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resurfaced and his mind kept returning to his plan. He told me reso- lutely, 'Igot the vial out, and loaded up the syringe with the whiskey. I sat down on the sand, staring at the needle and thought about it for awhile. I wanted to be sure if that was what I wanted to do. I didn't want to feel like I was being pressured or, for some reason, I was doing this wrong. I decided I had the place and the stuff to do it with and if I was going to do it, there would never be a better time. I was very firmly committed to going through with it." Some people have said that injecting alcohol into the vein might not be enough to kill. Others have said that it depended upon the strength ofthe alcohol, the amount injected and the body weight of the person and other variables. So this point is debatable. Phil said it never occurred to him that it would not work. He never even con- sidered that possibility. I believe the important thing is that he had made acommitment to kill himself. The method, although unusual, isnot the important issue. He had picked an isolated spot, so isolated thathis body probably wouldn't have even been discovered for a long time. The fact that there was no one around to stop him showed how serious he was about it. No, the only way he could be stopped from taking his own life would be ifsomething other than a human, physi- ween te tnlen 2 LA cal agency were to take a hand. "I put the needle in a vein in my arm ... and had my thumb on the plunger." He paused as he remembered the event. "And then I thought of my brother, my twin brother, and that's really what stopped me. I thought I had considered everything, all the possi- bilities and weighed all the pros and cons. But suddenly I saw my brother's face. It wasn't any particular thought. It was just thinking ofPaul and whether I really wanted to leave him or not. Whether I could do that to him. What would he think ofme and howwould he feel afterward? And so ... I pulled the needle out. I looked atit and Ifelt shame and disgust. I felt like I had betrayed myself somehow by even going that far.... And I threw it all, both of them, the vial and the needle, out into the ocean." Phil felt cleansed, relieved, somehow reborn. But this was not the end of that story. When he returned to his sister's apartment, he found out that another drama had been played outa few miles away on that same beach at the exact same time that he made his life or His brother, Paul, had been scuba diving and had gotten caught in a rip tide. He was being pulled under and was drowning. Then Death in a Needle 85 death decision.