death so sweet

 (...if it's from old age. If it's a disease killing me, I'd feel robbed!)

Looking at suicide rates over the last decade I was touched to see that Covid pushed the rate up for age 85-and-above cohort. Touched, because I'm guessing that some of these are deaths of despair over the loss of a spouse. 

That was my first thought, but it's not likely to account for all of the uptick, since at 85, your spouse is likely to have died already before the pandemic. But imagine watching so many others in your assisted living facility dying. No one to talk to, play with, love or entertain. The thought occurs, well, better go, it's time. They are lovelorn. 

I don't know whether this is the explanation for the uptick, but the statistic seemed so sweet to me. When I think how hard it would be for me to give up on my life, the thought that one day I'll feel that there's nothing more to love, no one to engage with, and it's time to join the gone, that to me is sweet. 'Cause it's all about love, isn't it? It's all about love.

Forgive clinical talk now: if love is the driving emotion in a social species  then why shouldn't we want to give up when there's no one left to love, play and engage with? Anthropologists call it "cooperation" through our hunter-gatherer evolutionary period, but it's really just loving, wanting from each other. Let's be real, hunter-gatherers don't have a cooperation emotion, it's loving and enjoying and playing with and engaging with and endlessly talking to the members of their foraging band that is the emotion that natural selection has given them to keep them all together and survive. This uptick of suicides is the sweetness of our species nature. You ask (or let Lex Fridman the King of Kringe ask) what is the meaning of life? The answer is of course, love (which is probably why the Kringe King always asks it) -- wanting from each other. Even when we argue, we want something from each other, approval, agreement, respect. "Meaning" in "the meaning of life" is an abuse of the language (post on this a-coming), but still. Love and loss, and letting go.