Just search every cradle is a grave on amazon it should show up
It has a skull on the cover
I think they meant a pdf or something online for free. It's not online as far as I know, I had to purchase my copy.
This is a great review of Perry's book.
Comments: Sarah Perry wrote this book from a place of philosophical intellectualism and factual integrity. She exhaustively researched the hows and whys of suicide and procreation and makes a very compelling case for making suicide accessible for people who do not want to live and for considering whether or not it is ethical to continue to create new humans whose lives may be more a burden to them than a gift. As she deftly picks apart the arguments against suicide and antinatalism, she bestows upon mankind a dignity and respect for self that anti-suicide and pro-birth crusaders deny us as we are asked to suffer and to mindlessly recreate ourselves because of tyrannies of tradition and religious mores.
I very much want to discuss this book in a bloodless manner because the subject matter is so fraught with emotional reaction, much of it knee-jerk, that makes the topic hard to discuss in an intelligent way. When you speak to people whose loved ones killed themselves, you hear them speak of the cowardice and selfishness of suicide. When you talk of people who did not have children, you all too often hear others dismiss ethical childlessness as selfish, or insist that if only one had a child, one would know,
really know, what true love means. To approach a counter to such topics with emotion is pissing in the wind because the very basis for avoiding suicide and encouraging procreation is steeped in emotion.
But given my personal history and recent events in my life, I can only approach these topics – especially suicide – from a place of emotion and personal anecdote. I hope that as I write from my id I do this topic justice. This book really is a paradigm changer, and you don't have to adopt an antinatalist world view for that to happen. It is a book that argues against some of the most deeply ingrained habits of human existence – to remain living at all costs and to spread one's seed far and wide – and it makes the case that our reason and self-awareness are not entirely a great gift and that possession of them should permit us to control how we decide to die rather than be used as a manipulative tool to keep us living.
And there is no way to discuss the entirety of this book. Know that I will be unable to discuss large amounts of this book and that you need to read it yourself. All I can do is discuss what I experienced when reading this book and how it relates to my life.
Perry begins her treatise with an analysis of Bryan Caplan's theory of "free disposal." Caplan, an economist, through analyzing current trends in suicide, makes a facile case for how it is that the mass of people consider life a great gift. Caplan states that since it is so easy to end one's life, that there are so many options available to the suicidal person, the fact that so few people avail themselves of suicide proves in itself that life is valuable to us all. For Caplan, because there are so many tall buildings one can leap from, and because one doesn't have to worry about cleaning up the mess one leaves behind, that proves, economically, that even though the "cost" of suicide is cheap, people choose not to commit suicide not because it is hard to do but because we as human beings really value living at all costs.
Without the rancor that would accompany my own dismissal of such an argument, Perry neatly tears apart Caplan's economic view of cheap suicide. The costs of suicide are steep, Perry explains. People are not free to do with themselves what they want. The very nature of the secrecy of planning suicide proves that one is not free to take one's life because the secrecy is necessary to prevent people from stopping you from dying. You have to plan to die in secret because it is illegal for anyone to help you and if you fail you may find yourself locked up in a psych ward, your will thwarted and your future in the hands of people you do not know.
But Perry goes beyond just the basic economic analysis Caplan offers. Suicide is hardly a situation of "free disposal" because anyone who thinks about committing suicide knows full well the social burden suicide brings with it. Someone will have to find your body and it's appalling to think of a family member or friend encountering such a thing unprepared. Suicide with drugs is risky and prone to failure but more effective methods are messy and one does not want to think of one's mother or husband cleaning brain matter off the wall. Then we have to face the knowledge that our loved ones will feel utterly betrayed because we crept around behind their backs in order to die and they are left holding the bag, second guessing themselves, wondering if they could have saved us, wondering what they did wrong. Did they miss the signs? Could they have gotten us help? Or worse, they may be angry at us for being cowardly, for not fighting to stay alive at all costs. There is nothing free about suicide in this world. If it costs us nothing when our bodies hit the floor, the loneliness of planning a covert suicide and the reactions of those surviving us have a cost that many find too dear to pay.
Most interesting to me was Perry's analysis to support the notion that most suicides are not caused by a person feeling out of options or that life is too hard. Temporary despair seldom fuels suicide. Most suicides are committed by people who feel like they lack connections to others, or are tired of being burdens or fear becoming a burden. Virginia Woolf did not drown herself because she could not endure another depressive episode. She drowned herself because she could not see putting her family through the effects of another depressive episode. It is in this moment when the self-awareness that is supposedly a gift to human-kind is most evident, a realization of one's limitations and endurance and our impact on others. In order to work around that self-awareness, we've imbued suffering with meaning, a religiosity that guilts us into remaining alive and to creating more living beings, ensuring that no amount of personal or inflicted misery can ever be seen as a legitimate reason for dying because our suffering evidently ennobles us. It teaches us lessons. It gives us meaning that makes the suffering seem worth enduring.
*****
I now know there are ways you can tell a person is getting ready to die. Gradually failing appetite. Distaste for being touched. Mood changes. Agitation. Much of what marks a person beginning to die can also be markers for depression except for one: seeing and speaking to dead loved ones.
My mother confused me for her mother on the phone a couple of times before she died in January of this year. My grandmother died in 1981. She was also convinced my grandfather was in her home, pacing the hallways, looking over her. He died in 1994, and he indeed haunted her.
My grandfather shot himself in the head, dying in a hospital when life support was removed. He shot himself because he was 78 years old and his health was beginning to fail him. I don't know the details but he wasn't fatally ill. He was just an old man who did not like being an old man because he had been so strong in his youth and middle-age. His family was long-lived and he was the baby of his family. His own mother, a vile Irish hag, lived with him and my grandmother when she was old. She more or less turned my aunt into a nervous wreck and wreaked havoc on my very sensitive grandmother. My mother claimed the evil old woman didn't bother her much but Mom never copped to any mental or emotional weakness, at least not around me.
My grandmother suffered for decades before she died in her early 60s and my grandfather was her primary care-taker, even as he worked as a rancher. He loved her dearly and did not resent his role but it is undeniable that my grandmother's severe illness changed their marriage. He was unable to save much money, he spent much of his life caring for his elderly mother and then his sick wife, and it all left a mark. My grandfather married a widow after my grandmother died and lived in her home because he had been a sharecropper (share-rancher is more accurate) and owned nothing but his truck. My mother thought my grandfather remarried because he didn't want to be a burden for her or my aunt, but either would have loved to have had him come live with them. But he didn't want any of that. He'd seen how that worked out for him, his wife, his children.
My grandfather had spoken of his older brother Tom, who in his 90s was a dementia patient in diapers. He could see years and years of failing health with indignity after indignity heaped upon him.
He didn't want to be a burden on anyone. He hated not having financial independence. He didn't want to sit by idly as his body failed and his mind left him. He didn't want to wait around for the worst to happen. So he took care of it himself.
It shocked everyone. My grandfather was a deacon in his Baptist church. He had strong ties to his community and was in his way a pillar of the community. He was quite literally the last person anyone would think would kill himself. Well, he was until you looked at it logically.
In the last year of her life my mother was so bitter towards her father. She told me many times she planned to confront him in Heaven, to tell him off for what he did and demand an explanation. She said he could have lived 20 more years had he not killed himself. I asked her why, as a Christian, she could not forgive him. I asked her why she wanted him to stay on Earth in a body that was failing, in an emotional state that hurt him. She would look away when I asked her these questions, never answering.
I know the answers now. She couldn't forgive him because he planned it and no one knew. She was angry because she could not prepare. She was angry because she could not say goodbye before he left. She felt abandoned by him, like he had made a craven choice to leave her behind without a single word of warning.
So she was haunted and spent the last year of her life in misery because she didn't understand and felt angry. I wonder if at the end she began to understand why he did it. I know I do now.
And I wonder how different her last year would have been had my grandfather lived in a culture where impoverished, elderly men who were tired of life and rightfully afraid of what was to come could end their lives in the presence of those who loved them, preparing people for the end rather than planning covertly, going in quiet dignity rather than blowing their brains out in their backyards. She would have had more peace as her own body failed her. She would have been able to remember how wonderful a man her father had been. She could have planned to meet him again with an open heart rather than angry demands for answers. She would not have been haunted by him pacing the hallway, nervously awaiting her arrival.
*****
One of the elements of Perry's analysis that stuck with me the most is the notion that we human beings exchange suffering for meaning.
Rather than eschewing all suffering, individuals frequently accept some degree of suffering in pursuit of other rewards – either in the form of meaning or in the form of pleasure. The mountain climber or medical student affirmatively chooses to suffer for the purpose of future experiences, pleasurable or meaningful. Others, looking back on times of suffering, say they are glad to have had such experiences. When making decisions for ourselves, there is no moral problem with trading off suffering for pleasure or meaning; it appears to be a social fact that people do not minimize suffering in their own lives.
She goes on to make note of the fact that even though acceptance of suffering is evidently a part of human decision calculus, we really don't have the right to actively inflict suffering on others so that they can later interpret it as a meaningful experience. This is an element of thought important in creating new human beings – when we have children we are effectively asking these beings who had no say about coming into existence to participate in this exchange of misery for meaning, and Perry questions whether or not we have the right to do this.
This question also comes up for me when a person is no longer possessing higher consciousness. We imbue suffering with meaning because of our higher consciousness and self-awareness but how moral is it to ask a person stripped of any sort of sentience to continue to suffer when such a personal exchange is no longer possible? Well, we tell ourselves that life is sacred and we cannot deprive anyone of life, no matter how little they experience life or how quickly they know they will be facing the end of their natural life. Life has assumed the role of an ultimate good and because we cannot inflict suffering on others we cannot help them achieve a pleasant death, even if refusing that death is itself the infliction of suffering. Worse is the use of other people's suffering for our own interpretation of meaning. We tell ourselves that terrible things happen for a reason and that if we learn a lesson, then it was all worth it in the end, and that's a very callous way to process suffering that we don't have to experience first-hand.
All of this has led us to a very sorry end. What do we do when we know suffering no longer has any experience-value for the person suffering? The answer is: not much.
*****
For close to fifteen years my mother had suffered and the last year of her life was spent in complete misery as her conditions became terminal. I can't even begin to describe what happened to her and the last six months she was alive were torture, the sort I know I simply could not have endured. She had many things going wrong with her body, all of them painful, all of them complex. But of all the things we thought would kill her, a brain hemorrhage was not on the list.
She was already in the hospital for a fall brought on by hepatic encephalopathy and suffered the hemorrhage in the middle of the night, and because the hepatic encephalopathy made her sleep heavily, the nurses didn't notice anything was wrong until she had already lost all her higher brain function. It was not until late the following morning on January 2, 2015 that a scan showed she had suffered complete death of her cerebral cortex and her cerebellum. Had the doctors detected the bleed the moment it happened there would have been nothing they could have done – her blood was unable to clot so surgery was not an option. We just had to wait for her to die on her own as the swelling in her brain reached her brain stem.
The hospital, which had no facility for hospice care, didn't bother to arrange hospice transfer immediately because they were so sure she would die quickly. They eventually put her in a room on the sixth floor and the vigil began. The doctors said my mother could feel no pain so no genuine palliative care was offered – they called what they did "comfort care" and very little of it seemed comforting. She was given anti-seizure meds, which we later learned didn't prevent seizures but rather prevented the seizure from manifesting physically and upsetting us. She also was given an anti-inflammatory drug that would help slow the swelling in her brain.
We were waiting for the swelling to reach her brain stem so she could finally die. Why did they give her anti-inflammatory drugs via IV? That inexplicable action prevented her brain stem from herniating and she could potentially have stayed in a coma for years. However, my mother had refused a feeding tube before the hemorrhage, so even though her heart kept pumping and her lungs kept breathing unassisted, eventually death would come in the form of dehydration and starvation.
And that was okay, in a perverse way, because if her cerebral cortex and her cerebellum were completely dead, as we had been told, she wouldn't need morphine. The hospital didn't really take care of her much – they unhooked her from all monitors and didn't bathe her until she had been in her coma for six days and my aunt and I told the nurses we could smell an infection in her skin. But she didn't feel any of it.
*****
