This is what I looked up in the Bible I borrowed from the Auld Kirk — I found what I was searching for quickly enough. Psalms 90.10:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away.
I know what’s wrong with me and I know what I will become — a working, vital, thinking brain in a dead and uncontrollable body in which nothing works. No thank you. The days of my life will be threescore years and ten, I have decided. I will cut it off and I will fly away, myself.
Everything is in order. Here I am in my sitting room on 6 March 1978 waiting for midnight. The fire is banked up with peat bricks and I am ideally cosy. On the table beside my armchair is a full bottle of Glen Fleshan malt whisky, a glass and a jam jar full of Jock Edie’s blessed ‘sweeties’. Jock’s capsules are a benzodiazepine — ‘Librium’ in this instance. Take them with alcohol, he advised: alcohol compounds the effects, leading to coma and then death. It’s a tranquil feeling, he had added, consolingly. You won’t be aware of anything. Flam lies by the fire watching me carefully. I think he knows something untoward is going on; he senses my troubled mind and it discomfits him. We’re both animals, after all, so it’s not surprising that he senses something’s amiss. He knows me very well.
On the coffee table in front of me is my will, a letter for Annie and Blythe and my life story in a cardboard file and I will add the ‘Barrandale Journal’ to it before I fly away. Pinned to the front door is an envelope for Hugo with ‘Hugo. Read this before entry!’ written on it. I’ve arranged for him to come round tomorrow, ostensibly to travel to Oban to look for pots and pans and other kitchen utensils for his new house. In the envelope is a letter telling him what I’ve done — what I’m about to do. I don’t want to shock anyone, which is one reason why I’m sitting in an armchair. I suspect I shall look as if I’ve dozed off when he pushes open the front door and comes through the hall into the parlour. He’ll have been forewarned.
I don’t like the word ‘suicide’ or ‘assisted dying’ or ‘mercy killing’ or any of the few other synonyms available. I prefer the expression ‘by my own hand’. I will take my life by my own hand at a moment chosen by me — not by my disease. ‘By my own hand’ speaks to me of autonomy, of free will.
I feel very calm. I truly believe this option should be available to anyone who wants it. In fact I feel quite passionate about this issue now I’m about to put it into practice — it should be available to anyone who wants it as a matter of civil liberty, of human rights and human dignity. You go to your doctor, explain the situation, you sign all manner of affidavits testifying to your determination, clarity of mind, familiarity with consequences and so forth. You have the documentation witnessed, if required. Then you’re given your bottle of pills, or, even better, one pill, and you go home, set your affairs in order, make your necessary farewells, if you want to, and gladly leave your life behind. End of story. I’m not going to give the lethal pill to anyone else. If I buy a kitchen knife no one asks me if I’m going to stab someone with it. With your purchase you are simultaneously handed the responsibility to use your knife as it was designed to be used — so too with my notional pill. Our lives are filled with potential lethal weapons, after all; a pill that will end your life painlessly is just another. If we’re treated as responsible beings we tend to act responsibly.
There was a French writer — Charbonneau told me his name but I can’t remember it now — who defined life as a ‘horizontal fall’. It’s a neat metaphor. I just want to end my horizontal fall now, before the bleak prison of my particular ailment closes in around me. What could be more reasonable than that?
Charbonneau’s name coming to mind makes me think fondly of him — and all the people I’ve loved during my own horizontal fall. My threescore years and ten have been rich and intensely sad, fascinating, droll, absurd and terrifying — sometimes — and difficult and painful and happy. Complicated, in other words.
It’s midnight. I take my first pill and wash it down with a sip of Glen Fleshan. I’ve decided to keep writing in my journal until my last moment of consciousness. Flam looks at me, his tail thumps on the carpet. I’ve walked him so he’ll just have to wait until Hugo arrives in the morning. I’ve ordered Hugo to take Flam and Hugo can walk him, later, when he’s been. And it’ll be a fine day tomorrow, for a March day on Barrandale — a good day for a long walk. Clear skies have been announced, bracing sunlit weather. I should never have listened to the weather forecast. I take another pill.
My eyes flit around my sitting room, taking it in for the last time.
In a fruit bowl on the table in front of me are four oranges and a banana. And I think — without thinking — ah, breakfast tomorrow. The banana is freckling nicely. I could slice it into a bowl of porridge. I could have freshly squeezed orange juice and then a bowl of porridge with sliced banana and then go for a walk with Flam, down to the bay, round to the headland. Call Hugo, invite him for lunch. A bottle of wine. . Except there won’t be a tomorrow, I realise.
I take another pill, another sip of whisky. I won’t feel a thing, Jock Edie said, just drift off to sleep and not wake up.
But, annoyingly, I keep thinking about freshly squeezed orange juice and the day ahead waiting for me. Sun on the wavelets in the bay and that cold bright weather that here on the west coast is about as invigorating as you can experience — cheeks numb, breath condensing, the light and shade razor-edged, the focus precisely sharp. I could take some more light-pictures by the rock pools. .
Flam is standing now, as if he senses this new direction in my thinking, and he shakes himself, licks his chops and comes over to me and puts his muzzle on my knee and looks into my eyes. No, I’m not going to rub your ears, old dog, go and lie down.
I pick up another pill. .
But I’ve put it back in the bottle and screwed the cap tightly on. Was I making another mistake, I thought, my last mistake? Was I being a little hasty. .? If I can plan my breakfast and look forward to the day ahead with its simple pleasures — isn’t that a sign? Wouldn’t it be wiser to experience the day ahead and savour it, as if it were my last, and postpone for a while my appointment with my pills and my whisky until the moment comes when I don’t feel like coping any more and all anticipation has gone? I have the means so I can decide at any time of my choosing — Jock Edie says the pills will keep for years. I push the pill bottle away and pour myself a large dram of Glen Fleshan.
I am thinking — hard, concentrating. My life has been complicated, true, very complicated, and it seems to be entering another realm of complexity. But, then again, isn’t everybody’s and won’t everybody’s be just as complicated? Any life of any reasonable length throws up all manner of complications, just as intricate as mine have been. I pick up an orange and contemplate it. Remarkable fruit. I test its rind with my thumbnail. Like skin, porous, soft. What’s waiting for me? A cold fine day, a dog, a walk, a white beach, the wind-scored ocean, a camera, an urgent concentrating eye, a curious active mind. I weigh the orange in my hand, sniff its citrus astringency. The singular beauty of the orange. . The here and now. Seize the day, Amory.
Yes, my life has been very complicated but, I realise, it’s the complications that have engaged me and made me feel alive. I think I should let my horizontal fall continue just a little while longer — keep falling horizontally until I decide to stop.