or his second attempt, my father selected a set of kitchen knives and, when he got to the garage, a hammer from his toolbox. Shortly after my mother found him, the emergency crew rushed him to the hospital and the neighbors and the parish priest arrived to offer what services they could. Then, amidst the frenzied activity in the Intensive Care Unit, my father struggled to explain the presence of the hammer. At a loss for words, he could only say that he had felt at the time that it "might have been of some use." There is a dark logic to such thoughts, perhaps, one which trades in the various means and mechanisms of self-annihilation, and it is the relative inaccessibility of this logic which interests me here. If the decision to end one's life is the most important decision of one's life, then how do we gain access to the line of thinking, the chain of events, the preliminary acts and feelings that lead to such a conclusion? How are we to understand a hermeneutic system that courts its own destruction? Though shocking, experiences like this are not entirely unfamiliar, partly because of the media's increased ability to provide us with a glimpse of such personal tragedies as they unfold: we watch enthralled as the Koresh compound burns to the ground; we huddle around our sets as the white Bronco makes its slow drive down the freeway; we wait for updates as Dr. Kevorkian develops new strategies for disposing of the bodies of his patients. That the media feast on the misfortunes of others is a point we in the academy never seem to tire of making. Indeed, I was recently on a panel where one of my fellow presenters successfully entertained the packed room with his exposition of how the popular television show Rescue 911 satisfies its viewers' need to witness disasters week after week. Although there was little in the