Click here to read Eva Holland’s excellent essay on the lives and intentional deaths of Alaskan artists Eric and Pam Bealer (note that the story is also available as a professionally-read audio-essay):
Below their declaration was a passage attributed to Richard Bach, which said: “Why, instead of suffering and fighting it, don’t people reach a time when they decide, ‘Done! We’ve finished everything we came to do. There are no mountains we haven’t pretty well climbed, nothing unlearned we wanted to learn, we’ve lived a nice life.’ And then they just sit themselves down under a tree or a star, lift themselves out of their bodies, and never come back?”
Underneath the poem was one more note from the Bealers: “Why indeed?”