My father read Charles Dickens 's A TALE OF TWO CITIES to me and my brothers when we were children, and at the very end, when Sydney Carton dies in Charles Darney' s place, my father wept. My father was not a weeper. He was not someone whose emotions bubbled over in every emotionally meaningful moment. He didn't cry in sad movies. He didn't cry when his children left for college. Maybe he got stealthily misty-eyed from time to time, but not so anyone other than maybe my mother would notice. In order to cry, he needed his children on the sofa listening, and he needed one of history's most sentimental novelists. Take away either of those two factors and no one would ever have seen his tears. That's coupling. If suicide is coupled, then it isn't simply the act of depressed people. It's the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.