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Carolyn Heilbrun b. 1926
'Rational suicide'' is what some call killing yourself to avoid something worse. The phrase has a stoical, ancient Roman ring to it -- think of Brutus, Cleopatra, Seneca. For them, the alternative was humiliation and execution. For us, it's pain, senility, the dragged-out deathbed of the modern hospital, the cumulative debilities and losses of old age. ''Quit while you're ahead was, and is, my motto,'' wrote Carolyn Heilbrun, explaining why she had long intended to kill herself at 70.
It wouldn't have been the first time she put that precept into practice. When she famously quit Columbia's English department in 1992, saying she was sick and tired of battling entrenched sexism, she was an academic star: a key figure in the Bloomsbury revival, author of ''Reinventing Womanhood,'' ''Writing a Woman's Life'' and many other elegant and original works of feminist criticism. She was also a mentor to a generation of female scholars. And as Amanda Cross, she was the author of a series of well-received and popular detective novels. Somewhat to Heilbrun's surprise, her later years turned out to have their own pleasures: young friends and three grown-up children, a new dog, a new country house with ''no beautiful old trees'' for a storm to knock down, she wrote. Instead of committing suicide when she reached the fateful birthday, she produced ''The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty,'' a wry, wise collection of informal essays about enjoying life as an older woman, and ''When Men Were the Only Models We Had,'' a memoir of her graduate student years. She was 77 when she finally took the pills she had somehow collected, having chosen a time when her husband would be in the country with the dog. ''The journey is over,'' read the note she left behind. ''Love to all.''
What was going through her mind? Heilbrun was apparently healthy, vigorous and, by contemporary standards, not even all that old, but as she herself often pointed out, if you wait too long, you can lose the opportunity. For its defenders, rational suicide is more than a way of cutting your losses; it's about freedom and power, the right to shape the arc of your life, to decide when the journey is over. ''Suicide should be legal -- you should be able to ask your doctor for pills,'' one friend of Heilbrun's told me. ''And he or she should give them to you.'' At Heilbrun's memorial service, Gloria Steinem seemed to endorse this shadowless view, comparing Heilbrun's suicide to those of the queens of the Lovedu, an African tribe, whose duties, she said, are to make rain and train their successors and as a reward are permitted to choose when to die.
Why do I feel that something is left out of this happy story? At the memorial service, several eulogists expressed -- delicately but with unusual candor -- anger, regret and self-blame. I felt that way myself, and I had hardly known her. Weren't we supposed to have gone for coffee in 1996? I should have called. Well, she could have called. It's hard not to see suicide as rejection, as a comment on the failure of others to give you what you need to keep going, even as you reassure them that no such thing exists, and perhaps it really doesn't exist. ''Suicide tears something,'' my 83-year-old father said. Maybe not the natural span of life -- medical science has already torn that -- but the web of human connections. Is it selfish for me to have wanted Heilbrun to set an example of how to age -- as a writer, a woman, a feminist? Perhaps she would say that she did.
''Untreated depression'' is the buzzword now. Some say it lies behind all suicide, even of the terminally ill. It's often a retroactive diagnosis, though: the evidence of the depression is the suicide itself. True, for a year or two Heilbrun felt disengaged from her writing -- a painful loss for a brilliant woman who always saw work as central. In an article published over the summer, she said she had lost interest in the writers who had absorbed her for so many years. Still, she turned in an essay on Henry James the week before she died; the December issue of The Women's Review of Books carries her essay on Patricia Highsmith. Revisiting her books after her death, I was struck by their warmth, generosity and spiky humor, but I seemed to find a slender, darkening thread of sadness and disappointment and a tendency to see herself as older than she was (60, she wrote somewhere, was the beginning of ''old age''). I was struck too by the way she pared her life down as she got older: no more dinner parties, no movies, no theater, no shopping, no travel, no fussing about clothes and looks. Each of these decisions might have felt right, might have felt like freedom -- after all, Kate Fansler, the beautiful, rich, thin, clever English-professor heroine of the Amanda Cross books, always did exactly what she wanted, with usually splendid results. But perhaps, taken all together, they led to a room that was too empty.