This is a photograph of my sister Susan Dollar several years before her suicide. She is standing in a window of a Creole house along Cane River in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. I had flown home to Natchitoches, LA, to visit my mother and her sister who was living with my mother, and Susan invited me and my camera to ride with her along Cane River. It was on this drive that we talked about her interest in dying. Life wasn’t to her liking and she was tired of pretending it was her thing, and I pointed out to her that a lot of us get to that point of having had enough. Susan was a brilliant person, PhD brilliant, with two of them, and was quite capable of sizing up a situation, knowing what was what, and what was called for in response and making the choice that was hers to make. I told her if she was going to take her own life, to do it by starving herself to death because that way, if she changed her mind, she could reverse her course and live on.
It was about 12 years after this conversation that Susan drew up a Living Will, entered Hospice, quit eating and drinking, said her good-bye’s and died about two weeks later. That was four and a half years ago, 12/20/2021. She relieved herself of the burden that was her life, and I honor her choice, respect her wishes, and wish her well in light of Albert Einstein’s formula, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed or converted.” Susan’s life energy has been transformed and/or converted, and I consider her to be still with us on her terms. May it be so!
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 