Parenting & Family Quote by Alex Campbell

A line like this doesn’t argue for suicide so much as it tries to domesticate it. By framing death as a “change of residence,” Campbell borrows the language of housing and bureaucracy to sand down the terror and moral charge of self-killing. It’s politically canny in a bleak way: the metaphor makes an irreversible act sound like a routine transfer, a paperwork-friendly relocation to an address where grief has already moved in.

The emotional engine is the second clause: “where my wife and baby are.” Whatever policy debate or public controversy might surround a politician, this pivots to the most disarming credential in modern public life: intimate loss. The subtext is a demand for moral exemption. If the family has already died, the speaker implies, then the usual social contract collapses; judgment becomes indecent, and intervention starts to look like cruelty.

It also reveals how public figures manage vulnerability as rhetoric. The sentence is built to pre-empt critique by making the listener imagine the vacant spaces at a kitchen table. That’s not manipulation in a cartoonish sense; it’s survival language repurposed as persuasion. The danger is that the “residence” metaphor smuggles in certainty about reunion, an afterlife made administratively obvious. In political speech, certainty is power. Here, it’s also a kind of anesthesia: faith or fantasy as a way to outvote despair.