by Blake Guthrie

Created on: November 30, 2007

Ask yourself this question: Who owns you?

I'm betting your gut-check answer was: I own me. Sure, you might be in hock to the credit card company or the IRS or the bank that holds the mortgage on your home, but do these companies "own" you? Do your children "own" you? Does your spouse, your mother and father, "own" you?
When you consider this question in the context of suicide it becomes plain as day. You might be a pain in the ass, but you still own yourself, no one else does. If you owned a valuable baseball card collection, one that contained the only copy of an original Babe Ruth from the early twentieth century, it would be in your perfect right to burn that collection, if you so desired.

Those who commit suicide exonerate themselves from any punishment temporal beings could bestow upon them, save for a tiny place in infamy in the mortal world. How are you going to punish those that off themselves except through your own pain and admonishments for posterity? All the cliches' ring true: the easy way out, a selfish act, too much pain to deal with.

Like Einstein's theory of relativity, suicide is subjective based on the observer's point of view. Who can know what really is going on inside another person? Two of the twentieth centuries most famous writers-Ernest Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson-blew their brains out so they wouldn't have to bear the pain and indignity of old age. Or that's one man's relative opinion anyway-a man who never went through what they went through.

In my life I, like most of my closest friends, admit to having thought about suicide a time or two. It's not an act I have ever seriously considered, but then again, should I come upon an unbearable and unforeseen situation later in life, it is a right I can't say I would never exercise. Like drug addicts, suicide cases need help, not chastising. If you come across someone with a gun pointed to their head what are you going to do, lecture that person about their rights?

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