I’ve brought up the examples of Zeno, Cato, and Seneca, with all the due historical caveats, because they illustrate five different reasons for walking through the open door. Zeno did so because he was in increasingly unbearable pain, and he also felt that he had become useless to society—not very different from the case of Betsy Davis. Cato walked through the open door for principled reasons in defense of a political cause. Seneca did so as a matter of personal dignity and to safeguard the people he was leaving behind. (To this list one can add the attempted suicide of James Stockdale.)
