A Very Human Ending by Jesse Bering

Author:Jesse Bering
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2018-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

This is a poor assessment of the market, in my opinion. Suicide will always flop as performance art. The critics will write you off as a desperate bore with no future, and the audience will despise you for your conceited indifference, if not outright antipathy, to their life-affirming worldview. You’ll be forgotten in days.

Oh, and also, ouch.fn3

✹

If there was ever any question about the role of the internet in suicide-related trends, it was finally put to rest in the nondescript Japanese industrial town of Iruma on February 11, 2003. In chapter 3, we saw how the strange death of Jessica Choi yuk-Chun—the young insurance executive from Hong Kong who killed herself using what was then an unheard-of method of burning charcoal in a sealed-off room—led to a copycat suicide epidemic in several Asian countries. In the Saitama Prefecture of Japan five years later, three young people, complete strangers to one another, would meet on a pro-suicide website and enter into an online suicide pact to die by charcoal burning while holding hands. The Japanese media was quick to see this as a shocking new form of suicide, net-jisatsu (internet suicide) and, in an act of dumb irony, proceeded to then cover the incident extensively.15 In the months following the detailed reporting of the case, there was, as you’d expect, a proliferation of group charcoal-burning suicides of the same net-jisatsu variety.

More recently, suicide by hydrogen-sulfide gassing has replaced charcoal-burning as the nation’s leading method. Most experts trace this shift to a 2008 suicide pact involving three other young Japanese people who’d met online. Once the media reported on that trio’s decision to die together by filling the room with hydrogen sulfide gas, an obscure method at the time, more than a thousand such hydrogen-sulfide suicides would accumulate before the end of the year (thirty-five times the number reported for the previous year). Google searches for the term “hydrogen sulfide” shot up fifty times in the initial weeks after the suicide pact was reported and surpassed the search volume even for the word “suicide.” The online publication of a handy set of instructions for how to make the deadly gas at home didn’t help matters.

I guess this is one of the few situations—rigging a makeshift suicide apparatus or preparing lethal chemical concoctions—in which being completely incompetent at anything requiring a sliver of technical know-how or manual ingenuity can be, ironically, a great lifesaver. Personally, I’m terrible at such things; I can’t even put together a chair from Ikea. Suicide by gas? Highly unlikely, in my case.

In fact, as a way of offering you a bit of a breather from such heavy material, let me give you an example of just how bad I am with death-related contraptions. Thinking I’d probably lose a finger setting a mousetrap, I once made the unforgivable mistake of using a glue trap to catch some thieving vermin in my pantry. Pelleted remainders of the evacuated bowels of rodents mixed with the nibbled cardboard shavings of what was once an unmolested rosy-cheeked portrait of the smiling Quaker Oats man littered my shelves.

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