My mother, I said, called the Samaritans once and asked whether research had been done on thwarted suicides to find out whether they had spent the time after the incident happily. What did they say? They said they didn’t know. He grinned. I said Sibylla said He said Who? I said My mother. She said they should recruit people like Oscar Wilde, only there isn’t anyone like Oscar Wilde. If there were enough people like Oscar Wilde so that you could staff Samaritans with them, no one would want to commit suicide anyway—they would joke themselves out of a job. You could call and someone would say Do
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