Everyone in the car had a plan for his or her suicide. K~ sided with me on carbon monoxide poisoning. Go out into the garage and turn on the car and sleep to wake no more. But P~ had a much more clever, if painful, plan, which was that he was thinking of a skydiving accident where you just fail to open your chute. "There's no way you can survive, and you get a hell of a ride down."

His plan was motivated by two primary considerations. One, that his child would be able to cash out on his life insurance. It was very important to him that she be taken care of (as some slight justification of my and K~'s selfishness, K~ is married but has no kids, and I, of course, am single). And two, that people not have to deal with his suicide if they weren't able to. They would never know for sure if he just freaked out and froze up in the air and failed to open his chute or if he actually meant to die.

Can you tell I did the suicide training again last Saturday?

This was my first training with the new class. It's tragic and pathetic, but the first thing I do when I come into a new class is to scan it for pretty girls. I think that is the most natural thing in the world, but you can't help but feel like a scoundrel when you do it. In addition to pretty girls, there will always be one cool hippie dude. There will be one smooth guy who will never take off his leather jacket. There will be the class dork, or the joker who will make borderline inappropriate comments the whole time.

I was pretty well resigned to having to play that role in my class back in the day, but happily there was another guy exponentially worse than me who saved me from the label. There will also be a couple of middle-aged women, and one or two older women. Then a bunch of college girls and young women in various stages of professional development and prettiness.

Almost everyone in the room will be training in a social work or psychology program somewhere or thinking about a career change to social work or therapy. They all end up knowing me, and greeting me months later when I'm on shift or subbing. And me so terrible with names, I always end up embarrassed.

In training, T~ acknowledged that most of us think about suicide at one point or another in our lives. I believe that is so completely true. It's just part of the human condition. Being alive, you naturally think about being not-alive. Even if you're not serious about it, just the thought of having an alternative is nice. You get stressed with life, and everything starts piling up on you, and sure, you are going to deal with it. But in those moments before you buckle down and dig in, how can you help but think, "wow, wouldn't it be nice if I didn't have to be here at all to deal with this?" So it didn't surprise me at all to hear that everyone had thought about how they would kill themselves. The surprise came from the fact that we were able to discuss it at all. Usually it's a pretty darned taboo topic.

Of course, if you are going to do the P~ skydiving plan, you would need to do lots of acting and prep work, and would have to keep stuff very well hidden, because you know the insurance company is going to be investigating the heck out of a possible suicide to avoid having to pay out. In fact, you can rule out suicidal intent for P~ just on the basis of his having told us about his plan. The one thing you could definitely not do would be tell people about your plan if your suicide was structured specifically to allow people to believe it was an accident, and you would have a hard time telling the insurance company, "well yes, he talked about killing himself in a skydiving accident, but I'm sure this one was really an accident."

Because that was his big number one concern; that his daughter get his insurance. Marvelously good and thoughtful of him. I also appreciate that he was being considerate of the people who wouldn't want to think about him killing himself. With the beauty of the accident possibility, no one would have to; they could just tell themselves that he froze and it was a tragedy that happens to dozens of people every year. Very nice. He's a thoughtful guy, that P~. Now I feel all bad and selfish that my suicide plan doesn't give people any plausible deniability. I may have to consider revising it.

Note: Dozens of people die every year in skydiving accidents. Skydiving is really expensive, and is nothing but entertainment, like watching TV or reading a book. It's not like driving (which also kills lots of people) where you need to do it to get from here to there in a reasonable amount of time. It's not like bicycling (where you have to wear appallingly tight pants) where the startup costs are high to get a good bike but then it's cheap. It's always expensive and you might die. Outside of not having to wear pants which display all of your privates to the world in a compressed form, I cannot quite see the appeal.

In favor of my plan would be that everyone talking about my death would have to concede that I went without pain, where everyone thinking about P~'s death would always have the image of him smashing into the ground at two hundred miles an hour or whatever. Which one is going to give you nightmares? The suicide plan that taps into your instinctive fear of heights and fear of falling or the plan that taps into the shared experience of sleep?

You ask me, I'm gonna go for sleep.

Do you suppose we're better or worse off as a society for our reluctance to talk about suicide and death? Granted, we're not going to introduce it to children in 5th grade along with sex ed (although that does have a certain cyclical unity that does appeal), but would we be better informed if we knew more about death?

If executions were broadcast on TV, for instance. Would it change our opinions on capital punishment? Hiding from death is a pretty new thing, really. Roll back a dozen generations, and you would have had the opportunity to witness public executions. It would be interesting to combine an informed view of death along with the democratic process. What sort of debate would we get? Or, in this age of hype, would we just sensationalize it and lower the quality of discussion with big lurid pictures? Would FOX show World's Grisliest Executions III on Tuesday nights? It might be worth it, though, if it could get Cops off the air.