Don’t worry; even though I have already composed my own epitaphs, and even though I have been officially declared blue (in fact, I’ve been certified… can I put that on my resume under “qualifications?”), this isn’t my final magnum opus by a long shot.

Besides, according to my beloved Time/Life Medical Encyclopaedia (I’m back in South Africa, so I have to spell it in proper English now), killing oneself isn’t all that easy. Also sounds like way too much work for the likes of me. Hanging oneself or flinging oneself off a skyscraper requires movement. And not just any kind of movement (which, as you all know, is quite a stretch for me), but getting up there requires VERTICAL movement. Way too exhausting a prospect.

And then there are all those methods: Pills, noose, electrical socket, gas, poison, knife, razor blade, gun, bath. It’s a bewildering array of choices for someone as naturally indecisive as I am. By the time I’d make up my mind and get around to it, I’d be close to the age for natural death anyway. Can you imagine opening the obituaries and reading: Redsaid. Tragically taken from this life by suicide. Age 98. Her suicide note, scribbled in shaky hand, was incomplete (just like so many stories on her blog). What was she thinking, writing "to be continued" at the end of her suicide note?

So no. I don’t think I’ve been designed for suicide. I mean, I gag when I have to swallow three headache pills. So I’d probably get it all wrong and choke when what I was really trying to do was overdose.

I can’t even slice bread, so I should probably just forget about getting a proper grip on a sharp object to slit my own wrists. And I couldn’t possibly drown myself a la Ophelia, because my round body is far too buoyant and so I’ll just keep on bobbing back to the surface.

As for gas (oooh, how poetic!), let me tell you a little story:

When I was in high school (a.k.a. Phase One of my Female Angst), I took a liking to the dark poetic stylings of Sylvia Plath. I obsessively devoured all her work, memorising every poem (from Ariel to The Mirror), I even read her only novel (The Bell Jar) over and over, and when I was finished, I moved on to the biographies about her. Which is how I discovered that she had committed suicide by sticking her head in the oven.

It sounded so romantic and awful and dramatic to my young, twisted-yet-impressionable mind, because I could not fathom how she had brought herself to do it.

I tried it. One afternoon when I was home alone, I turned on our oven. And I just couldn’t do it.

It took me the longest time before I figured out that Sylvia’s suicide oven had worked with GAS, and not, like all the ovens of my youth, with electricity.

So for years and years I had gone through life mistakenly believing that she had actually broiled herself to death…

I guess I should rather just die than kill myself.