SCD 2040

TW/CW: Suicidal ideation

The car jerks to a halt. I lurch forward as the cabbie curses dramatically. “Christ, it’s like they want to die sometimes…”

Through the droplet-beaded window, a helmetless hipster awkwardly hauls his bike onto the sidewalk. He waves apologetically, looking at his phone, unphased by the drenched jeans clung to his legs and the cabbie’s glowering eye-daggers.

“Right here is good.”

“Alright, $12.75.”

I fish in my pocket for the single $20 I got from the bank earlier when draining my account. “Keep the change.” The door to my past slams behind me before he can think of wishing me a good day.

“You too, hey?” The hipster smirks at me, tossing his phone over his shoulder into a bush.

Summoning the biggest smile I can muster, I grunt in acknowledgement and trudge towards the small apartment block on the corner. Without looking back, a wave of cobwebs down my neck gives me the feeling he’s following me.

Creeping with lush ivy posed against a red brick facade, the building looks like all the others on the street — the kind that reeks of Nag Champa, dirty bongs and fuckboys. The only thing setting it apart is a small white sign obscured by a swarm of people.

I pull my hood up and cross the street. Invisibility has become my greatest strength. The crowd stands quietly, shouting through words scribbled on cardboard.

Your family loves you.

Choose life! Your mom did

Death is not a human right.

Life is a gift! Don’t throw It away.

“You’d think they’d have some better material.” The hipster is smoking a cigarette and leaning against a lamp-post like a cracked up James Dean. “Maybe Avoid mortal sin! Quitters never win, winners never quit! Jesus loves you, but he’s not IN love with you.”

I roll my eyes, sizing him up in my periphery. I can’t place his age, but judging from his furrowed expression and tortured, piercing green eyes, I decide he’s somewhere between a strung-out 27 and hot 48.

“Don’t worry about those assholes, they’re not legally allowed to talk to you. Besides, they should probably be the ones in there anyway.” He picks up his bike with a wink and zips off down the alley, stopping after several yards to pull a cast-iron pan out of a box.

“Say hi to Linda!” He calls back, tossing his dumpster booty in a milk crate zip-tied to where a child would sit, and pedals off on his aimless steed.

The bell on the door chirps like a bird as it opens and I unwittingly look up from the tiled floor. Save for an immaculate desk in front of me, the bright, botanically dense sitting room is empty and smells of eucalyptus, lavender and the faintest hint of a fart.

A plump, middle-aged woman sits upright behind the desk, looking at me with a rehearsed smile glued to her face, waiting to catch my eye. Annoyed, I examine the frustratingly clean desk as I approach, avoiding her needy gaze. She is wearing a knitted polyester cardigan in a nauseating pink and I cringe impulsively, imagining my cracked winter fingers snagging to it like velcro. A pair of reading glasses hangs from a chain around her neck, scraping mutedly against her name tag which reads, “Linda.”

“Hi,” I say, as instructed.

“Hi there, how can I help you?”

I freeze. Though I ruminate endlessly on the outcome, this isn’t a moment I’ve anticipated and the formalities are new to me. I start with the simplest thing I can within her administrative abilities.

“I want to die.” The beast inside me, an old friend, shoots a thwarting arm up from my gut, grasping my throat as I spit out our tacit truth, choking on the final word.

“Well, you’re in the right place.” Linda says stoically. I blink at her and look around the empty room. The only other entrance is a frosted glass fire door, leading to where I assume I will be dying. “If you don’t mind filling out these intake forms, we’ll be happy to help. Do you have life insurance?”

The beast erupts in an aggressively audible snort, escaping my body in the form of laughter which, for a blissful moment, evaporates the imperious fog around me. I slide my insurance card across the table as she looks at me with mild amusement, handing me a clipboard with an aloofness that leaves me with an odd sense of ease. I take the stack of forms as Linda gestures to the waiting room. “Would you like something to drink?”

“A hard caesar,” I say dryly, waiting for a reaction. Nothing. “Uh, water please.”

“I’ll be right back.” Linda disappears through the death door. I curl up on a beanbag and look down at the first page on the stack.

Welcome to the Centre for Self-Chosen Death (CSCD) Life-Ending Care.

As a pro-choice organization, we are here to provide a safe, open space for you to prepare for your Self-Chosen Death (SCD). We are committed to a harm-reduction approach to Life-Ending Care and over the following weeks, we will be here to support you with compassion as you navigate this transition.

“It’s a dark world out there, there is no shame in wanting to leave.”

-Sharina Schmidt (Co-Founder)

Our History

Following a national public outcry in response to the Suicide Pandemic of 2032, a bipartisan bill was passed by the Government of Canada in March 2036, recognizing the right to a Self-Chosen Death, including the ability for facilities to provide compassionate life-ending care equally to all citizens. In 2038, CSCD was founded and we are proud to be the first SCD Centre of its kind in Canada.

The “Kill Bill,” as it has been affectionately nicknamed by pro-lifers, had been a long time coming. The world was pretty sapped from pandemics, race wars, and environmental, political, and economic collapse. People were consistently offing themselves — not always successfully — and the system couldn’t keep up. While it would have been easy to jump off the band-wagon, I wasn’t much for fads and took strange enjoyment in binging on the headlines.

I remember the day the Kill Bill was passed. The beast I’d been hosting for 20 years roared inside me, the faintest scent of freedom plunging it into a manic frenzy of twisted relief and exhausted excitement. He’d just shown up one day to feed on my soul and somehow managed to lock himself in. Terrified, confused, and trapped, he flailed around like a bull in a china shop, slowly crumbling each calculated structure of human functionality. The shrinks, the drugs, the mindfulness, the sex, the gin, the exercise, the diets, all laughable opponents to the undefeated boss of my brain. I’d long since given up on the idea of functionality, having submitted myself to the daily goal of waking up and going to sleep alive without pissing him off too much.

The key to his freedom, if it even existed, was long lost. Once we both realized he wasn’t going anywhere, we started to get familiar. I’d surrender to his hunger for darkness and solitude; an involuntarily captor soothing their resentful hostage. We’d spend months together, our mutual Stockholm Syndrome creating an invisible codependency. Sometimes I would mourn, with the faintest recollection, a person who got excited for Christmas and woke up in the morning without wanting to vomit; someone who felt hope, comfort, and joy; someone who hadn’t sabotaged every good thing they’d ever had; someone who wanted to try. But we were one now, a spectre lurking behind the facade of someone who lived in this body.

When the Kill Bill passed, the irony of my new zest for life didn’t escape me. I felt seen for the first time since he’d moved in. My pain was real — it was okay to feel it, and hate it, and be fucking sick of it. We wanted out, and now there was a way. I began our methodical escape, finding freedom in quitting my job, selling my things, and the overall deconstruction of life’s absurdities, to facilitate the final step: the opiate-induced key to the cage of this agonizing life.

What is Compassionate Life-Ending Care?

Everyone’s pain is uniquely theirs — we are not here to judge, but to support you as you say your goodbyes and prepare yourself to move on from this world with agency.

This process guides you through your pain and choice to end your life, providing a safe space for reflection, processing and sharing with staff, peers, and loved ones.

When you are ready, should you want to continue to the final stage, you will meet with our on-site physician who will prescribe you a lethal dose of ingestible fentanyl.

The door-bird chirps again as a fresh breeze and smell of stale cigarettes overtakes the fart. The hipster plunks himself silently in a hammock as Linda reappears through the death door with a glass of water and a can of tomato juice.

“It’s the closest I could do to a caesar,” she winks as she walks back to her desk.

Her morbidly Lynchian attempt at hospitality feels uncomfortably familial. “Thanks,” I mumble, forcing my lips up at the edges into the shape of a smile.

I can’t help but feel like a defeated Dale Cooper, bleeding out on the floor as a senile bellman looms over me, reminding me to drink my milk before it gets cold. I glare at the tomato juice with mild amusement, wondering if I should pretend to drink it or just leave it there.

“Psst,” a hand waves in my periphery. I glance over. “Here, this should help.” The unmistakable blue glimmer of Bombay Sapphire flings across the room and lands on my beanbag.

I look over at Linda who is busy organizing daisy-tipped pens in a flower pot. I crack the can, take a nauseating gulp and discreetly top it off with the gin, sliding it back across the floor. I take a sip of my gutter-punk Bloody Mary which is not nearly strong enough to defend itself against the clenched fist in my stomach.

“So why do you want to die?” the hipster asks, the question protruding from its inflection like a bad voice-over. If I didn’t speak English, I may have guessed he was asking my name or what I had for breakfast.

“Um, what?” No one has ever asked me this before and I am speechless at the notion of explaining myself. It’s not a want, it’s a state of barely-being. A tunnel with no light at the end.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to assume, but you are in a death clinic. I assume you have a reason for being here.”

“Well, why do you want to die?”

“I don’t… yet. Not anymore, anyway.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Oh, I work here. It’s my day off.”

“Sounds like a fun place to hang out.”

“Speak for yourself,” he chuckles.

I go back to my forms: the typical personal and medical details. Easy. My diagnoses have stacked up over the years, and I can recite them in my sleep.

Proof of Permission.

I pull out the folded up form crumpled in the bottom of my bag, perforated from being opened and refolded over the months. My old shrink, who probably loathed me, signed off on it one day in surrender to my incessant begging and it hasn’t left my side since.

Then comes the question:

Why do you want to die?

I take a deep breath and look around the room, searching for some descriptive words for the unique sensation of the beast scraping my guts with serrated claws. Everything hurts all the time.

Do I have to give a reason? Maybe not. I look over at the hipster who is examining a pothos plant running along the windowsill. “Aren’t these guys awesome?” he exclaims pensively, as if he knows I’m watching him. “Did you know that every one of these little bumps is a node that can grow roots and has the potential to be its own plant?

“When they start to get too crowded, they’ll trail off and go in another direction like that.” He points to an elbow in the vine where a stem has emerged, new leaves jostling for light in the shadow of more established growth.

“Just cut it off, put it in some water in the sun, and leave it alone. Pretty soon, roots will start to grow. It takes them a bit to settle into new soil, but eventually they perk right up and spread like crazy.”

His piercing gaze meets my own. “People are kind of like that too, don’t you think? Sometimes we just need a fresh start to help us grow.” His eyes twinkle like emeralds, mocking me with an elfish shrewdness.

He feels familiar, as if we’ve met many times. His face is a million faces blended into one and his smile is almost maternal. I wonder what he does here. Is he a nurse or a doctor? Maybe he’s the janitor or the guy who makes the fentanyl milkshakes. Maybe he’s the one who comes in and holds me at night. Is that a thing here? Why do I wish that was a thing?

I suddenly can’t breathe. Something swells up in my head like a balloon, forcing tears from my eyes. I stare blankly at the question, drops falling onto the paper with every blink, and slowly sink back into the beanbag.

The pen hits the forgotten clipboard and I sit there for a minute or an hour, staring out the window at a crow chasing a seagull around a tree. The tree looks like a ballerina with her hands on her hips. I wish I could be like that, poised and grounded, unshakable but always growing. I feel more like the seagull.

Something gently touches my leg. Shiny green leaves sprouting from a gnarled, brown pedicel. The crooked shoot is scabbed over at the end, hinting at the remnants of a vine long-gone, its phantom limb clung on through half-dried tendrils of fibre.

The freshly cut end of the stem reveals the pale green of life, oozing with a protective film. It smells like the forest floor. The sweet aroma of fresh rain with the piney wisdom of old-growth cedar. I examine its fresh, thirsty wound, prepared equally for death or new life.

The chirp of a bird startles me back to the present. “Hey.” The hammock is empty. “The sun just came out. Wanna get out of here?”