C. S. Lewis's Case Against Suicide

And why it's the best

If you’re a young person and you’re thinking about killing yourself, Freddie de Boer has some advice for you: Don’t. For the usual reasons you might be thinking of, but also for another reason Freddie wants to talk about in this essay: Killing yourself is so stupid that people are going to laugh at you, then they’re going to forget about you.

Freddie wants to stress that he’s not trying to be mean for shock value here. He’s just explaining how it is. If you think it’s going to be tragic in a romantic way or romantic in a tragic way, if you think it’s going to be like Dead Poets Society or something, if you think “Well this will make them…,” it won’t, actually. It won’t be like that at all, and it won’t “make them” do that at all. Quite the contrary.

I encourage people to read the essay in Freddie’s own words. He has a distinctive style that won’t come through in mere summary. And while my preview makes it sound brutal, it’s not merely brutal. Freddie really, truly does not want people to kill themselves. I suspect, though I can’t prove, that at some point Freddie knew some young person who killed himself this way, and this is the epic long form rant he’d like to go back in time and deliver to that person before it was too late.

Freddie also understands very well that not every would-be suicide is trying to make a Statement or be tragically romantic. His essay “Clutching A Severely Depressed Person’s Body Against Yours in Bed to Keep Them From Killing Themselves” proves this, in his oddly profound and inimitable way. Again, I really can’t summarize, just read the essay. I especially love this line: “If you asked me to pick one job that will never be taken by the machines, it’s ‘Senior Vice President for Clutching the Body of the Severely Depressed Person in Bed to Keep Them From Killing Themselves and Customer Satisfaction.’”

But in the end, eloquent as he is, I don’t think Freddie has made the best case against suicide. I say this because it remains, at heart, a nihilist’s case. That might sound a bit paradoxical. How can there be a nihilist case against suicide? Well, I think there can, and I think Freddie just wrote it. The problem is that it has nothing to run on except fear—pure fear.

There’s a better way to tell the melodramatic young person in your life not to kill himself. I find the best model of it in a story about C. S. Lewis which you’ve probably never heard before.