144 / 194
129
“And besides, your oven is electric,” she says with a
shudder. “The bit about the oven was just a manner of
speaking.” “It’s always been clear to me,” she says. “If one
day I were to decide, it’d be in a nice warm bathtub.”
“Too slow for me; you know I’m impatient, the faster the
better.” I sigh at the difficulty of choosing. “But it’s
incredible that removing yourself from the equation is so
complicated!”
“Complicated?” she says.“Not at all!” “Ah, no?”
“Potassium injection.” “What?”
“Potassium chloride straight into the vein. Pills, don’t even
think about it. I have a patient who took fifty tranquilizers
the other day and he’s alive and kicking.”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah . . . He never stopped talking about killing himself
and when he takes a shot at it, he screws it up!”
•
The rest of the time we discuss the relationship between
suicide and suicidal thinking. It’s not true that people who
talk about suicide never kill themselves. Actually, the