in melbourne three weeks ago a middle-aged man hanged himself in the garage and was seen by a passerby who called emergency services. his heart had stopped by the time paramedics arrived, but they were able to resuscitate him. he is now in a hospital, alive, yes, and brain-damaged from the oxygen loss, in pain, full of tubes, sobbing to himself all day in his hospital bed, frustrated. he is unmarried and no family comes to see him or is able to care for him. (two young children come into the picture somewhere, but we are not sure how.) ought he have been resuscitated, we ask ourselves as the weeks go by, and all that is certain is the terrible condition he is now in, has found himself in, and will be for the rest of his life. because he most certainly would have succeeded in his attempt; his heart had stopped when he was found. and if he is still able to ask, why the hell did you save me i didn't ask to be, what do you say to him? whether it would have been better for him to have lived in the first instance, by the time they cut him down it would have been better if they hadn't. another man, in singapore, is ninety years old and lives in a nursing home. he has no family; the only person who visits him, once a week, is an eighty-year-old woman with whom he had some arrangement of a romantic or domestic nature. one weekend she didn't come because she had died. the old man broke down badly and later tried to smother himself with a towel but was too weak to succeed in even this. he was sent to imh for observation, where he would not respond to the psychiatrist and would only lie in bed and cry. what do you say to him that can make any difference?