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| Arthur Koestler (1905 -1983) |
To whom it may concern.
The purpose of this note is to make it unmistakably clear that I
intend to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs without the knowledge
or aid of any other person. The drugs have been legally obtained and hoarded
over a considerable period.
Trying to commit suicide is a gamble the outcome of which will be
known to the gambler only if the attempt fails, but not if it succeeds. Should
this attempt fail and I survive it in a physically or mentally impaired state,
in which I can no longer control what is done to me, or communicate my wishes,
I hereby request that I be allowed to die in my own home and not be
resuscitated or kept alive by artificial means. I further request that my wife,
or a physician, or any friend present, should invoke habeas corpus against any attempt to remove me
forcibly from my house to hospital.
My reasons for deciding to put an end to my life are simple and compelling: Parkinson's Disease and the slow-killing variety of leukaemia (CCI). I kept the latter a secret even from intimate friends to save them distress. After a more or less steady physical decline over the last years, the process has now reached an acute state with added complications which make it advisable to seek self-deliverance now, before I become incapable of making the necessary arrangements.
I wish my friends to know that I am leaving their company in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a de-personalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This 'oceanic feeling' has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this.
What makes it nevertheless hard to take
this final step is the reflection of the pain it is bound to inflict on my
surviving friends, above all my wife Cynthia. It is to her that I owe the
relative peace and happiness that I enjoyed in the last period of my life – and
never before.
Arthur Koestler
