A Collection of Suicide Notes

The coroner has one of the best collections of suicide notes I have ever seen. Of course, he has an in. That’s often what separates the true collector from the gifted hobbyist. My own assemblage is eclectic, with a few documents of historical interest and a couple pieces that I would call real gems from an artistic point of view. But all in all my collection is wanting. I don’t have the access.

You shift your legs, uncrossing them, crossing them the other way, and I can see that my revelation is making you uncomfortable. Maybe I’m kidding, or maybe the darkroom fumes have gone to my head and left me dizzy. That’s happened before. Like the Sunday when I’d been developing photographs all afternoon and I came out finally and poured milk on your sister’s head because I thought her hair was on fire. That, I’ll admit, was a legitimate hallucination. This time I’m telling the truth.

The coroner says that it’s not always easy to get his hands on the suicide notes. They are, after all, evidence, although perhaps not evidence in the strictest legal sense; no real law has been broken. The notes are the unofficial certification that the deceased did in fact kill themselves and were not, as the coroner is always careful to establish, victims of foul play. So as you can see there is nothing truly illegal about our little avocation. It’s a bit voyeuristic, morbid even, but essentially harmless. No need to look alarmed; I assure you there is nothing of a sexually deviant nature to this hobby, speaking for myself in any case. I can’t honestly say what goes on in coroner’s mind.

While my collection pales beside the coroner’s, I have over two hundred and fifty original suicide notes, and another five hundred-odd if you count certified photocopies. The very youngest writer was a boy of eleven. I bought his from a serious collector from Seattle, who’d found it pressed between the pages in an antique bible. The note is very old and simply reads: “I’m sorry I am not a better son. I only want you to be proud of me.” It is addressed to no one, so we can only speculate, and signed simply “Owen.” (A suicidal eleven-year-old is not as unusual as you might think; the coroner says he often sees children as young as three and four who have taken their own lives, although, out of compassion, he lists these deaths as accidental.) The oldest writer in my collection is a man named Dolby, who, at the age of one hundred, shot himself in the head. This letter is definitely authentic, I bought it off the man’s grandson, although rather rambling and disoriented.

What would your sister say? It’s not as if she’s without her own little peculiarities, is it? Everybody has secrets and collections. You yourself have your preferences, which I have been very tolerant of, and I don’t think I need to remind you of the way you used to collect baby things until you gave it up. And your sister — your sister used to boast, “I collected lovers like holiday spoons.” We’ve both seen her in action at the supermarket. Pretending there’s something wrong with her cart, or that she can’t reach the oyster sauce on the top shelf (“Could I just ask you to reach that down for me thanks I don’t know why they make these shelves so high a woman’s got to be some kind of amazon or basketball player to get things down it’s so hard to go shopping when you’re just cooking for one”), or, when all else failed, as it usually did, offering the delivery boy a little something extra for carrying her bags. It’s in our blood; we evolved from hunters and gatherers, and hunters and gatherers we continue to be. So don’t give me that what-would-my-sister-say look, please.

Your sister once said something along the lines of, “I’m the type of person who remembers the lovers I almost had better than the lovers I did have.” Maybe you weren’t there, but I remember like yesterday. We were in Niagara Falls, the time before we were married that we went to the Falls, before I really knew you, in the days when I contemplated your sister. You remember. Your sister had just left the Spanish man, Carlos, in Montreal. Your sister had black hair then; this was several months before she became a natural blond. My cousin had the red Trans Am with the sun roof. He drove for a day and a half straight through by eating those little caffeine pills you’d taken from your father’s shaving kit. The four of us went to Niagara Falls to forget. You had gone to the wax museum with my cousin, and your sister and I were left on a beach together with nothing but our best moves. We did try to grope and grapple for a while, but then she told me about you. She said you were like the air inside a tennis ball. I laughed, of course, assuming that your sister, who was never one to wax philosophical, was somehow being sarcastic. But she wasn’t. “She has such secrets,” your sister said on your behalf. “No one knows what’s inside or how she keeps it there.” Of course, by the time you and my cousin returned from the wax museum I’d forgotten about your sister; I was over you like a plastic raincoat. You seemed surprised that someone would prefer you to your sister. And to her credit, your sister easily switched to my cousin. I’d like to know what she thinks now. Maybe I am one of those best remembered almost-hads; I’ve often wondered that.

It’s an erroneous belief that every suicide victim leaves a note. Most do not. In fact, most people go out of their way to make their suicide look like an accident. A car drives over an embankment. A woman out for an evening stroll stumbles into the sea. A lonely young man in a rooming house falls asleep with a cigarette in his hand. Psychologists, the coroner tells me, believe most “accidental” deaths are suicides of one sort or another: contrived, conscious, deliberate, premeditated and otherwise. Who wants to be remembered for taking their own life? (Worse, who wants to jeopardize their life insurance policy?) Not in our society anyway. Maybe in Japan, where I think hara-kiri is still acceptable if not honourable; maybe in ancient Rome or Greece. But in our culture, only a very few — the bravest or the most foolish — leave evidence. A survey of my collection suggests that most people feel a need to apologize; exactly sixty-two per cent of the letters in my possession start with the words “I’m sorry” or some variant. The coroner concurs. Of the letters in his collection, easily ten times mine, most are a kind of justification, although he also sees another force at work, what he calls “the last gasp of the creative impulse.” I know what he means. Many of the suicide notes in my collection are, for example, written as poems. Sometimes they rhyme — I have a least eleven sonnets or poems that take a rough sonnet-like structure, and dozens with less elaborate rhyme schemes — but free verse is more popular, in particular the haiku. This reflects, I think, a general belief that free verse is easier to write than rhyming poetry. Granted, it is easier to sound important with free verse, no one wanting, I think it’s fair to say, an insignificant sounding suicide note. It’s another interesting statistic that most suicide notes are written by men, despite the fact that the overwhelming number of suicide attempts and a significantly higher proportion of successful suicides — there’s an oxymoron for you — are carried out by women. This supports the coroner’s “last gasp” theory, I think. Men are much more drawn to the notion of their place in history than women are — I’m not being sexist here, it’s just what I think. Men are much more inclined to need a last burst of literary achievement, a demonstration of their creative prowess in the face of what they see as the ultimate act of sacrifice and destruction. Don’t roll your eyes, that’s how men think. For many women, I suspect, suicide is a creative act in itself, which needs no justification.

I have not been a collector as long as the coroner. In fact, I did not start my collection until after I met you. It was on the drive home from Niagara Falls — the second time, our honeymoon — that I realized two things: I loved you, and I needed a hobby, something to collect. You made a remark. Remember, we’d stopped off at your mother’s house, and just as you stepped out of the car, your teal pumps sinking halfway into the mud, your sister opened the screen door with her new hair and a new man on her arm. What did you say? You always say the right thing at the right moment, and that was the perfect thing to say. Your sister came and took your arm and helped you through the mud, and her friend took the suitcase from my hand gallantly and carried it to the house. He was an investment banker from Mexico, the wetback with the green-backs, your sister said; she always had a thing for Latin men. Your mother met us in the hallway, and she hugged me tightly and kissed me like we’d known each other all our lives, like she was my mother, not yours, or our mother, even though I’d never met her before. Your stepfather forced himself out of his chair and shook my hand and said, “I guess you’re part of this crazy circus now.” You sat on the red settee, rubbing your swollen feet, with your hair piled high and your sunglasses on like a movie star; that’s the moment. That’s when I knew I loved you. Your sister talked about a springtime many years earlier when you tried to hatch a robin’s egg that had fallen out of the nest. You kept it on the hot water pipe in your bedroom in a cereal bowl full of torn-up yellow toilet paper. And finally a beak appeared and a tiny head, and your sister said she wanted to crack the egg open to let the chick out. But you wouldn’t let her. You said it would have to get out on its own or it was as good as dead. (Where did you bury the chick, I forget, by the birch tree in the back yard?) And all the time your mother sat there on the edge of the sofa, both hands supporting her cane, correcting your sister and shushing your stepfather whenever he opened his mouth.

And when she could contain herself no longer, your mother burst out, “So you’re married, honey, I can’t believe it! I’m so happy for you.” (Although the family politics, the sharp look to your sister and her rolling her eyes, did not escape me.) Then your step-father saying out of the blue, before your mother could hush him, “I’ve married off five and buried two myself. That’s not bad batting.” The Mexican laughed majestically, then suddenly stopped, embarrassed. And in the silence that followed, that’s when it struck me: I had a family now; I had a crazy circus. An urge overcame me, the urge to hunt and gather. The urge to collect.

The most celebrated piece in the coroner’s collection is a suicide note by none other than Sir Winston Churchill. The great statesman never in fact killed himself, but that does not diminish the value of the piece in the eyes of a collector. Churchill was hounded most of his adult life by the Black Dog of Depression and drafted at least seven suicide notes. The coroner’s is considered to be Churchill’s finest. It is written on ivory vellum and still has, if you hold it close to your nose, the raw scent of leather, like a magnificent leather-backed chair from, one imagines, Churchill’s study. While most of his other notes are pathetic, he simpers in a most unChurchillian manner, the coroner’s note is beautiful. I’ve copied a passage, which I keep in my wallet. I have wallowed in the trenches; I have whined in the streets and mewed on the hilltops and in the lowest valley; I have suffered You to make this bleak wind kiss my lips and comfort me with the cold; I do not ask much, my Lord, just the comfort of the cold. You can almost hear the great man’s voice as you read. The coroner picked up the Churchill note while he and his wife were on holiday in Zurich. (She, by the way, is completely aware of his hobby and finds no malice in it; she is happy he has an interest outside his work, which can be very consuming, and has on several occasions presented him with suicide notes for his birthday or at Christmas.)

The coroner had the good fortune to come across an antique dealer who specialized in suicide notes — the Europeans, as always, being much more tolerant. The owner, a Pole, first tried to sell the coroner Adolph Hitler’s authentic suicide note, which, to a collector, is suspect, in the same league as a sliver from the true cross or a deed to the Statue of Liberty. Once the Pole figured out that he wasn’t dealing with a rube, he got out the real goods. The coroner picked up the Churchill note, along with a certificate of authenticity from Sotheby’s, for just under twenty-five thousand Swiss francs, which is, I can assure you, a bargain. While I haven’t anything as exciting as the Churchill note in my collection (the coroner has given me a certified copy, under the stipulation that I neither sell nor reproduce it), I have a couple of pieces of which I am justifiably proud. Of some historical significance is a note from Edwin Miles, the only survivor of the Charge of the Light Brigade (in truth, the validity of this piece is in some doubt). My favourite piece is a note by one Günter Polphner, Herman Goering’s personal chef. Written on the back of a recipe for stuffed green peppers, it says simply, “Dear Lord, turn me over when I’m done.”

I think it’s true what you said, that every man must spend time in the company of strangers. It was years ago, I know, but every time I look at you I hear you saying it again. We were on the sand by the lake, and the moon’s light fell across your face; I could see your cheeks and lips; your eyes were shadows. You had just revealed to me the first of your secrets — how you concealed it from me I’ll never know. It seemed at first only a small bump on your chest, but when I looked more closely I could see that it was in fact a third nipple, just as you said. “It’s not so uncommon, really . . .” But you didn’t need to apologize. I kissed this and all your nipples, and, enjoying the compression of you above me and the warm sand below, I fell into a kind of sleep. In the distance I could hear your sister talking as always. What colour was her hair then? Black or white? In my near-sleep I remember the sound of the paddles as they stirred the water, and I think by then the Mexican ambassador was singing to her in Spanish, something vaguely familiar, like a lullaby, although the words and melody didn’t register. Yes. That’s it. “London Bridge.” In Spanish. I’ve always wondered if you heard it too. I did not hear the splash as your sister dove into the water, and I don’t recall anything before the ambassador called her name. By then, you were calling too. I followed the trail of clothes to the water’s edge and saw you waist deep in the water, calling, calling, calling your sister’s name. The ambassador, who once worked as a pearl diver and had tremendous breath control, scoured the bottom of the lake, while we did the best we could from the cumbersome rowboat. It was almost dawn when the police divers arrived with their scuba tanks and sonar equipment. You stayed on the water in the rowboat the rest of the day and into the following night. It’s not so strange that we never recovered her; the police captain, the one with the twitch and the stammer, said that the lake was cluttered with sunken stumps; a four-foot layer of mud and silt covered its bed. Finding her would have taken a miracle. The search continued for a week, but all we came up with was her waterlogged hairpiece, which had drifted to shore on its own. I’ve always wanted to ask you, how come you never cried? Not when she went missing, that’s understandable, there was work to do. But not even later, when the police called off the search, or when we found your mother in a heap on the floor of her living room with her dress wet with tears and a photograph of your sister in her hands, which she held so tightly that it tore when we tried to take it away from her. I’d thought you’d cry then. But you seemed indifferent, cynical at best. You laughed at the funeral and ridiculed us for spending two thousand dollars to bury a thirty-dollar hairpiece. Afterwards, you laughed when your stepfather tried to put things into perspective. “At least this tragedy has brought us all closer together,” he said. And later as I drove you home from the cemetery I confessed to you that I had never felt more alive than I had during the search, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the police, all of us focused, and that I had never felt closer to anyone than I felt to you right then in that car. That’s when you said it. “Men need the company of strangers. Men only come to life when they’re surrounded and involved with people they don’t know.”

The coroner says most people wait until the spring to kill themselves. Death in general is more abundant in the spring; hospitals and old folks’ homes routinely report the highest number of deaths in March and April. The coroner sees this in a positive light, and I agree: people hold on to life for as long as they can. Surviving one more winter is, if not a small victory over death, at least a slap in death’s face. I’ve come to think of you as this kind of person, the kind who plans to make it through one more winter. I think you’d like the coroner. In a lot of ways, he’s similar to you. Stoic, that’s the word. Stoic, but in the good sense. Not like an institution, but stoic like a well-fed farm animal.

I wanted to tell how I came to collect suicide notes, but it’s not a very interesting story. A fluke, more or less. I chanced upon a note. I must confess that I was very apprehensive about telling you anything at all, especially at this time. But in a relationship like ours, we should be able to tell each other our deepest secrets as easily as we say “I love you.”

I wanted very much for this to be about someone else, but it’s about you.

I’ve read your note. I was going to put it in my collection, but the coroner’s offered me a handsome sum for it, and, at this point in our relationship, I think I should accept his generous offer.