Hi Paul,

I’ve done a little thinking about our campfire talk and about the intimate morality of suicide.

I guess the simple notion is that once you have cared enough to reach in and ask me as to my intentions about living, and my intended death, I owe you. Now I care how my killing myself will affect YOU.

The Questioner has responded to my mood (disorder). He has cared enough to Ask. He has taken responsibility for me. Now I am responsible for him and I am no longer free to kill what he loves.

My isolation has been broken into. I am no longer alone.

I think of it this way: We all live in two very different worlds, the inner world of passionate emotions and unconscious beliefs, and the outer world of passionate relations with others.

We get into trouble when we think the two worlds are the same.

The depressed, suicidal person is stuck inside a kind of claustrophobic space with set beliefs that reinforce feelings like, “I don’t care and no one cares about me anyway, so what does it matter what I do with my life?”

The Questioning person who breaks in to this private place momentarily destroys the unconscious fantasy of "no care."

If someone cares then the suicidal ideation is disrupted.

There is no longer merely the inner world with its destructive fantasies. The equation of inner and outer is blown. It can be surprising, even shocking, for the suicidal person to recognize that the dead world inside is not the same as the outside. There is life out there! For the moment, at least, I am touched by the living.

I think that is how it works, emotionally, ethically.

We all have an essential ethical nature, assuming we have been known by an Other, and have experienced care.

In suicidal ideation the inner world holds sway over the outer. One is lost "inside." The hatred in that inner world now runs cold and has made it unlivable. Asking the Question of Life restores, for a moment, the warmth of the world outside. I am warmed and linked up again. I am, once again a man or woman with others.

Alone I can do anything. But we are social creatures. We depend on each other and all pathology is a denial of that essential fact. My life is not my own. I have my life because of many others. If I am loved by you, I am beholden to you.

You Ask about me and, for the moment, we are in this together.

Any painful passion is made more bearable should it be shared. Even blame is not so hard to bear when there is plenty to go around. That is, when we are responsible for each other.

This is one reason that Family is so important. We belong to each other. That is why the question, "Who do you love?" defines us so.

This is not the morality of religion, or political correctness. It is the simple morality of human relations. Related to you, everything I do matters.