Wally is not afraid of death. He is afraid of staying.
He is entering late-stage dementia, and he can already feel the edges of himself going soft. So he has decided he would rather leave while he is still Wally than remain in a body that has forgotten his own name. He wants to die by his own hand before the disease takes the one thing he believes makes him a man: the ability to choose for himself.
Wally is not my client. He came to my book launch. We got to talking, and that talk became the most painful conversation I have ever put on tape.
I oppose what he wants to do. My whole life exists to defy the clock, to reach a man before despair convinces him the only door left is the one that closes for good. I do not write about this as a theorist. My father chose suicide. My grandmother chose it, two decades apart. I built The Guy in the Glass around that wound, not because it is a book about suicide but because it is a book about men choosing life, and I set their choices beside Viktor Frankl’s, a man who stood inside a machine built to murder him and decided his spirit was still his own.
But Wally is not my father. Wally is not my grandmother. My father and grandmother chose in the dark, cornered by a despair that lied to them about what was still possible. Wally is choosing in full daylight, lucid and resolved, against a disease whose whole cruelty is that it will eventually take the ability to choose away from him. He did not come to me broken. He came clear-eyed. That is a different thing, and pretending it is the same would dishonor all three of them.
Understand me. Every ounce of my being resists what he wants to do. I am not neutral and I will not perform neutrality to sound wise. I think he is wrong. And that is exactly why this conversation shook me the way it did, because I had nowhere to put it. He was not in despair. He was not lost. He was not asking my permission or my guidance. He was a man looking me dead in the eyes on a podcast, telling me what he intends to do. There is no counseling move for that. There is only the man, and the truth he was handing me.
Two truths that will not share a room
Frankl built his life on two convictions that are now colliding in Wally.
The first: there is meaning in all circumstances, and perhaps most of all in suffering. I believe this without reservation. I believe there is meaning available to Wally even now, even in the slow erasure.
The second: between what happens to us and how we answer, there is a space, and in that space lives the last human freedom, the freedom to choose our response. No disease, no diagnosis can take it.
Now hold both at once. Meaning exists in Wally’s suffering. And Wally has the freedom to choose his response to it. What happens when a man uses the second truth to walk away from the first? That is not a thought experiment. That is a man I know, still alive as I write this.
Where this leaves us
In men’s peer groups we hold one rule above nearly all others. We do not tell another man what to do. A man robbed of his choices is not being helped. He is being handled.
So I keep reaching out. Wally keeps responding, and I wait for each reply with my breath held. I reach out lovingly but decidedly, to keep reminding him that there is meaning in the suffering, to defy that number for two more minutes. And each time, he pushes back and declares again his right to choose when the day comes. I respect that willingness to respond, and I refuse to wave him through the door. Both are true. Both are mine to hold.
I will not tie this off with a lesson. Wally is still here. The story has no ending yet, and I will not manufacture one to give you the closure this does not have. This is coming for more of us than we admit, and as men and as a society we will have to look at it without flinching, because looking away has never saved anyone.
I keep reaching. That is the only verdict I am willing to give, and it is the one the mirror hands back to me every morning.
Watch the conversation here: [YouTube]
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