Walker Percy and Suicide (Critical Essay)

IT HAS NOW COME TO PASS in American secular culture that the choice to end one's own life--suicide--is tacitly accepted as an inalienable right of every person. Although the American Medical Association, the American College of Physicians, and the American Nurses Association continue officially to oppose physician-assisted suicide, there exists a widespread sentiment in favor of individuals' absolute right to determine their own end. This attitude, of course, contravenes both the Hippocratic Oath and the centuries-old proscription against suicide in Judeo-Christian societies. Nevertheless, in the popular secular view, the choice of suicide is taken to be an act which is uniquely and absolutely "mine." The southern novelist and philosophical essayist Walker Percy (1916-1990) was no stranger to suicide. His family legacy included a long line of ancestors who had taken their own lives, including Percy's grandfather John Walker Percy in 1917, and his father Leroy Pratt Percy in 1929. In his later years Percy himself expressed amazement and some pride in having "outlived" almost all of his male ancestors, though he did suffer from an inherited disposition toward melancholy. (1) A key factor in Percy's personal rejection of suicide was his Roman Catholic faith. When he was suffering from terminal cancer, he expressed his belief in a letter to his closest friend, novelist Shelby Foote. "Dying, if that's what it comes to, is no big thing since I'm ready for it, and prepared for it by the Catholic faith which I believe.... [I]n this age of unbelief I am astounded at how few people facing certain indignity in chronic illness make an end to it. Few if any. I am not permitted to." (2)