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David Foster Wallace an Apparent Suicide
snydeq passes along the news that David Foster Wallace was found dead Friday at his home in Claremont, California. Wallace's wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home at 9:30 PM Friday. The novelist, essayist, and humorist, best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, was 46. Wallace had been awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 1997.
All the coverage of this cowardly act seems to really implicitly glamorize suicide. When people kill themselves, they hurt families, loved ones, etc. Then there's all this fawning news coverage of the suicide... oh come on.
He took the cowards way out. No diagnosis of terminal cancer, his death doesn't somehow cleverly result in saving someone from some terrible fate, there's no apparent real reason for doing it other than just giving up.
Fine, your life is the only real currency you have any anyone should be entitled to make that one decision about when and where they go. But for the news to make such a big deal out of it is a disservice to all the writers whos passing went unannounced and sends a terribly mixed message to society about how we value folks more for their death than their life.
Generally "survivor" is used to mean a situation in which ones death could easily have been foreseen. For instance. "I'm a survivor of the Iraq War" or "I'm a survivor of a horrible car accident", "I survived cancer" etc. People generally don't use survivor like this: "I'm a survivor of driving to work", "I survivor of my dad's heart attack", etc. I agree it's fucking pathetic to think you survived someone else's suicide. Talk about ego.
People who talk like would probably like to commit suicide but know that they'd fail at that like everything else in their lives.
You disgrace everyone who has actually survived something that was a serious risk to their life.
If you seriously think you are a survivor of this suicide, go to the nearest VA hospital and have a chat with those guys about surviving. Odds are you'll end up getting the shit beat out of you by people with no legs.