It was suicide. Others killed themselves with poison or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes and hours.

Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.

On 11 November 1997, Veronika decided that the moment to kill herself had — at last! — arrived.

Everybody had a story as to why she tried to kill herself. Mrs. Buell said the parents were to blame. "That girl didn't want to die," she told us. "She just wanted out of that house." Mrs. Scheer added, "she wanted out of that decorating scheme."

Nothing would stop her from doing something, even if it killed her. Doing something for absolutely no reason, perhaps, but still doing something, such is what life demands from human beings. Faint whiffs of hope would stir up illusions she had thought quite dead. So this is what helps, she told herself as she walked. So this is why suicide cannot be the normal culmination of a human life. I am going to try to do something. I'm going to try to believe that I can still make myself useful. She looked at the sky, the trees, the flowers, the people, as if she were seeing them for the first time. She opened her handbag and put money in the hands of beggars; confronted with a skeletal mother and her four starving, crying babies, she took stock of her own sufferings and found them acceptable. (chapter 12)

As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck. So that everything done to her might be done, as it were, far away.

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde — dyed by her own hand.

A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide.

She was as one who, in madness, was resolute to throw herself from a precipice, but to whom some remnant of sanity remained which forced her to seek those who would save her from herself.

She committed suicide...
"Why?"
"She often told me, she was frightened of getting old."

So she drank to the point of suicide, because a life which not only lacked love, but couldn't even catch a little indifference, like a net to contain air, was intolerable; because she hadn't a single god, or goddamn thing to do, or anything she could look back on as done—completed or accomplished—only one pleasureless screw which produced an ingrate and a monster upon whom she nevertheless pinned her hopes with exactly the same chance for success as anyone would who tried to drive a nail into a passing cloud—a son to whom she threw her soul at considerable peril, like a stone in a paper boat.

She believed herself to be completely normal. Two very simple reasons lay behind her decision to die, and she was sure that, were she to leave a note explaining, many people would agree with her.
The first reason: everything in her life was the same and, once her youth was gone, it would be downhill all the way, with old age beginning to leave irreversible marks, the onset of illness, the departure of friends. She would gain nothing by continuing to live; indeed, the likelihood of suffering only increased. The second reason was more philosophical: Veronika read the newspapers, watched TV, and she was aware of what was going on in the world. Everything was wrong, and she had no way of putting things right — that gave her a sense of complete powerlessness.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

What really happened to her? How did she die?