In the library, before Ozzy, I found and read another book recommended to me, Tuesdays With Morrie. It's a real-life account of a former college student who learns his former professor is dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease – the very same disease with which Stephen Hawkings is afflicted).

The book is the account of the months the author would visit him every Tuesday and discuss various topics about life from the point of view of a dying man. The book has been the inspiration to many because of Morrie's positive attitude and affirmation of Life in the face of death.

The book mentions three interviews by Ted Koppel during this period that were aired on U.S. network TV's "Nightline", and Koppel was so impacted by these meetings that he apparently got permission from the network to compile the footage into a separate documentary about him, entitled Lessons on Living.

I guess the book was interesting to me because Morrie was an ordinary person, who lived an ordinary, normative life, and then had to confront his mortality. He was Jewish, but wasn't particularly spiritual.

So my point of view in reading the book was of someone who has taken Tibetan methodology to heart, where understanding, if not pursuit, of death is just as important as an understanding of life. Not "just as important", but central.

On one hand, many of Morrie's reflections and revelations are philosophically old hat. On the other hand, he was actually going through the process in real time, in this lifetime, in a way that I can't identify as having experienced.

With a belief in reincarnation, I can reflect that I've been through this many times before, studied it, processed it, played with it, but I don't know the feeling of actually facing it definitively beyond my own choice.

Hm, my own choice. Actually, that's my key point. I have absolutely no doubt that if faced with death that was not my own choice, I'd have absolutely no problem with it, I'd be happy as a proverbial clam. My own choice is the dilemma in this lifetime, not death itself.

Morrie deals with issues only a person facing mortality can process. The people his story has touched are the multitude of people who wonder and worry about death and mortality, but, I shouldn't wonder, are people who don't have the will or the means to affect change in their own lives based on what are essentially his teachings, but hopefully do.

And the issues Morrie deals with are the same ones I've touched on for myself, and I've come to my own conclusions and made my own peace, and also will not affect any change in my own life because he has actually affirmed my direction to also go there.

With my lifelong striving towards suicide, I've always felt like a dying person. This impulse saying I will commit suicide, I must commit suicide, is arguably not different from a disease. Ergo, I've dealt with the issues that Morrie also confronted. When suicide is your reality, you are confronting your mortality.

There was a time when suicide could be avoided. There was still the possibility of another path. And the analysis could have been broken down between positive (live) and negative (suicide), but it's not that way anymore, and hasn't been for quite some time.

That another path is the negative path now. Finding something to latch onto to continue living is not something positive because it's attachment. It's a fundamental lack of understanding of the foundation of being.

Morrie's story, in my opinion, is presented in a way that shouldn't evoke pity. Sympathy, perhaps. My story, I shouldn't wonder, wouldn't evoke pity or sympathy in anyone. And that's the way it should be in our attitudes about death if we really understand life and death as a part of life, not as an end.

Whether or not you believe in reincarnation, you live on by the impact you have on other people, and you don't impact other people by evoking pity in your passing. Suicide I'm hoping is the way I die, and in following this path, I definitely do not hope to have any impact on anyone else's life, which is why I've worked so hard on making myself a low-impact soul.

No matter how I die, the impact will be very minimal, and if I died of renal failure because of alcoholism or got hit by a bus while riding my bike, the impact would still be more, and more than I would want, than if I simply disappeared in a suicide about which no one had any evidence.