Giving One's Life

[Content warning: suicide] This will be a morbid post; forgive me. It will be hard to write this well. I will write it badly. You are young or middle aged -- healthy you think. You get a fatal diagnosis out of the blue, let's suppose. You have a few months to live and no cure. You will seek whatever pleasure, peace, and companionship feels right in those last months. You will complete a few important projects maybe, and prepare your loved ones as best you can for a world without you. But you also have an unusual opportunity. You could give your life. You could die in a good cause, if you knew a good cause that would be advanced by your death. Perhaps this is worth contemplating. In the past, you have given money and you have given time, but now you could, if it seemed right, give something very different from money or time. Socrates drank the hemlock. Would Plato have been as inspired if Socrates had fled Athens and died quietly ten years later in Corinth? Thich Quang Duc immolated…