I once saved a man from suicide. He had parked under redwoods with a view of green pasture near the gate of the ranch on which I was living in the hills west of Stanford. When I stopped to unlock the gate, on my way to a seminar, I saw a vacuum cleaner hose from a car’s tailpipe into a rear window, and as I ran through the gate, saw a towel stuffed into the window opening made necessary by the hose. Then he must have got in and turned on the engine.
I opened the driver’s door and pulled him out. Partly asphyxiated, he nonetheless coughed. I shut off the engine and called the nearby fire and rescue unit. On the dashboard was a suicide note, donating his organs to the Stanford hospital.
Afterwards I wondered about the wisdom of what I had reflexively done. Why not respect the man’s judgment? He had planned this act carefully, had driven to a lovely remote spot, had sought to help others (at least by donating his organs). Was it a cheap thrill for me to intervene and play the hero?
Of course it’s true that he had failed to lock the doors from inside or it would have been much harder to open the car and pull him out. Did he want to be rescued by somebody who might happen by on that lonely road or did he want to make it easy for whomever would find the body?
We generally assume that suicide is a result of depression, from which an individual would probably recover. That could have been the case. Surly a successful suicide offers no second chance, no opportunity to change one’s mind. But why my rush to foil his plan?
During the seminar afterwards I was troubled. It was about war poets, people who had often not known when a bullet or piece of shrapnel might hit, but who survived at least long enough to write about it.