…on the suicide of biology professor Jerry Wolff:
In southern Utah, the search for a solo backpacker missing in the Needles District of Canyonlands went into low intensity mode as details emerged about suicide letters he’d sent to family and friends. Jerry Wolff (65), a biology professor at St. Cloud State in Minnesota, failed to return on May 15th from a 5-day solo trek in the Salt Creek area, triggering a search that included at least 20 ‘ground pounders’, two search dog units and aerial overflights.
Then details emerged from his hometown newspaper about letters the ‘extremely stressed’ personality had sent to family and friends. “I am so sorry to burden you with yet another death,” said one missive. “I am gone in a remote wilderness where I can return my body and soul to nature. There is no reason for anyone to look for me, just leave me where I am.”
As our world becomes ever more crowded and people seek a peaceful place to check out, parks and nature preserves are becoming actual suicide destinations. According to SAR statistician Bill Syrotuck, who has compiled one of the few SAR databases in existence, virtually all ‘wilderness’ suicides occur within a quarter mile of trailhead, but victims occasionally break that mold.
This tragic incident also illustrates a seldom-published fact in Search and Rescue. The number one cause of search call-outs nationwide is mental illness – namely ‘despondents’ (potential suicides) and wandering Alzheimer’s patients.
… Depressed people require our compassion, but so do the hundreds of searchers who get dragged into these scenarios. For example, Wolff disappeared in the gorgeous Needles District of Canyonlands, which is laced with jeep roads, and by far the most popular backpacking region in the park. It is not ‘remote wilderness.’ With all due sympathy to the distressed Wolff and his relatives, there is more going on here than the right to die. If you want to commit suicide and be buried ‘Ed Abbey’ style, don’t go to a national park, fill out a permit, and vanish along a nationally renowned backpacking route. Such an act commits dozens of searchers, drains funds for true emergencies, and traumatizes the rangers or visitors who eventually find you. I’ve often thought a person’s death is like the ending of a book: If the ending sucks, the whole book sucks. So if dying right is important to you, then finish the story well, not sloppy. Leave no traces.
May 27th, 2008 at 10:12AM
"If you want to commit suicide and be buried ‘Ed Abbey’ style, don’t go to a national park, fill out a permit, and vanish along a nationally renowned backpacking route. Such an act commits dozens of searchers, drains funds for true emergencies, and traumatizes the rangers or visitors who eventually find you. I’ve often thought a person’s death is like the ending of a book: If the ending sucks, the whole book sucks. So if dying right is important to you, then finish the story well, not sloppy. Leave no traces."
What do you think, UD?
May 27th, 2008 at 10:47AM
Mary: I’m madly at work on an essay about suicide, and that’s the reason I haven’t weighed in here — I want to present the essay. But your question lights a bit of a fire under my ass, so let me finish at least a bloggable draft of the thing today, and I’ll post it.
But the shorthand version of my response to this is: I agree. Of course by definition someone distraught enough to prepare for suicide is unlikely to consider the sort of consequences outlined here, so I’m not sure we can cluck-cluck at the poor guy…
It’s true, though, that Wolff seems to have wanted to leave no trace — he asks in one of his suicide notes to have his body be left alone, and seems, as an avid outdoorsman, to have wanted his body to merge into nature (“merge” here probably meaning be eaten by a large animal) and therefore it’d have been wiser for him to do as the Backpacker guy writes, and go somewhere truly remote. It’s odd that he’d go to the trouble of applying for a permit, etc. Yet he wouldn’t be the first suicide (think Sylvia Plath) who acted ambiguously at the end in terms of whether he wanted to be saved…
As to the ending sucking and therefore the whole book sucking — I think this is probably true of suicide rather than of plain old death, yes. Suicide is so powerful an act — it has so crushing an effect on the rest of us in terms of what it says about the worth of life — that if you do it, your entire life will be read retrospectively in terms of that act. And if you do it poorly, as this writer suggests Wolff did, things along these lines will only go more badly for you.
But I’ll get the essay up. Or at least Part I.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:59PM
My opinion (unasked for) is that suicide is an inherently selfish act — I believe that most people at the point of suicide are not able to think about the probable effects on others. Consider those who do it in the family home, in very messy ways, so that they will be found by loved ones, who are then traumatized. (And then how do you live in the house?) This fellow, while not taking that route, almost certainly did not wind up his legal affairs — his estate/property will be tied up until the body is found/identified or the statutory period passes (seven years in some places). He’s tried to assure everyone that he’s dead, don’t worry, but is that so easy to accept? He’s satisfied *himself* in that regard, but few others.
I don’t even go so far as to say suicide is wrong or irrational — situations vary — but it is selfish.
May 27th, 2008 at 3:08PM
carlton:
I think Wolff did, in various documents he left before leaving for Utah, deal with legal stuff. I may be remembering wrong. There might not have been much. He was unmarried, and had, I think, no children.
Hadn’t thought about the possibility that he might just have decided to disappear rather than kill himself. But there’s strong evidence that he was stressed and depressed. A girlfriend had just left him.
In a way I agree with your use of the word “selfish,” and in a way I really disagree.
By definition, it seems to me that most suicides don’t have much of a self left to be selfish or selfless or selfanything. Certainly when people kill themselves it often FEELS selfish to the people they leave behind… and suicide notes, accordingly, tend to be full of apologies, as Wolff’s numerous suicide notes were.
But I doubt most suicides intend to be selfish. By taking their selves away from people who love them, they can be said to act selfishly. But I don’t think it’s fair to accuse them of selfishness.
May 27th, 2008 at 3:59PM
I also disagree very strongly with the "selfish" label. Many cases of suicide, especially among young people, are the result of abuse, and to declare the victims selfish is to grant final victory to the abuser.
May 27th, 2008 at 5:23PM
Obviously, perpectives on this are going to vary, which I accept. I haven’t had the chance to read UD’s essay, I’m sorry to say, but I will.
I disagree with UD in that I don’t think that the suicide has a lack of self — rather the opposite, that the self is all that exists for the person. By this I mean that the person’s suffering (loss, or physical pain, or what have you) is so profound that he is not able to fully consider anything outside of that suffering — certainly not the feelings of others. In many cases, the suffering may indeed be of a type that blocks out everything else, and ending it is an overriding imperative.
Maybe "selfish" is the wrong term, because it has the moralistic perjorative attached to it. "Self-absorbed" and "self-centered" have the same problem, however. My interpretation of the example given above, in which the abused person commits suicide, is the person stating that "*I* cannot endure this any longer."
May 27th, 2008 at 5:43PM
But I doubt most suicides intend to be selfish. By taking their selves away from people who love them, they can be said to act selfishly. But I don’t think it’s fair to accuse them of selfishness.
Correct me if I’ve misunderstood, but if the idea is that someone is to be judged as selfish they have to intend to act selfishly then that seems to be an unusually stringent criterion. We wouldn’t think that way about, say, cowardice – who intends to act in a cowardly way (as opposed to intending to act in a way that one knows is cowardly)? In the case of selfishness I think that it’s not only possible to be selfish without intending to be selfish, it’s possible to be selfish without even realizing that one is being selfish (indeed, it’s quite common). Could UD clarify the distinction she is making in the last paragraph of post 4?
There are probably too many different types of cases to generalize safely. And even in cases which look to be appropriately called selfish, it might be best not to utter such judgments. To call someone who is suicidal or who has committed suicide selfish might, even if true, also be unhelpful, dangerous, and cruel.
So it’s probably worth distinguishing between private judgments on these matters and public declarations and not to suppose that we should try to make the latter match the former. That said, I’m not convinced by RJO’s claim that declaring the victims of abuse who commit suicide selfish is to grant final victory to the abuser, at least if it’s supposed to be a general principle. I certainly don’t think that the abusers would always recognize such a declaration as any kind of victory, though there are surely some cases in which they would. I guess all I’m saying is that the psychology of abuse is at least as complicated as the psychology of suicide.
If UD is writing an essay on suicide then I expect she’s already familiar with Alvarez’s The Savage God, but does she know Clive James’ critical essay on it? It’s well worth a look:
http://www.clivejames.com/pieces/metropolitan/alvarez
May 27th, 2008 at 5:50PM
There’s much in the above comments for me to mull, so give me a bit.
Meanwhile, Peter W., I know The Savage God well, and I cite it in my Inside Higher Ed piece on suicide, which I’ve just posted.
I didn’t know about the Clive James thing, so thanks for that link.
June 18th, 2008 at 6:37PM
I am an undergrad studying at St Cloud State University and coinincidentally my wife and I just bought a house not more than two blocks away from the house that professor Wollf lived in. I had the opportunity, although very brief, to visit with him for ten or fifteen minutes while walking my dog one evening. I have also had the opportunity to visit at length with those who worked with him to finish his house (he built a house in Sartell last fall) and prepare it for whatever end he had planned. Lastly, I am someone who has first-hand experience with the attempted suicide of a loved one (unsuccessful thankfully).
It is in my estimate incredibly easy and just as selfish for someone who has no experience with attempted suicide to categorize and judge someone who has attempted suicide. Without really knowing the mental state of a man who in the 65th year of a very successful life spent studying life, it is incredibly unfair to say that he is selfish for wanting to end his own. I know for a fact that he made every attempt to take care of all legal matters before putting his plan into action. Furthermore, how many of you can say that you have never made a mistake or commited some form of oversight when undertaking something for the very first time. Albeit a grotesque act, his decision to end his own life is not for us to understand or judge. Lastly, I am appalled that some jackass (sorry for my lack of restraint) wants to couch a man’s last moments on earth in terms of how much he is costing someone else. I am sure that those who were searching for his body were diligently hoping to find him in an effort to save him and give him the help that he needs. I am thankful (as is his family no doubt) that we have in place services available to help those who suffer from the sort of mental delusion that often accompanies severe depression and I offer my apologies to any of professor Wolff’s family or friends who read these posts for the insensitivity in the words of those who care more about the financial ramifications of his suicide.
In my short visit with Dr. Wolff, he was very kind and generous and offered his advice as to how I might finish my studies successfully. He seemed to me to be troubled and in retrospect I wish there was something I could have done to help him, but as is often times the case with suicide there is nothing we can do if the affected don’t want to be helped. I will never forget him even though I didn’t know him. Wherever you are Dr. Wolff, I pray that you are at peace. May God rest your soul.
January 17th, 2010 at 5:24PM
[...] Columbia; Pomona’s David Foster Wallace; Winston Napier, Clark University; Jerry Wolff, from St. Cloud State; Hank Payne; George Mason’s William Lash; Berkeley’s Jorge Liderman; Denice Denton at [...]