Depression is crippling enough. It traps you and claws up your psyche. While you can do things to cover it up and beat it back, it never goes away. You live your life behind a 3" pane of glass. No one can truly reach you. They wave and smile. They chide you for being down. They prod you with meaningless glib advice like, 'Grow up,' 'Be happy,' 'Get over it' and 'Smile! Other people have it worse than you.' Meanwhile, you have to function within and drag this capsule of despair, inadequacy and numbness around while terrible memories, failures, anxieties, colored and compounded by resident depression, play endless loops in your mind. There is no escape.
It was from this vessel that Robin poured brilliance and joy. I do not believe for a moment that he was a weak or selfish man. He was exhausted. I'm not sure if having an answer would've prevented his suicide. I doubt it since there's no cure for Lewy Body Dementia. Knowing might've been some small mercy -- At least enough to die knowing the mechanics of the disease and WHY it's over. Knowing 'goodbye' and 'I love you,' will never feel like adequate words to make a departure on. I hope my own final words are as graceful as, "Goodnight, my love."
This is why I support the right to die, whether it is an early exit from chronic or fatal illness OR emotional exhaustion and anguish. Society needs to remove 'selfish' from the dialogue about suicide. It is not selfishness or weakness that leads someone to end his or her life. It is a decision which comes over time as alternatives falter and evaporate. Until you've been in someone's circumstances and truly gripped that person's battle to keep going, you have no business deciding whether that person's death was selfish.
Having considered my own eventual mortality, I have told my family that I will end my life when I reach a point where I can no longer continue without significant palliative care. Expiring while attached to machines and opiate drips, requiring others to attend to my bodily functions, edema and bedsores, slipping in and out of consciousness while being delirious and unable to communicate is no way to go. There is nothing good or saintly about it. The last thing I want to do to my family is waste thousands of dollars of medical expenses for a losing cause. True selfishness is expecting someone to die this way just to satisfy a religious edict or social more. The same applies to suicide for emotional or spiritual reasons. When we end our own lives, we have done all that we can do.
Bless us and let us go.