FRANCIS AZNARAN
“The final note will be a D natural.”
I found it fascinating that the much-loved Sinatra song, ‘My Way’, commonly used at funerals, has by association developed a highly dubious reputation as a soundtrack to self-murder. Victims’ preferences for it perhaps derive from the understandable desire to, with their final act, assert that they have ‘lived a life that’s full [and] travelled each and every highway’, despite what they are about to do; this may assuage internal anxieties concerning the value of their experience of life.The song’s largely optimistic tone may also reflect the belief, delusional or not, that suicide is the best possible option for the individual – preferable, perhaps, to living perpetually in disappointment or pain.
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