Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 20, 1990                   TAG: 9003222339
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ELLEN GOODMAN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SEEKER OF MEANING OF LIFE CHOOSES OWN DEATH

The psychoanalyst had spent this century trying to understand and communicate the meaning in human life. He had wrested meaning out of his experience in a concentration camp, resurrected it out of the minds of the autistic children he worked with. Finally, in his later years he had reassured anxious Americans that they could be, in the title of his book, "A Good Enough Parent." His was more than a good enough life.

But the later bulletins cast a different shadow. Bettelheim had killed himself. He was discovered Tuesday night on the floor, sleeping pills in his system, plastic bag over his head. Death hadn't taken him. He had taken death into his own hands.

Almost immediately, suicide changed the context of the death of this remarkable man who had written so much about survival. Mourning turned to mystery.

Clues were collected from friends. The death of his wife. A stroke that limited his work. A move from one coast to another. A shift from independence to a retirement home. Even rumors of an estrangement from a child. Did all these clues add up to a reason? Are there good and bad reasons for suicide?

Bettelheim, who never asked easy questions and never offered unambiguous answers, left this legacy. In his memory, in his name, we inherit a moral dilemma of our own era. When is suicide rational? When can we accept it as other than tragic?

"Suicide," they say over the prevention hot lines, "is a permanent solution to a temporary problem." Suicides among the young, the healthy, the melancholy, are tragedies of waste that leave others guilty and rudderless.

But problems aren't always temporary. Slowly, we have come as a society to exempt certain people from the moral imperative of living. We give them our understanding if not our permission to die if they are old enough, if they are sick enough. And then we argue over questions: What is enough? When is enough enough?

Attitudes toward suicide are changing in part because of medicine. The miracles of survival are balanced with its horrors. As respirators and feeding tubes and surgeries save lives, our attention shifts to the qualities of those lives.

Today, fear of the dying process may exceed fear of death. Parents go to court for the "right" of their comatose child to die. AIDS patients debate the moral posture of those who secure and swallow pills.

Among the elderly, official suicide rates have risen over 25 percent this decade. White men over 85 have the highest rates. Men of this age are 12 times more likely to commit suicide than women - but even these figures are surely low. Suicide is often unknown or hidden for shame, privacy or insurance.

More of us have come to reject what psychiatrist and ethicist Willard Gaylin provocatively calls "the tyranny of survival." He says: "One can simply get to a point where the pain and grief of life is in excess of the joy and pride."

These were not strange thoughts to Bruno Bettelheim. In "Surviving," the Austrian-born Jew wrote eloquently about the challenge that a concentration camp posed to the will to live. "So intricately, so inextricably interwoven are death and life that when life seems to have lost all meaning, suicide seems the inescapable consequence." He went on to write: "To have found meaning in life is thus the only certain antidote to the deliberate seeking of death. But at the same time in a strange dialectical way, it is death that endows life with deepest, most unique meaning."

However profound his understanding of the motives for survival, Bettelheim was also a member of the Hemlock Society. It was Socrates who drank hemlock when he was condemned to death. This man may have "chosen" death from the same options.

I don't suggest that we adopt a casual, callous attitude toward suicide. Even among the old and infirm, suicide can be the result of reversible depression. I hope that we always need a good reason to accept this death. It's too easy to go from understanding suicide to subtly promoting it. This is your life: Love it or leave it.

But this elderly man of the mind chose his own death no more and no less than he chose his own life. As Dr. Gaylin weighed it: "He paid his dues. He tolerated suffering. He understood life and exercised his privilege to leave it."

This time, enough was enough. The Boston Globe/Washington Post Writers Group