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Jennifer Michael Hecht writes this,

We are indebted to one another, and the debt is a kind of faith, a beautiful, difficult,

strange faith. We believe each other into being. That's the message this philosopher poet and

historian puts at the center of her unusual writing about suicide. She's traced how Western

civilization has at times demonized those who died by suicide, at times celebrated it as a moral

freedom. She has struggled with suicidal places in her life and lost friends to it, and she

proposes a new cultural understanding based not on morality or on rights, but on our essential

need for each other. Your staying alive means so much more than you really know or that anyone

is aware of at this moment, but we're in it together in this profound way and you can take some

strength from that. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on Being. I spoke with Jennifer Michael Hecht in

2014 after she published Stay, a history of suicide and the philosophies against it. And I also

interviewed her once before in the early years of this show about her glowing work on the forgotten

history of doubt as a graceful life philosophy. I can't remember if I asked you this when I

talked to you before. This has just become a stock question for me. I ask everybody this question

to begin, which is, was there a spiritual or religious background to your childhood?

Yes, there was. My father was a Jewish atheist physicist still is. That's a great tradition.

That's a great language. It really is.

Yes. My mom believed in Judaism and the Jewish God and she was in charge of our spirituality

...