a depressed and hopeless relative commits suicide, the family must cope not only with grief but often with guilt and unanswered questions?. Why a typical reaction is "how could he hate life that much"?

Let’s try to reason that out. Ask yourself: why evolution invented death? Or, if you are the Intelligent Design believer, what is intelligent in a death? Or, if you are one of more traditional believers, why God invented death, he is immortal, isn’t He? Whatever are your starting grounds, the conclusion is imminent: to make room for the next generation(s). And next generations are beneficial for the life itself, here you are.

Suppose, for a moment, that because of my admiration for life in the most general sense and according to my reasoning, it’s time to give a definite advantage to other living forms. From the society point of view, it is not a surprise, not at all - I’ve already got more than dozen so called pre-cremation offers (all I have to do is to die, they’ll do the rest). But how should I die? First of all, regardless of the means, legal or illegal, I would not like it to be called suicide. In the current cult of life, including the crapulous drive for immortality, the term suicide has too many connotations. We are in need of a fresh, untinted term. It could be a code, typically an acronym, like GSSUPM, but the use of acronyms is nowadays so widespread that one more may drive somebody to suicide. How about ‘platitude’? Or ‘coda’? Or ‘inanition’? Or ‘encomium’? I like ‘platitude’, it has some melody, but I’m open to suggestions.