Suicide.

In what is likely to be the least surprising news of 2009, it was confirmed on Monday that my mother's friend, who died last week, had actually committed suicide.

Anyone who'd ever met her knew that the image of her own death followed her very closely - indeed, she'd tried to end her life on a couple of occasions, only to be pulled back from the brink of obliteration at the last possible moment.

The third time, though, there was no dramatic rescue act. Like the cat who had nine times to die (of course those words are not mine) finally the numbers stacked up. Nobody knows how many co-codamol she took, each one another bullet to a fragile body which had long ago taken enough punishment - but the important thing, from her perspective, is that there were enough to do the job.

It took her a fortnight to die, leaking blood, and organs failing successively like a set of dominoes. To be prepared to sacrifice oneself because there is no longer anything to live for is the ultimate resetting of consciousness - I have done all there is for me to do, and I hereby express the wish to become again my constituent atoms before nature otherwise would decree it.

Speculating wildly for a moment, though, what if that isn't it? What if she is condemned to be spat out, disappointed and shocked, once again into the world? I was reminded of this possibility - be it eternal repetition or eternal re-incarnation - as a colleague and I stayed back late at work last night.

The South African, my ex-girlfriend, was a staunch believer in re-incarnation, even devising a system by which she could estimate the age of a person's soul: nah, she's a new soul. Look at her, floating like a bubble. He on the other hand, has been here and back many times before - an endless journey.

What if it's true? It's unverifiable, but what if it's true? Every eighty years or so, springing up like a jack-in-the-box or a flower? It makes suicide - which I've always regarded as the last cry of defiance, the final blinding burst of light - even more futile than purchasing a lottery ticket.

The 14 million-to-one probability of winning the jackpot suddenly looks like a hell of a bet compared to taking one's own life - the first has almost zero chance of ever coming up, but with the second you've already been beaten before your body is even cold.

Oh, how easily the certainties by which we move from one day to the next are overturned! How simple it is to take a cherished truism and invert it! Suicide is no longer the falling of the hero, but the tossing of a loaded coin. It is the gun in which every chamber - and none of them - contains live ammunition.