The following brief explanation was contained in the booklet produced to accompany a Retrospective of Lenkiewicz's work in 1997.

"Everywhere there were people living out their lives using aspects of suicide against themselves. They did not even have the authenticity of the final act to speak for them. Suicide is, in short, the one continuous, everyday, ever-persistent problem of living. It is a question of degree. I' seen the all in varying stages of development and despair. the failed lawyer, the cynical doctor, the depressed housewife, the angry teenager... all of mankind engaged in the massive conspiracy against their own lives that is their daily activity. The meaning of suicide, the true meaning, had yet to be defined, had yet to be created in the broad dimensions it deserved." Daniel Stern.

The room on 'Death' in Lenkiewicz's Library has a large section devoted to the subject of Suicide. He had studied this material for some time, and subscribed more or less entirely to views like those of Daniel Stern. Lenkiewicz found the whole issue the most compelling of subjects. Viewing life as a tragedy on the grand scale, and well aware that people can suffer, he explored this theme with the intention that he might re-explore it every ten years or so. Suicide raises such harrowing ironies both for the perpetrator as well as the witness, that even the casual observer is haunted to the quick by it.

Some social activities immensely popular in a wide range of cultures, eg. marriage and the family are viewed by Lenkiewicz as suicide techniques. He feels strongly about this and a number of the images in this project relate to the misery people inflict upon each other in short or long term relationships. Depression locks its sufferer into a cage through which one can neither see out of nor in to. It is, in a sense, the psychic equivalent of black holes in space. Great pain leads to silence. Except for suicide, silence is the most extreme form of revolt. As Kierkegaard has observed, whether one does or does not think about despair one musters:

". . . everything to re-explain and explain away entrance and exit, simply lost in the interval between the birth-cry... and the death struggle."

What interested Lenkiewicz in this project was the notion that suicide was murder through mistaken identity; that the suicide may not be motivated towards his personal extinction but rather, he wishes to annihilate the world. Psychology has a great deal to say about this; but how interesting it is that we live so irrationally and insist that suicide cannot be rational. The complex issue of euthanasia will raise its head again and again until it is no longer unlawful. When that day comes, suicide as a whole will become far more acceptable.