.. and author of a series of books on strength conditioning, has killed himself.

He suffered from depression.

He jumped off the roof of the New York Athletic Club.

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On the same day, an opinion piece in Emma’s city’s newspaper, The New York Times, features this phrase:

suicide is generally wrong

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Indeed the opinion piece’s headline makes the wrongness of suicide paramount. It asks:

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SUICIDE?

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This is the writer’s second column, in the last couple of days, on suicide. In neither column does he even begin to hint at a justification for the claim that suicide — assisted or non-assisted — is wrong. Let’s see if we can do that.

There is an obvious religious way in which suicide is wrong. You are born by God, you live by God, you die by God. For many religious, taking your death into your own hands is – like abortion – denying the will of God in regard to the most basic of human realities. It is a sort of grotesque disobedience, a usurpation of divine powers, essentially unforgivable in its extremity.

Other spiritual traditions may not bring so punitive and outraged a rhetoric (and indeed damnation) to suicide, but they may well see it as … not exactly wrong, but, as the Buddhist Matthieu Ricard explains:

[W]anting not to exist any longer is a delusion. It’s a form of attachment that, destructive though it is, binds you to samsara, the circle of suffering existence. When someone commits suicide, all they do is change to another state, and not necessarily a better state either.

Here, suicide is just sort of stupid, since it doesn’t accomplish the surcease you’re after. On the contrary, it almost guarantees the unpleasantness of your next go-’round.

If you’re not part of a spiritual tradition in which the will of God or karmic action prevails, in what way is suicide wrong, or ontologically mistaken, and therefore to be rejected?

Here are three possible ways: One is the harm argument; a second is the antithetical-to-life argument; and, finally, there’s the cowardice argument.

Harm: Everyone knows that suicide hurts other people. When suicides write notes (apparently Tom Emma did not), they almost always include the words I’m sorry. Weighing on their minds as suicides do the deed is the shock and despair and guilt they’re handing people who love them, and they routinely ask their forgiveness.

Just as for the religious you are, in killing yourself, denying yourself to God, for human beings you are denying yourself to them. The act is the ultimate taking. Hence, suicide is wrong because it is cruel beyond reason.

Antithetical to life: In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis writes that “because of what I do all day ,… suicides … are antithetical.” An artist, a writer, creates, makes something out of nothing. Her material is us — living breathing human beings and their ongoing dilemmas — and she needs us to be there, to keep at it.

When we check out, we take the air out of everyone’s tires. We threaten the fundamental, unthinking commitment we’re all supposed to have to the human comedy and our part in it. Life is good… or at least interesting… or at least compelling in its pleasures. Something like that. Each suicide is thus an intimately demoralizing act for the rest of us. Why persist? Why create? Who says life is good? Suicide is wrong because in killing oneself one ontologically puts at risk all of us.

Cowardice: Old age, people like to say, is not for sissies. All of life is full of challenges and deficits and sorrows and anxieties, and old age is of course rife with them; but, as the cliché suggests, only a sissy would take the easy way out. Life, under any circumstances, is a gift. Your life is a gift to you, and to others. Suicide is wrong because its commission makes you a supreme sissy, someone whose unseemly fear of existence itself blights your very being.

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UD would argue that none of these three arguments succeeds in marking suicide as wrong.