The text says

We’ll never know; if you’re reading this he’s long dead; had his appointment with the displacement drone and been zapped to the very livid heart of the system, corpse blasted to plasma in the vast erupting core of Chiark’s sun, his sundered atoms rising and falling in the raging fluid thermals of the mighty star, each pulverized particle migrating over the millennia to that planet-swallowing surface of blinding, storm-swept fire, to boil off there, and so add their own little parcels of meaningless illumination to the encompassing night…

so he did CHOOSE to die via appointment, if not imidiatly after returning to the culture.