the last months of Abbie’s life saw him lose his grip, one by one, on the things that mattered most to him. The married idyll he’d wanted with Johanna, complete with their little house up on the river, gave way to his sense that their relationship was on the rocks. He became convinced that Ma, who had been diagnosed with cancer, was dying. Still frequently suffering from the injuries sustained in the car accident, and dependent on drugs to control the pain, he decided that he was no longer politically effective, and even wondered if he was still famous. He felt his life might be all over. He didn’t want it to be. But he thought it might be.
He had found ways to sustain his optimism for the longest time in the face of overwhelming adversity. His optimism had always been a part of him—intuitive, spontaneous, practical, and inseparable from the rest of who he was and what inspired him. Now, feeling hopeless, Abbie was finding that living without his optimism was not something he knew how to do.
In late 1979, when lithium had been prescribed for him to help control his manic episodes, it had also been associated with myriad physical problems. Abbie hadn’t liked lithium. It affected his speech, and he feared it also affected his thought processes. He felt it aged him. He took it somewhat regularly for a few years, especially while under Nathan Kline’s care. Then Nate Kline died, and things had been more or less out of control ever since. Abbie had tried to work with other psychiatrists in the New York area, but none could inspire his trust the way Kline had.
Ironically, after Abbie’s March 1983 suicide attempt, he had regained his balance for a while, having acquired for perhaps the first time a healthy fear of the abyss. He joined a manic-depressive support group in the New York area. He started to read up on the medical literature on manic depression, and throughout the ’80s Abbie’s knowledge on the subject increased steadily. One entire bookshelf in his New Hope apartment was filled with books on manic-depressive illness. Abbie had decided to write his own book on the subject. He was going to call it The Hell of It. In the mid and late ’80s, on more than one occasion, Abbie said to me, “There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about my manic depression.”
But as early as 1983, he was self-medicating. When he traveled on the college speaking tour circuit, he was never without a zippered black leather pill case, like an old country doctor. As I remember it, there were at least six bottles of pills in that case. All the medications were legally prescribed, not least the powerful antihistamines he’d taken all his life, but the doctor who was carefully monitoring how all the different medications interacted with one another was Doctor Abbie. The more his illness seemed to resist prescribed management, the more he felt that he had nothing to lose by trying to do better on his own. And after the car accident in June 1988, when the powerful narcotic painkiller Percocet was added to the mix, Abbie was laying out and dipping into his drug armamentarium according to his moods in a typical, and very dangerous, display of manic-depressive behavior.
In January 1989, Abbie dipped lower. Not wanting to be alone, he started to spend more time at Johanna’s apartment—most of it lying on the couch. When in New Hope he sometimes didn’t get out of bed at all. He wasn’t interested in the Super Bowl—for the first time ever. He had no desire to go out. We still spoke, as usual, nearly every day, sometimes more. But he didn’t show his usual dynamism. Neither sports nor current events could break the hold of his lethargy. When I asked him if he was taking his medication, he would answer, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” which made me think that he wasn’t. And now at the end of our conversations, if he was at Johanna’s, he would pass the phone to her and she would take over, filling me in on how Abbie had spent the day and how concerned she was about him.
In the January 18 issue of The Guardian, one of the few surviving Movement newsweeklies,1 there appeared an apologetic-sounding strategy paper by Mark Rudd, one of the ’60s leaders Abbie respected most. Rudd’s heartfelt article was clearly the expression of a deep-seated bitterness that Abbie understood only too well. Speaking as a former SDS leader, he zeroed in on the 1969–1971 period, when SDS came apart at the seams, giving way to the more violent Weathermen faction: “The destruction of SDS and the rise of Weathermen . . . were historical crimes,” Rudd wrote. “Not only did we wind up killing three of our own people, but even worse we helped murder the organized anti-war movement at the height of the war. Vast numbers of campus militants became paralyzed and demoralized by our guilt-based, idealistic arguments. . . . Our vanguard militancy led only to isolation and defeat.”2
Abbie was enraged enough by what Rudd had written to rise out of his torpor. Even in the despair that was now darkening most of his waking hours, Abbie’s mind was acute. His vision may have changed with the times, but it remained undiluted. His political beliefs were as firm now as they had ever been. And one thing Abbie could not stand was revisionism. Within minutes of reading Rudd’s article, Abbie began drafting his response, which appeared in The Guardian a month later. It was vintage Abbie: impassioned, witty, chiding, eloquent, urgent.
It’s good to see Mark Rudd thinking aloud in public again, but as much as I respect his historic and continuing contribution . . . I don’t agree with his one-dimensional caricature of “60s” politics. . . . He chooses to create [a] false dichotomy between those who believe in nonviolence as a way of life and those who believe in “armed struggle. . . .” Successful social movements—revolutions, if you’ll excuse an old-fashioned word—have always rested on a unity of both philosophies. . . . Revolutionaries are born to love, they are not born to kill.
If the choices in this world were between war and peace, only the mentally deranged would choose war, but life and global politics are not that easy. The choice has always been between justice and injustice, oppression and resistance. . . . Good tacticians will be those who best respond to the objective and potential conditions in which they find themselves.
The name “Mark Rudd,” just like the name “Jane Fonda,” means something. Having some regrets in life is a human condition. [But it is] the architects of repression and imperial wars [who] should be doing the apologizing, not those who stood boldly in opposition.3
The thrust of Abbie’s letter was that an apology sends the wrong message to “those who struggle on the side of justice today and tomorrow”—that it is in effect a shirking of the responsibility of leadership. And certainly the reason Rudd’s confession got Abbie so riled was that the despair and bitterness expressed by Rudd were feelings shared, at least to a degree, by Abbie privately. Abbie’s point, as he made very clear, was that Rudd shouldn’t lose sight of the larger political debate in his sorrow. Abbie had not made that mistake himself. Personally, he was overwhelmed with regret; the marriages, children, wives, friends, and political battles won and lost were all piled up by the end of his fifty-two years like one of those mile-long, rush-hour California freeway car wrecks you see on the nightly news. Yet he stood stubbornly by every position, every book and article, every march, every civil disobedience, every cause that he had taken up in thirty years of activism. No regrets. He had never let his disappointments color his political analysis.
Abbie and Mark Rudd shared a common sense of loss, and both were still active in the fight for social justice. They were among those whose resistance to oppression had been lifelong. But their personal responses to a similar dilemma had lately diverged. Abbie, in 1989 no different than he was in 1969, was ready to die. What he was not ready to do was admit defeat. Sensing his own life drawing to a close, beginning to put his papers in order, arranging for the reprinting of his books so that they would be available after his death, contemplating suicide, perhaps even planning his suicide, he held ever more tightly the beliefs he had always held and stood ready like some aging knight of the Round Table to defend the Movement against attacks from any quarter.
When Abbie wrote that the names Mark Rudd and Jane Fonda “mean something,” that they “have some responsibility [to those] who fought beside them,” he was surely thinking that the name “Abbie Hoffman” meant as much or more and of his own comrades in arms. Abbie did not want to let people down in the way he felt Rudd had. And, rightly or wrongly, he may have thought, in his deep and seemingly endless weariness and apathy, that it would be better to die than to stop fighting. He may even have felt that it was necessary to die soon, before his own sense of loss and bitterness forced him publicly to recant as Rudd had, or in some other way to weaken politically. If Abbie was thinking about suicide, he would certainly have been analyzing it tactically, as something that might give added weight to his memory, or otherwise contribute to that for which he’d lived.
In the Hertsgaard interview from late 1988, Abbie spoke freely of death and claimed to have overcome his fear of it while he was a civil rights worker in the early ’60s. Abbie also said he was “absolutely convinced I’ll be fighting until I die.” The converse of the statement would also have rung true for Abbie: that he would have to die the moment he became absolutely convinced he had stopped fighting. Hertsgaard asked him a follow-up question: “You’re not planning to do that anytime soon, are you?”
“Well, I don’t exactly get a choice in the matter,” Abbie had replied, laughing hard.4
At the end of January a friendly and apologetic letter arrived from Anita requesting money to help with america’s upkeep. “You know I hate to ask you,” she offered, but she didn’t ask how he was or what he was doing, and in Abbie’s depressed state that made it the wrong communication at the wrong time. Several times in conversations in February and March, Abbie harked back to Anita’s letter. “That’s all she wants,” he’d say, “money I don’t have.” It was the first time I had heard him complain like that about Anita, almost as if he confused her in his mind with Sheila, as if he had entered into a delusional state in which he could no longer differentiate between his first two wives.
In mid-February, Abbie suggested to his psychiatrist that the various prescribed medications he was taking weren’t working. Seeing himself slipping further and further into the black hole, as the depths of depression are called, he asked for something new. His psychiatrist prescribed the antidepressant Prozac, giving Abbie some free samples to start with and a prescription to fill for more.5 According to Johanna, both she and his psychiatrist knew of his own concurrent efforts at self-medication with painkillers. But I wonder if either of them knew or understood the full extent of his self-medication. It is well documented in the Complete Guide to Prescription and Nonprescription Drugs, among other places, that using Prozac and Percocet in combination can increase the depressant effects of both drugs.
I found that where recently Abbie had been calling me twice as often as I called him, now I was having to place the calls. And he showed little interest in our conversations. Upcoming speaking engagements had usually been the subject of intense, animated discussions, but now he couldn’t care less. Spring was usually the busiest time of the year. But there was only one speaking engagement in February, at Oklahoma State, none in March, and only three or four in April. It was the lightest his schedule had been in seven years.
And yet, at the same time, Abbie agreed to an unusually large number of interviews, some of which he had been turning down for years. He let independent radio producer Stuart Hutchinson come over and interview him for days on end, and was similarly generous with Chicago writer John Schultz, who was working on a new book on the 1968 Chicago convention, and with Howard Goodman, who was writing a long piece on Abbie for the Jewish-oriented, Philadelphia-based glossy magazine, Inside.
Abbie was tying up loose ends. He had the energy, somehow, to involve himself in a clear-minded way with the past. But for the first time in his life, the present almost seemed to bore him, as if time passing were itself now an enemy, signifying nothing more than that he was growing older, getting less famous, dying.
The one political battle that cut through his depressed state during this period was the Salman Rushdie affair. Abbie’s view was that the policy of some bookstore chains not to carry Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, out of fear of reprisals from Islamic fundamentalists was an extraordinary act of censorship. Likening the situation to what he had faced with Steal This Book, Abbie saw himself as uniquely qualified to organize on Rushdie’s behalf. The combination of censorship plus government complacency—given our government’s reluctance to condemn the death sentence that had been passed against Rushdie by the Ayatollah—energized Abbie. He not only went to every demonstration and spoke at several key events but was a tireless behind-the-scenes organizer.
The following week, The Phil Donahue Show aired a special broadcast on the Rushdie affair with a number of famous authors—many of them the same ones who had first gotten involved after a wake-up call from Abbie. Abbie was not invited to be one of the participants, and the snub left him feeling doubly crushed, both as an organizer and as a writer. He kept up his organizing efforts in support of Rushdie, but in his mentally exhausted state he seemed especially sensitive to perceived attacks. As never before, his guard was down.
In the Inside interview, Abbie expressed his loneliness succinctly:
Being so heavily into politics is not the best way to make friends. I’m closest in a personal sense to the ideas I believe in, and in an abstract sense with a global movement. So there is a kind of emptiness around.6
So there is a kind of emptiness around . . .
By late February I could feel Abbie withdrawing from me as if he were being pulled out to sea by a strong tide. I experienced the distance between us growing greater from moment to moment. Worst of all, my awareness of what was happening was not accompanied by any commensurate stirring to action; I felt completely helpless. In my own head, irrationally, we had come to the point where nothing I might do was going to make a difference, almost as if Abbie’s depression was so strong as to weaken not only his resolve but also mine and anybody else’s.
Then it was “March Madness,” NCAA college basketball finals. Abbie and I always went full steam into our analysis of the games, trying to identify each individual player according to his strengths and weaknesses, betting beyond our limit. But this year Eli, our bookmaker, hadn’t heard from Abbie at all. Abbie was $480 into his $500 limit from old bets, but that had never stopped him before. Eli called me to express his concern. He wanted me to let Abbie know that he would raise his limit, and to make sure everything was all right. Not knowing what else to say, I told him I would pass the message along.
Every year in Worcester, a group of us build a float to enter in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in the name of our friends the Aboody family who own the El Morocco Restaurant. Abbie, when he was around, me, Jo Aboody and Richie—we’d all really get into it, arguing for almost the whole year leading up to it about how long, how high, what color, and anything else we could think of. Some years we modeled the float after a popular song or a Broadway play. That year, 1989, our float was the “Yellow Brick Road,” after The Wizard of Oz, and we’d already spent hours discussing how yellow the yellow should be. By early March, we were hard at work weekends in the Worcester Bus Terminal, which had been loaned to us free of charge. But we still hadn’t come to a decision about whether to go with a cadmium yellow or something more golden. Richie suggested we call Abbie to get him to settle it. So we called him.
I don’t remember details of the conversation, but afterwards, Richie, our friend since we were six or eight years old, said, “Jesus, he sounds really down and out.” And in response, before I could even think the words I was speaking, I said, “I’m afraid he’s going to try it again”—meaning suicide. Until that moment, I hadn’t let the thought into my mind, although it had been there, silently waiting. And now suddenly I felt the full force of all the fear I had been trying to protect myself from, coming over me like a blast of heat.
I called Johanna at her apartment in New York to tell her that I thought Abbie might be getting ready to attempt suicide again. She shared my feeling and seemed to be experiencing the same kind of helplessness I felt. Since she saw Abbie more regularly than I did, the pain of watching him slip away may have been even worse for her. And for Johanna, as for me, feelings of helplessness may have been compounded by anger at what we may have felt was his abandonment of us. But all she really said was that Abbie was trying a new medication, and that she was trying to visit him more.
According to Dr. Harry Markow, the psychiatrist Abbie was seeing at the time, Abbie had been showing signs of increased depression since early March. What he was depressed about, according to Dr. Markow, were the broken ribs and significant injuries to the hand and foot he’d received in the car accident. And this interpretation is largely accurate. Even after the casts had come off in the fall of 1988, Abbie had remained in excruciating pain.
Dr. Markow wanted to hospitalize Abbie for his depression. Abbie refused. The reasoning Abbie gave to the psychiatrist was remarkable. “Mr. Hoffman stated he had no desire to live,” Dr. Markow told the Deputy Coroner, “yet claimed he would not commit suicide.”7 That this psychiatrist would accept such reasonings from a patient, and that he would seem unconcerned about the combination of the Prozac with the Percocet Abbie was taking, seems unbelievable to me now. But these were things that only came out afterward.
Abbie had a high threshold for pain. But in the winter of 1988 and then in the last months of his life, he would often raise the subject of the injuries from the accident with me in phone conversations. And each time we talked about it, the scenario seemed to have worsened: In the fall of 1988 there was the possibility that he might need bone surgery on his foot; the stairs up to Johanna’s apartment were almost a torture; in January 1989, he was still talking about the possibility of surgery, this time on his hand: “Who knows?” he said, “I may never play tennis again.” What he didn’t tell me during these conversations was how he was killing his pain with Percocet. Others knew that he was taking the drug, which might have worsened his depression and conflicted with his other medications at the same time as it killed the pain. They knew, but they didn’t know what they knew.
Johanna used to tell me how conscientious Abbie was about taking his Prozac. Once I asked her what the pills looked like.
“You know,” she said, “little white tablets.”
I did not know it at the time, but Prozac comes in very distinctive two-tone capsules. The little white tablets were the Percocet that Abbie was taking in addition to or instead of the Prozac, blunting the psychological and physical pain rather than treating it. But he wasn’t about to tell that to Johanna.
On March 27, suffering from a bad flu and visibly exhausted, Abbie traveled to Jericho High School on Long Island to speak on the occasion of Human Awareness Day, an event organized by Students for Social Responsibility. And on April 4, in his last public appearance, Abbie appeared onstage at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, along with Bobby Seale and Timothy Leary. He somehow found the energy to perform but looked and sounded ragged as hell. When he got back to New Hope, he talked about killing himself to both his landlord Michael Waldron and Johanna. According to Waldron, Abbie asked him if he could hang himself from the rafters in the barn. Before the flabbergasted landlord could respond, Johanna stepped in, saying to Abbie, “Don’t even kid around like that.”8
Johanna and I were speaking frequently on the phone. We both had Abbie’s last suicide attempt, in March of 1983, very much on our minds. I knew the risk, but I didn’t see a way out. Johanna was placing her hope in the Prozac. She explained that it can take around six weeks to kick in. It had already been six weeks since he’d started taking it. “It should kick in any day,” she said.
And it is possible that the Prozac was beginning to take effect. Some experts say that when a manic-depressive is in “the black hole” it is virtually impossible to make love. Yet Johanna would tell me later that four days before he died, on Saturday night, they were staying over in Abbie’s apartment and enjoyed their best lovemaking in a long time. On Sunday she returned to the city and called me that evening. But there seemed to be very little to say.
On Monday, April 10, I called Abbie in the early afternoon to fill him in on a visit Phyllis and I had made that morning to Ma’s doctor.
Ma had lymphoma and her doctor advised us to prepare for the worst: Our mother might die within thirty days. Abbie listened to me for about twenty minutes. The less he said, the more afraid for him I became. I pleaded with him not to do anything that would hurt him or us. I couldn’t come out and say the word “suicide.” The closest I could come was, “Don’t get any ideas,” and “You can’t leave me now.” But Abbie was so unresponsive that I wasn’t sure he even understood me. “You’re the patriarch,” I tried. That got through to him, sort of. “Well, maybe it’s time you took charge,” he finally said.
I spent the rest of the afternoon attending to business matters in my office, trying to contain the pain and loneliness I was feeling. Around 5:00 p.m. my part-time secretary and friend Carole came in to type up the letters I’d written. She asked me what was the matter. Crying again, I said, “He’s going to kill himself.”
According to phone records, on Tuesday morning at around 11:30 a.m., Abbie put in a call to Loyola College in Baltimore, where he was supposed to speak that afternoon. He told them that he was canceling the date because his mother was dying.9 Given his depressed state of mind, the possibility that she might die became the certainty that she was about to die. And Abbie was taking the news very hard.
At around 1:30 p.m., Abbie left the apartment and drove to the post office to mail two letters: one contained a check for $1,500 to the IRS, his estimated quarterly federal tax payment, and the other a check for $4,000 to his accountant, the balance due on his state and federal income taxes.10
There is no indication that Abbie saw or talked to anyone else before he died. On Tuesday night I tried to call him to see how the Loyola speech went, but his answering machine was turned off. Sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, Abbie emptied 150 or more 30-milligram phenobarbitals into a glass of Glenlivet single-malt Scotch whiskey, gulped that down, and then filled and swallowed four or five more glasses of the Scotch as fast as he could. It only took a few minutes for the drug to take hold of him, and then he lay down to die.
Around 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 12, Johanna called Michael Waldron to ask him to check on Abbie since he wasn’t picking up his phone and she was getting worried. Waldron used his key to get into the apartment at around 6:30 p.m. and found him, with his boots on, lying fully clothed on his side in the bed. He’d pulled the covers over him, his hands were nestled under his cheek, like a sleeping child. The apartment was immaculately clean. There was no note.
Waldron called Johanna right away from Abbie’s apartment, and Johanna reached Joan at our home in Framingham. When I got home and Joan told me, at first I only screamed and sobbed. Then the thought in my mind turned to the possiblity that maybe he was still alive, maybe he only seemed dead. I got on the phone and pleaded with Johanna and Michael to call the police right away so that they could get an ambulance there. Then I started to worry about Ma. If Abbie really was dead, it was important that Ma didn’t hear it from some reporter. I drove to Ruth Street, making calls from the van during the half-hour ride, and by the time I got there, although the news hadn’t yet been announced, I no longer had any hope that Abbie was still alive.
The Solebury Township Police Department clocked Waldron’s call at 7:57 p.m. and a police officer arrived at Abbie’s home at 8:09 p.m. By the 10:00 p.m. news, Abbie was the lead story on local television and radio, and a major story nationally. On Thursday morning I was met at the Philadelphia airport by Kathy Devlin, Abbie’s trusted secretary, accompanied by one of his Del-AWARE colleagues, who took me to Abbie’s apartment.
It was the first time I’d visited him in New Hope, at the $400-a-month converted turkey coop, where he’d been living the last few years. It made sense to me somehow that this had been Abbie’s last refuge. Cinderblocks and wood boards held CDs and books—works on a wide range of revolutionary struggles around the world, one shelf devoted to books on manic-depressive illness, and multiple copies of his own writings, especially Revolution for the Hell of It, Woodstock Nation, and Steal This Book. Between rows of books were the television and VCR, with a tape of The Godfather on video and ready to be played. To one side was his desk—immaculately clean—and next to it a computer station. I’d known his personal computer was linked electronically to several counterculture networks. But seeing it there in all its splendor was a little like seeing him sitting there.
About five feet from the desk, on the coffee table in front of the couch, the chess pieces were all arranged and ready to play. I could not take my eyes off them.
Over the kitchen counter hung a framed front page of the New York Post of September 4, 1980, when he surfaced after the years underground, with the headline: “Here’s Abbie!” On the other walls of the apartment were posters or framed photos: the familiar silk-screened raised fist over the word “Strike!”, a National Lampoon cover on Abbie, a Grateful Dead poster, a promotional poster of Abbie holding a test tube for his most recent book, Steal This Urine Test; Abbie with Jimmy Carter, with Daniel Ortega, with Jerry Rubin, with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. And there, above his computer, was the autographed photo I’d gotten for him of our childhood idol Fats Domino. Over Fats’s signature it said, “To Abbie, Keep on Rockin’.” Seeing the photo proudly displayed on Abbie’s wall made me feel close to him: The part of him that loved Fats was the part I’d grown up with, and felt closest to. For all the changes Abbie had gone through, I thought, he hadn’t changed much. I found myself shaking my head. It was hard to see all these signs of life with my brother dead.
Reporters and television camera crews were milling about Abbie’s apartment the day I was there. I heard that one of the journalists was Andrea Fine from People, and I introduced myself. We started talking and I was impressed by her intelligence and sensitivity. But in the back of my mind I was thinking what Abbie would have been thinking: If I play this right, we can get the cover of People. I wanted that cover badly. I would have felt I’d disappointed Abbie if I didn’t get it.
That’s how he always liked to play it. For every battle won, Abbie liked to have a scar or two to show, indicating the price he’d paid for victory. And even when he lost, he liked to have some gain as proof that the fight hadn’t been completely futile. For the next few hours I didn’t let Andrea out of my sight, and I would follow up with calls to talk about my brother during the next few days. Abbie’s punim took the whole front cover of People the following week, along with a six-page photo spread inside. It didn’t bring my brother back, but it helped me feel that we were still a team even though we were one man short.
Abbie’s death made the lead story on the local and national network evening news all over the country. And it was front-page news in every newspaper. the New York Times printed not one but two different obituaries on successive days. There would be three large-scale memorial celebrations, one in Worcester which I organized, one that brought 6,000 partygoers to the Palladium in New York, and one in Los Angeles. Testimonials came in from all the far corners. Chicago columnist Mike Royko, who had covered him many times over the years, portrayed Abbie as a George Bailey for our times. “Now most of his 1968 pals have wised up,” Royko wrote; “But Abbie? There he was, a graying 52, still protesting this or that injustice. . . . In the age of the bottom line, he had become the odd man out.”
On the following Tuesday a toxicology report was released that listed the broad variety of drugs found in Abbie’s apartment—grass, hash, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, traces of MDMA, and straws with traces of cocaine. None of these drugs were Abbie’s, and none were found in his blood. Johanna has said that the pot, MDMA, and LSD were hers. The rest belonged to friends and visitors. Prescription drugs found included Ornade, a strong antihistamine; Temazepam; Xanax; Prozac; Inderal, a beta blocker; and Ativan. The prescriptions for all of the legal drugs had been filled recently, five of them in March, one in January, and one again in April. But none of these was found in Abbie’s blood, and once the cause of death was established, repeated requests from the family to conduct further tests to ascertain whether Prozac was present in Abbie’s body were denied. The only substance found in Abbie’s blood, other than the booze and the phenobarbital that killed him, although it was notably absent from the above list, was the drug Abbie took most frequently, which would have augmented his depression and which may indirectly have been most responsible for his suicide—Percocet.
A few weeks after Abbie died, I would visit Johanna in her apartment in Manhattan and she would take me into the bathroom and show me two empty amber bottles labeled with Percocet’s generic name, oxycodone.
“You know what these are?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Percocet.” I told her. The bottles she was holding explained to me why the coroner’s report had not listed the drug among those found in Abbie’s apartment. Someone must have thought they’d held the phenobarbitals that had killed Abbie, and had removed what they considered to be incriminating evidence. She kept the bottles in a misguided effort to protect Abbie’s memory.
Immediately after the release of the toxicology results, I called a press conference in Worcester to say I did not believe that Abbie could have committed suicide without leaving a note, and to announce the next day’s memorial service at Worcester’s Temple Emanuel. In those first hours and days I still couldn’t accept—it was literally beyond the reach of my imagination—that it might have been suicide—that Abbie’s pain and desperation could have been so great that he would have taken his own life. Although I’d been fearing Abbie’s imminent suicide for weeks, facing the reality now, I couldn’t come to terms with it. All the national networks and local media came. Even in my anguished state, as I stood in the middle of that room packed with journalists and electronic equipment, I felt some relief knowing that now Abbie’s memorial service/celebration would probably be packed.
The next day we marched in a crowd large enough to block traffic from Ma’s house to the temple, with our arms linked and Pete Seeger leading us in song. Once there, the service included a variety of friends who each said their Kaddish in their own way. Bernie Gilgun said, “To know Abbie was to know his family. . . . They filled his life, and when he needed them they were there.” Bill Walton, who’d met Abbie as a fugitive, described my brother as “a great man who gave everything he had, and more.” Burt Schneider said, “It is my belief that Abbie died of an overdose of caring and love.” And our cousin Sydney Schanberg, speaking for the family, told us, “He had the courage for the rest of us.”
After Abbie died, Norman Mailer (whom Abbie liked and who liked Abbie, although they lived in different worlds) said something about Abbie and America that I think is true: that if this were a democracy, Abbie would have had a nationally syndicated column—in other words, his voice would have been recognized, respected, rewarded for what it was. Right after Abbie died, many people wanted to hear that he had been killed, that he had not killed himself. Those people weren’t entirely wrong in the sense that Abbie’s death was a human response to years of being denigrated, harassed, and shut out by the very same society he was serving, and by the very same institutions of government he was protecting.
On Christmas Day 1967, in a letter to Bernie Gilgun, Abbie had described his forthcoming book, Revolution for the Hell of It: “It’s about Billy the Kid, Fidel Castro, & Abraham, which is to say the three stages of life.” And I like to think of my brother this way, according to his own self-definition, passing through these three stages of life, from outlaw, to revolutionary, to. . . .
Of all biblical figures, Abraham is the most bumbling, the least well understood. He is also among the most blessed, because he obeyed his inner voice, what the Bible calls God’s voice. I think of Abbie’s suicide as a test, as was God’s demand that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac. Only in Abbie’s case no angel stopped his hand.
Maybe I knew my brother better than anyone, although I’m not sure. Maybe I’d been preparing his kaddish for quite some time. Out of compassion, a part of us is always relieved to see the pain of someone we have loved end. My tears aren’t from guilt, they are tears of loneliness. And tears of anger. The world seems vast and empty as I watch the Monday-night football game, as I read the election news in the morning paper, or eat a snack in the middle of the night with the kitchen TV tuned to C-SPAN. He ought to be here.
In the ’60s, when Ma heard Abbie say that kids should kill their parents for the Revolution, she laughed. She thought that was funny. She understood.
Once Abbie was on a radio talk show in New York City and took a call from a listener, who said to him, “Wait till Jesus gets his hands on you, you little bastard.” Abbie used to love to tell that story. He said it was his favorite audience response.