Ben Givens’s suicidal crisis

Ben Givens’s suicidal crisis grows from the collision between a physician’s knowledge of terminal illness and his inability to accept the suffering he believes lies ahead. He tries to make death a reasoned choice, but the practical preparations and private fears surrounding that choice expose how precarious his resolve is.

Diagnosis and the logic of escape

Before his diagnosis, Ben had approached medicine as a discipline of intervention. His large, capable hands had reassured patients, and he had struggled against the failures of their hearts as though skill and effort might hold death at bay. He had also learned to distance himself from the deaths he could not prevent, treating their ultimate meaning as beyond his control. His own incurable cancer removes that professional distance: he must confront the limits he once encountered in other people’s lives as the limits of his own.

The cancer has spread from his colon to nearby lymph nodes and his liver. At seventy-three, Ben understands the prognosis through both medical experience and personal dread. He imagines a decline marked by severe pain, increasing weakness, and dependence on care, ending in a nursing home. He believes that his doctor, Bill Ward, would eventually relieve his suffering with morphine, but only after the illness had taken its course. To Ben, that prospect makes death itself seem less frightening than the process of dying.

He rejects the consolation that a gradual death might sharpen attention to love, nature, or the meaning of ordinary life. Such ideas, he thinks, are easier to offer before a person has encountered the worst forms of pain. His medical work has shown him that suffering can overwhelm arguments about courage or spiritual composure; he does not consider the wish to avoid it cowardly. Although he believes that something holy leaves the body at death, that belief does not reassure him about the ordeal he expects beforehand.

Ben therefore treats suicide as a calculated escape from a future he sees as inevitable. He attempts to assess whether he can carry out his plan and experiences fear when he recognizes that it is possible. The episode does not settle his decision: it reveals the distance between his abstract conviction that ending his life is rational and the terror of making that conviction real. He sets the gun aside and continues preparing for a hunting trip, outwardly assembling the appearance of an ordinary journey while keeping his intention private.

The concealed plan and its human costs

Ben’s preparations gave the journey the shape of a six-day hunting trip, but he had already decided that its apparent purpose would conceal his death. He planned to release the dogs in the sage country and make his death appear accidental. He expected Bill Ward might suspect what had happened, but believed the doctor would keep his cancer and suspicions confidential unless a coroner’s inquest or an insurance inquiry required otherwise. The plan depended not only on Ben’s secrecy but on the likelihood that others would accept the story of a solitary hunter’s death.

The plan also threatened a promise Ben had kept with Rachel Givens. On a train in Italy, they had imagined their ashes nourishing a red rose and a white one, planted together to grow and intertwine. They had later treated the idea with amused affection without abandoning it; Ben had preserved Rachel’s ashes in the hope that the promise might still be fulfilled. He now recognized that dying alone in the sage country could make that shared future impossible. He also worried about leaving Rex and Tristan without him, despite hoping they might find another hunter, and saw that the quail he meant to eat as his final meal would sustain nothing beyond the creatures that fed on his remains. These anticipated consequences made the plan harder to separate from the lives and attachments it would cut short.

The plan gives way to attachment

The hunting trip does not deliver the meaning Ben had assigned to it. After taking a chukar, he holds the bird and recognizes the mismatch between the death he has arranged and the life he has lived. A solitary end in the dry sage country, after killing small birds, seems to him an expression of stoic machismo rather than a fitting conclusion. Hunting and the landscape cannot make the act feel right; suicide, too, conflicts with his identity as a doctor, husband, and father. The recognition does not erase his illness or fear, but it unsettles the reasoning that had made his plan seem orderly and sufficient.

Later, traveling with Bea Harden, Ben begins recounting how he reached this point. He tells the story in sequence, starting with Rachel Givens’s death and continuing through the losses and hardships of his journey: his shotgun is gone, Rex has been wounded, his eye is blackened, and he has been living without a settled home. Speaking openly to a stranger feels like a relief. When Bea names suicide as something she cannot imagine, Ben explains that he did not want to put his family through the months of illness he expected to endure. His explanation makes clear that the plan had been framed not only as escape from suffering but as a way to spare those closest to him.

When Bea asks what changed his mind, Ben attributes his failure to carry out the plan partly to cowardice and says he could not do it. Bea suggests that his inability may mean he did not truly want to die; Ben does not resolve the point, answering only with a shrug. His decision to go home remains tied to the future he had feared forfeiting: the promise that Rachel’s ashes and his own might nourish red and white roses together. He accepts that returning home is partly for that reason, allowing attachment and an unfinished promise to stand beside fear, rather than claiming that his fear of illness has disappeared.

Fear and the limits of composure

The crisis persists even when Ben can imagine death with calm detachment. He sometimes regards death as a sleep and the problem as the pain and terror of dying, reasoning that suicide could remove that ordeal. Yet this argument offers no lasting shelter: his melancholy includes the fear that he will regret his choice, and he feels already estranged from the living world. He describes aging not as a steady arrival at wisdom but as movement between denial and forgetfulness, fear and brief calm; work, love, and ordinary brightness can distract him, but cannot settle the question he keeps turning over.

Pain relief likewise does not resolve the underlying uncertainty. At a motel, his side aching and sleep out of reach, Ben uses marijuana cigarettes given to him by a drifter, despite remembering that the previous night had left his thoughts confused. The drug again unsettles his judgment, and he cannot tell whether his sense of his condition reflects illness or intoxication. Later, in the fruit pickers’ hut, he feels death approaching but recognizes that the marijuana stands between him and reliable knowledge of his state. The carabiner and piton against his chest, equipment made to secure a climber to rock, prompt him to contrast his own awareness of decline with the younger travelers’ romantic view of danger. The crisis thus remains more than a settled plan: it is a recurring struggle to find a bearable understanding of mortality, punctuated by attempts at relief that cannot supply certainty.