WHEN I RECALL DETAILS OF THE DAY I found Daniel dead, as I have so many times in the five years since, I am tempted to detach myself, to watch the event unfold in my mind’s eye without emotion, at the safe remove of time, in the light of selective memory, with the reputed benefit of hindsight and my capacity to fashion an interpretation that a reader might accept and understand. I can provide a version of events only. I am, after all, a flawed observer: biased, emotional, wounded, scarred, and at times still perplexed. There is so much I do not know, can never know. Daniel’s suicide was a kind of ground zero in my life, and I must overcome the fear that if I poke around in the wreckage left in the wake of that devastation, I will find smouldering embers that still spark and burn. Yet this is something I must do, this clearing of dangerous debris, this making of a new, unobstructed pathway along which I may safely move forward.
To get to the centre of the experience, I have to start at its edges. What I see now is an emotionally stretched woman in her mid-thirties dancing as fast as she can around her boyfriend’s depression. It’s not as though depression itself is news to her. She’s battled it herself and watched its insidious effects engulf others she’s loved. She’s no stranger to loss and grief, either, having survived a divorce and her mother’s death from a stroke two years earlier. She has worked hard not to let her troubles swamp her entirely, and so far they haven’t. She has seen enough human sadness and wasted spirit to know that not everyone lives happily ever after, and that she cannot simply expect it—happiness—to land in her lap, with no effort on her part.
But she doesn’t always get it right. There’s been therapy, enough to lay bare the obvious, all-too-common familial underpinnings of her own depression, and to show how this has—what else?—unconsciously predisposed her to choose similarly suffering souls as friends and lovers. Yes, she knows she’s somehow programmed to be drawn to those who labour through difficult lives under the labels of “depressive,” “addictive,” “manic,” and the like, to greater or lesser degrees. It’s not hard to do anyway in creative circles, where artistic talent is often the saving grace of impoverished craziness—I use the term to encompass the spectrum, from garden-variety neurosis to more obvious manifestations of psychological pain and disorder.
And now there is Daniel, with whom she formed an intense and, for a time, happy relationship the previous year. They have reason to hope for good things, despite the difficulties Daniel is now having, emotionally and financially. She knows from hard experience that once depression has invaded and flourished, it takes time and care to prune it down from its threatening wildness to fit the garden of ordinary unhappiness. Still it can gain control in quick and frightening fashion, and it is almost impossible to ever weed out its deep roots entirely. She’s kept it at bay for some time herself, and is determined to fight it off if it ever tries to take hold again.
Daniel too has been battling the infamous “black dogs” for years, with the aid of medications and regular visits to a psychiatrist he trusts. He talks openly about the help he gets and why he gets it. They have also talked about the shadow suicidal thoughts and feelings have cast on their lives in the past, and in Daniel’s case, many years earlier, attempts. Their acceptance and compassion for each other are part of the strength of their relationship, or so it seems.
And though the depression may always be lurking, waiting for an opportunity to lunge, you would not know it, to view these two people pass the promising first months of their relationship. See them work, productively, at a variety of creative projects. Here they are striding up College Street, laughing and carrying on with friends. Here they are shopping and making meals together, collapsing on the living room floor at midnight during a heat wave, listening to each other’s favourite music, discussing books, showing each other their work, sharing their most private dreams and desires. If there is an element of sadness in the mix, it isn’t so hard to imagine, for those starting over with a new partner in their thirties are bound to feel the undertow of past failures. And that undertow is there all right. Along with the laughter and the light there are dark moments, when Daniel, recently separated, seems wracked by various guilts and regrets, and compelled to inform his new love, with extreme contrition, that he hasn’t always behaved very nicely, especially back when he was a drunk. Sometimes, this need to confess and catalogue his sins strikes her as touching, incongruously innocent: “Listen,” she wants to say, “if that’s the extent of it … there’s worse than you in this world, and they’re not half so sorry!” Often, it seems, Daniel walks in the shadow of his own self-condemnation, and expects others to be no more compassionate toward him than a Texas parole board. Though redemption has been staring him in the face for some time, it seems sometimes he cannot see it, or imagine that it is real.
Remarkably, Daniel actually said at the beginning of their happy times that there was one thing he could promise her he would never do, not so long as they were together, and that was to kill himself. It never occurred to her that he might break such a startling and candid promise, never occurred to her that he might have reason to. As far as she is concerned, she and Daniel are loyal allies in the war to survive the exigencies of a creative life in the hardbitten, downsized, fin-de-siécle world, with depressive illness thrown in as an added challenge, occasionally requiring the deployment of big emotional artillery. When it comes to these battles, she considers joint forces stronger than solitary troops.
After that declaration of Daniel’s, suicide is not a part of their shared lexicon, not a spoken word that passes between them. But it seems in the end she didn’t adequately perceive the degree to which her comrade had fallen and lost heart, or notice in time that his wounds had become life-threatening, that he’d decided to lie down and die, letting her run on—generously, he must have thought—sparing her the details of how badly off he really was. She always thought that one way or the other, they’d live to be hoary old veterans telling their war stories, stories Daniel had already begun to tell with such aching clarity in his poetry and fiction. The hope and optimism of their first summer together—how could she imagine it would be their last?—are a long way from the dead of winter to come.
Now I see myself in the early morning of that particular February day, walking down the two steep flights of stairs from Daniel’s sprawling old apartment, with its rabbit’s-warren layout and creaky hardwood floors, above a shoe store in a crumbling old brick building on College Street, in the middle of Toronto’s now trendy “little Italy” neighbourhood. I set off to my small rented office farther east on College Street, where I do my work as a freelance magazine writer and editor. I am tired. I’ve been working hard, and Daniel has had the flu all week. With the physical symptoms of that to contend with on top of his other troubles, he is listless and sleeps fitfully, lying on the couch mostly, reading a little or watching TV. I feed him soup, keep him supplied with juice, throat lozenges, and Kleenex, cover him with blankets when they fall off while he dozes, run errands for both of us. Nurse Moira to the Rescue. Not a script I planned, or even knew I was following, but looking back, it appears I was quite a natural in my role among the ranks of failed saviours. As I now know, where there’s a suicide, you’ll often find us.
I see myself walking wearily up the street, wearing a black leather jacket, a black silk blouse, a black scarf splashed with a colourful floral pattern, the kind that hangs from racks by the dozens in the Latin American craft shops on Bloor Street between Bathurst and Spadina, and a pair of red denim jeans Daniel selected for me in a London boutique on my birthday the previous September. The colour red, a little alarming on a grey, sub-zero winter day in Toronto, is my one nod to Saint Valentine—I should mention shouldn’t I, that it’s Valentine’s Day. This is something gossips would later make much of, attaching a bogus, romance-tinged melodrama to Daniel’s exit from life on that day; his actual death was the night before.
But the reality is less florid. True, Daniel’s personal life was rather a mess; he was separated, not divorced, from his wife, and our relationship was suffering from his ambivalence about this. I’d distanced myself a bit, maintaining a separate place to live, though I ended up spending more nights than not with him. I rationalized this as easier on both of us while he went through the inevitable inner conflicts of unravelling a difficult attachment. But I don’t believe that this ordinary, if trying, human dilemma was linked in Daniel’s mind with the pseudo-event of Valentine’s Day. I think his deepening despair had by mid-February entered a kind of terminal phase that would have rendered the date irrelevant.
Earlier in the month, Daniel had come quietly into the living room, where I sat reading and drinking tea, and stood looking down at me with his best rather bashful smile. “Um, happy Valentine’s Day,” he said and presented me with one of those lottery tickets that lie in trays at the corner store, this one covered in shiny silver, pink, and red hearts. I laughed and thanked him for such a sweet, goofy gesture. “You’re early,” I said. “Isn’t it the fourth?” he asked, startled. Yes, I replied, but Valentine’s Day is the fourteenth. “Oh,” he said. “I always seem to get those days mixed up.”
Oh well. Daniel sat down beside me, and laughing at ourselves, a pair of writers living on the financial edge, we scratched off the hearts with a penny to see if we had won anything. Yes, we had. Two bucks. Wow. We never did get around to buying another ticket, and I have never had the heart to do so since. The unredeemed ticket sits in a box at the back of my closet, among other random mementoes I cannot seem to part with, but don’t like to think about.
Still, whether intended as part of the story, a lividly ironic comment or not, Valentine’s Day it was when I discovered Daniel dead, and I do live the day each year in the unavoidable glare of incongruous love-hype beaming in from all sides of the culture. The year following Daniel’s death, I was working as an editor at Equinox magazine, then a Telemedia publication with offices in a glimmering glass high-rise building in North York. I debated whether to hide out at home that day, to brood, weep, light a candle, agonize, and isolate myself, but in the end felt I’d already done enough of that the previous year. So I went to work. I knew I would be meeting Lynn Crosbie for a quiet toast to Daniel that evening. Lynn, a fellow writer and neighbour, had forged a bond with Daniel over several years of mutual support for each other’s creative efforts, and their shared battle with depression and agoraphobia. She too had been devastated by Daniel’s suicide, and later wrote two poems, “Pearl,” the title poem of her 1996 collection, and “Geography,” in the same volume. Tender and horrific, they brilliantly captured Daniel’s conflicted essence and the harrowing time of his death. Like several others in his life then, Lynn had recently had a falling out with Daniel, the kind of vague dust-up that often attends the writerly world of sensitive egos, and whose origins and meaning no one is really sure of in the end. But eternally unfinished business is one of the more burdensome realities of sudden death and, in particular, suicide. Lynn did not gloss over the tensions that had existed between her and Daniel at the time he died, but she had the grace to recognize them for the emotional ephemera they were (he mentioned her, with love, in his suicide note). She wrote of Daniel without damning judgment, and accorded her friend the dignity of forgiveness in death. I found it a comfort to know I would be with someone who understood that the better part of Daniel was a man to be deeply mourned, and missed. I looked forward to our meeting, and knew this would sustain me through the day.
Some time that morning, a mailroom clerk entered our office pushing a shopping cart filled with tiny white cardboard boxes tied up with red bows. “Any ladies here?” he called, sounding bored and a little embarrassed. The clerk wheeled the cart around to each woman’s desk and plunked one of the boxes onto it. This was, it turned out, a tradition established by the company’s president, and indeed, each box came with a typed-up, photocopied little tag with a Happy Valentine’s Day wish from the boss.
We all laughed, the men suggesting they were going to file discrimination complaints but settling instead for a share of the ladies’ chocolate-covered popcorn balls. Privately, I was glad I’d come to work and subjected myself to whatever Valentine crap might fly my way. A little box of sweets unceremoniously bestowed by the paid underling of a corporate executive I’d never met was about all I could handle anyway. It wasn’t the first time, and wouldn’t be the last, that outer and inner reality clashed wildly, in a way that demanded translation into comic irony. Grieving a suicide is like that, a constant tripping over cruel and abrupt juxtapositions between the tragic and the ridiculous. A year into the grieving process, I was beginning to get used to it, or so I comforted myself in believing.
But in the early afternoon of my own private D-day, one year earlier, I could never have imagined the turn my life was about to take, all the horrors that awaited. Now I flash back to the image of my oblivious, yet wary and anxious self walking back up the stairs in that dim hallway, my footfalls on the aluminum-trimmed linoleum steps echoing in my ears, the dry, acrid taste of fear gathering on my tongue. I reach Daniel’s front door (a red door, as it happens, inviting the infamous coat of black), and turn the key in the lock, the words he wouldn’t playing in my mind like a feverish mantra, their very presence unwelcome testimony that in some way, I actually think he would. I open the door with mustered determination, as though—I now tell myself wryly—a good attitude could have altered fate at that point. Christian miracles aside, I’m not one to believe that positive thinking can raise the dead.
But “dead” isn’t what’s on my mind in that moment. Now I tell myself everything is really okay, there is a rational and reasonable explanation for the morning’s three unreturned phone calls. At worst Daniel is just in a deep sleep that has lasted into the early afternoon, after a restless night. I enter the apartment. The door to the living room is still closed, as it was more than twelve hours ago, when it seemed explainable. Daniel was sick, and the cat had disturbed him the night before, poking her paw in our faces and mewing to be fed at 5 a.m. He didn’t want to keep me awake with his tossing and turning and coughing, so he told me he would sleep on the couch.
Yes, the closed door made sense then, but now my heart races and I somehow know I can no longer reasonably maintain the hope that everything is okay. I’m fending off the advent of deeper emotion by focusing on annoyance: How dare you scare me this way? I will open the door, to hell with privacy, and say, “Daniel, what’s going on?” But when I turn the knob, the door won’t budge. Locked. Another surge through my heart. I rattle the knob, pushing at the door and calling Daniel’s name. Then I see the note. Tiny thing. A white piece of paper tacked on a white door. It says, in what is undeniably Daniel’s hand, DO NOT COME IN. PLEASE CALL THE POLICE.
Later, I learned that the scant wording of this note supposedly echoed an event in a Martin Amis novel, but if Daniel had indeed intended to ornament the grim scene with a literary filigree, I’m afraid any such bookish allusion was lost on me then. Literarily speaking, the only thing I later at times wished was that I were possessed of the maniacally intrusive nature of one of Philip Roth’s more memorable characters, namely Portnoy’s mother, interminably haranguing her son every time he walks into the bathroom and shuts the door: “[Daniel], are you in pain? Do you want me to call the doctor? Are you in pain or aren’t you? I want to know exactly where it hurts. Answer me.” Yes, I have grimly thought to myself, if I were that kind of woman, perhaps I would have knocked sooner, knocked despite Daniel’s telling me he needed an undisturbed night of sleep. I would have knocked and discovered the note much earlier, when there might have been time to save him, while he was still nodding into unconsciousness from the pills, before he had successfully affixed the plastic bags over his head and suffocated himself.
This is part of the futile and interminably self-punishing dialogue suicide survivors often have with themselves, the go-nowhere Dance of the Thousand If Onlys. For the other side of those musings is admitting that it is more likely (though not a certainty; I live with that painful truth) that Daniel was dead before I arrived back at the apartment the night before, after an evening’s work toward a tight deadline at my office. The closed door did not signal danger to me then, and I did not knock or see the note. No, I was not a woman like Portnoy’s mother. At that point in his life, Daniel was far more likely to choose the kind of woman who quietly respects privacy, who doesn’t like to pry and prod, who would understand his needs, yadda, yadda, yadda, and who would consequently misread the final brick in a towering wall of despair as a perfectly understandable request for temporary sick leave. It has taken me years not to feel guilt about this; I do and always will feel regret. There is a profound and important difference.
In those awful first moments, however, I stand absorbing the note’s message, stunned, my legs going weak. Now I am banging on the door, shoving myself against it, and shouting Daniel’s name. When I stop for a moment to listen for an answer, a sound, anything, from the other side, there is only a terrible silence, settled and complete.
The mind’s eye starts doing jump cuts here. I remember the next few hours only in a jerky, jumbled sequence. I know that once I had seen the note and it had registered that Daniel was not answering me, I ran to his office and dialed 911. Now I hear a strange sound issuing into the telephone receiver, a hysterical lady’s voice, surely not mine, talking too rapidly of pills and a boyfriend and a locked door and please send an ambulance now, right now. Well, something like it, for I can’t actually recall with any precision what I said.
Now, since I can do nothing about the locked door until help arrives, I am curiously driven to track through the apartment, roaming from room to room like some half-crazed zoo animal, with nothing to do but pace around the strange enclosure. What am I thinking? That Daniel is hiding under the discarded, claw-legged bathtub in a tiny back room used for storage? That he has somehow managed to squeeze himself in back of the refrigerator, or is planning to pop out from behind the bedroom door and say, “Fooled ya!”? I’m not thinking, just acting on dumb impulse. Yes, what I’d like is to make everything go back to “normal,” anything, any explanation at all besides the one that is forcing its way into unwelcome being.
All I will let myself imagine in these moments is that Daniel has taken an overdose of medication, that he is unconscious, that as soon as the ambulance gets here, salvation and recovery will begin. That’s it, an overdose, horrible enough, but right now, I am not thinking death, I will not allow death. “The heart did not believe,” goes a line from Leonard Cohen’s incantatory Beautiful Losers, and it is as accurate an expression of the human capacity to repel and deny loss as exists in the language. It’s not so much a survival skill as it is an instinct, one that springs alert with particular strength in the face of abrupt, shocking death, wrapping us in a kind of protective psychological padding that dulls the impact of trauma.
So, no, I am still not thinking death, I am only thinking, and I believe saying aloud, things like please hurry, please come, for Christ’s sake get here, come now, please. I don’t know how long I wait, perhaps no more than five minutes, I don’t think more than ten. Long enough to spin through the rooms, to shove myself against the door again, to shout Daniel’s name and hear the awful silence, and finally, to fall to my knees on the patterned carpet in the hallway a few feet from the locked door, and the note that adorns it, feeling the word NO rising from my diaphragm, passing through my throat, and flinging itself hugely and forcefully from my mouth. As though NO could break down the door. As though NO could rip back time, sweep over the past, and reset its clockwork, so that it could resume ticking into the future minus this tragedy-in-progress. As though NO alone could go up against death itself and win.
Yet even though I am still fighting the possibility of death, a small part of me is getting the picture, and is now starting to bargain with God, or the gods, to think irrationally that perhaps a person can be a little bit dead, and can change his mind and crawl back to life, be scooped up and returned to the living, if he is not too dead, that is.
Finally, two bored-looking cops arrive, their black boots clumping up the stairs, the synthetic material of their massive blue winter coats incessantly swishing as they move. The older, bigger cop is dark-haired and blue-eyed; the other is blond and so young and fresh-looking that I almost want to apologize for exposing him to this.
I gesture to the door, and after they jiggle the knob and push against it themselves, they tell me to stand back, they’re going to have to break it out of its frame. Shoulders to it, they heave their combined bulk just a couple of times, and I hear the oddly sickening sound of dry, old wood splintering, the wrenching give and groan of the heavy door falling inward and resting askew off its dislodged hinges.
Now that the door is open, the last thing I want to do, the last thing I am able to do, is enter that room. Shock has instilled in me a child’s literal-mindedness: Daniel said in that note on the door not to come in, so I better not. Now that I am allowing for the possibility of death—death that can be bargained with, and reversed, mind you—I’m also starting to let myself form mental images of what scene might await. “He was capable of cruelty; he was meticulous, theatrical,” writes Lynn Crosbie in her sad and beautiful poem for Daniel, “Geography.” In it, she also writes of him as a “sweet friend,” capable too of “rare, infectious bliss.” But perhaps it is that cruel quality of Daniel’s I recognize as I stand there, a quality that might have made him fashion some horrible tableau for the living to find. “An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art,” writes Camus of suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus. And what artful death, I could hardly have dared ask myself, had Daniel silently prepared?
It wasn’t like that, in the end, but I suppose I had cause to fear Daniel’s capacity for theatrics. He had told me of it himself and the memory of one such conversation stays with me. The previous summer, he and I had driven to Killarney to visit the family home of friends of mine, the prospect of “Jones camping” causing much hilarity in his circle. The general view was that the urban angst-man extraordinaire must be well and truly smitten to have agreed to let his Doc Martens tread on anything other than the concrete of a city sidewalk, to put himself beyond the orbit of the College Street caffe latte, even for a brief weekend. He did it happily, remarking on how strange it all was, how long it had been since he had placed himself in such a rugged environment, or done anything so outdoorsy as lounge on a wooden dock in a bathing suit, reading magazines. When he took a running dive and plunged into the cool lake, he popped up with a look of amazement on his face, and said, “I can’t believe I did that. I don’t know if I’ve ever done that,” to the amusement of everyone else strewn lazily around the dock. It was like watching someone who usually lived within the squeeze of a vice-grip start to feel some loosening up, once again using muscles, emotional and physical, that have atrophied over a long time. Later, we spent an entertaining evening playing cards with my friend’s good ol’ boy brothers, who took to Daniel, even though it was obvious he aroused suspicions that he was a city guy of some airs and book learning. Besides, his drink of choice was diet Pepsi, not Molson Ex. During a round of euchre, one brother turned to another and called him a “bohemian, bag-bitin’ whore.” Daniel and I exchanged looks and laughed till we nearly fell off our chairs. We swore later that we would race each other to immortalize this wondrous colloquialism in a book; I guess I win.
On the way back, we drove along roads that channel like arteries through Muskoka’s masses of billion-year-old granite. Daniel and I talked, as lovers getting to know each other do, of who we’d been before we’d met, long before, back even to the primordial ooze of high school. Amid the shared stories of teenage ineptitude and heartache was Daniel’s description of himself as a budding young high-school playwright. He admitted one of the reasons he liked to write his own plays was because he could give all the good roles to himself. “Like what?” I wanted to know. He thought about it, and replied casually, “Oh, well, God.”
Something about the way the word “God” hung in the air between us—the big kahuna of theatrical roles, none better!—evoked such naive adolescent audacity, a troubled boy’s yearning for mastery of his world. It was so astonishing that we both began to chuckle. I pulled the car into a picnic area along the side of the road so I wouldn’t lose control of the car as I was convulsed with laughter. Eventually we composed ourselves, and resumed our drive through miles of blasted-out Precambrian rock, back into the city, with its altogether different terra firma.
Daniel told me other stories that revealed his flair for drama, his desire to be at the centre of his own scenes, but that story, and the moment of its telling, in which he revealed so completely the innocent and all-too-human underpinnings of his self-aggrandizing tendencies, often comes back to haunt me. “I love you, Moira, and I’m sorry, even though you will not imagine it,” he wrote in his suicide note, only two seasons after our intimacy was at its promising beginning. Oh, but I do imagine it, Daniel, I have responded many times in dialogues I can’t help having with his absence. Unfortunately, I imagine it all too well, have endured much time in which about all I could do was imagine it, and that is the problem with this suicide of yours, Daniel, you see, the very big, heartbreaking problem.
So, for reasons I could not have articulated at the time, two images crowd my mind as I stand paralyzed in the hallway by the broken door, suspended between not knowing and knowing what Daniel has actually done. Neither of them makes sense, couldn’t occur simultaneously, much less if my chief image of Daniel unconscious on the couch is closer to reality. What I see is Daniel hanging dramatically, accusingly, somewhere in the room, perhaps from one of the towering and crowded shelves that hold his thousands of beloved books, or from the ceiling in the middle of the room, though this could not be, logistically or physically. I also see Daniel blown utterly apart, my mind making a metaphor of my deepest fear, that Daniel is now fragmented beyond reconstruction, forever gone, and that he himself has somehow enacted the horrible, unconscionable dismemberment.
That’s what I see, the messy, terrible aftermath of a furious and violent act. What I feel is his rage, a rage encompassing the whole imperfect universe, and the chaotic heap of self that he so desperately sought to escape, when it seemed to have slipped out of his control. Mostly, I think, it is rage saved up, gathering gale force over years and years, and then turned inward, transformed into self-loathing and suicidal depression. “I thought I was trying to change, but I was not,” is about the kindest thing Daniel says about himself in his final note, as he expresses the distorted notion that the only “right thing” for him to do is to remove himself from the planet entirely.
Young Cop and Older Cop do go into the room. I hear them murmuring, though I have no visual memory. Then, their boots clump to a standstill. A figure finally emerges from the room. Young Cop looks a little pasty as he looms before me. He is saying, “Why don’t we go and sit down?” He is leading me away from the living room and into the kitchen. And I’m thinking, Okay, so I don’t have to go into that room, I don’t ever have to see whatever sorry spectacle has unfolded there. I don’t want to see Daniel in this undignified and horrible state of self-inflicted death. If he’d wanted me to see that, would he not have left the door unlocked? Would he have left the note explicitly warning whoever found it—and he had to know the person was going to be me—not to come in?
I never do go into the room; I only catch a glimpse of Daniel’s resting body as I leave the apartment, as the ambulance attendants and cops prepare to navigate the steep and narrow staircase with their grim cargo of a six-foot-one, 200-pound, thirty-four-year-old dead man. I feel no desire to behold this. The man I knew and loved is gone. Absurdly, I am not in a position to identify his body officially anyway, not being his “next of kin.” That joyous job fell to his wife.
My memory of the last time I saw Daniel remains less violent, though it speaks of what was to come in a way I didn’t understand at the time. The day had been good, companionable, quiet. Daniel stood in the hallway as I was preparing to leave for an evening of work at my office, saying he was not feeling well again. He went into the living room and lay down on the couch. Before I left, I sat down beside him as he faced inward, put my hand on his shoulder and asked if he was going to be okay. He nodded a little. Anything he needed while I was out? He shook his head. I kissed him on the cheek and said, “I’ll see you later.” As I recall, he did not respond. If the time he cites in his suicide note is correct, a little more than an hour after I left, he swallowed his overdose and began preparing to suffocate himself with plastic bags—a method that comes courtesy of the popular recipe book Final Exit. Dr. Sherwin Nuland describes the method in his illuminating study of modern death, How We Die, as about the most painless and humane way there is to go.
As we settle at the table and the young officer pulls out his notebook, I’m asking, in what must seem a spaced-out way, “Is he dead?” Somehow, he of the fresh face and stammering tongue manages not to answer that question directly. I am given a further reprieve from the truth, though of course, I know by now it is true, has to be. Why would everything be so very strange if Daniel were not dead?
I’m asked if I’d like a glass of water. Everything is happening very slowly now, as though we’re immersed in something viscous, something jelling and holding us. Water? A glass of it? Are you going to get it for me? Why would you offer me a glass of water? I strain to understand, as though grasping the precise meaning of this question might somehow explain what is going on in the other room.
More cops arrive, and ambulance attendants. Soon the apartment is crawling with large men murmuring in deep, urgent voices. In the end, it is a burly, deadpan, sandy-haired paramedic entering the kitchen wearing latex gloves who tells me that Daniel is dead. What he actually says is couched in some kind of official-speak about there appearing to be “no signs of life,” that the coroner would have to confirm that and he’d be arriving shortly. Only at this point do I cry, though not yet in full-out sobs. I am after all a Wasp by training and upbringing. Loss of control will come later, alone.
For now, I sit like a good girl on my chair in the kitchen, feeling small and immobilized while the big men do their job. From where I sit, I see a blur of human traffic in the hallway, legs in dark pants, feet in boots, moving back and forth, clump, clump, clump. I fix on two objects on the carpet there. What are they, anyway? My jacket, curled and twisted in a heap, the arms inside out. I must have squirmed out of it and let it drop to the floor at some point. There’s my scarf in a pile nearby too. I watch, numbly fascinated, as the succession of legs and feet step over these things, until one cop notices them and picks them up, straightening out the jacket and hanging it and the scarf on the back of a kitchen chair. It’s the same officer who makes shhhh noises and rushes to close the kitchen door, seeing me put my hands over my ears as another cop in the hallway starts reading Daniel’s suicide note out loud in a mocking tone to the assembled masses of post-mort officialdom. I sit, listening in speechless horror.
At some point, Young Cop escorts me to the phone in Daniel’s office, so that I may call a friend. But which friend? My mind is so addled, I cannot remember a single phone number. I sit for a while in this different chair, Daniel’s chair, occasionally picking up the receiver and again, like a child imitating the movements of the adult world, press the numbered keys in what might be, but isn’t, a familiar sequence. Young Cop hovers awkwardly behind me, asking if I have an address book and could he get it for me? Well, yes, I have one, but it’s at my office, I explain.
It’s mortifying. I finally remember that one of the women I share a house with, Jeannie, will be at the Ryerson School of Journalism today, and of all the numbers that dwell in my head, this institution’s is the one I recall. An alarmed secretary—I guess I sound pretty bad—finds my friend and soon she is on her way over in a cab. The officers seem more able to talk with her than with me, for I recall bits of information being relayed to me through her as an intermediary. Older Cop—he who read Daniel’s last written words out loud—enters the kitchen and, apparently trying to offer some condolences, stands beside me and says, “Ya know, Myra—is that how you pronounce your name?—if he was that far gone that he was capable of doing something like this, you’re better off without him. With sick people like that, if it isn’t this year, it’s gonna be next, and there’s really not much you can do about it.”
So, Older Cop becomes the first in what was to be a long line of people to offer me pat truisms and pet theories about suicide, none of them useful to someone in the first stages of coming to terms with the actual suicide of a real human being she knew and loved. Yet training in handling suicides does exist for police officers; considering how woefully common it is for the police to deal with these situations—not least within their own ranks—it is difficult to understand why an officer at a downtown precinct of a metropolis with a population of millions would not know better. The last thing I hear, as I am being led down the stairs, I think by Jeannie and the one woman officer in the place, is Older Cop once again reading aloud from Daniel’s note, and a snippet of the conversation of two other cops, who are standing in what had been the bedroom. “Great apartment, eh?” says one. “Yeah,” replies the other. “Guy sure had a lot of books.”
At my office a few blocks down the street, I compose myself and phone several people I think should know what has happened. I seem to need to say it to believe it. I transmit the information, I hear the stricken voices respond, I don’t recall what was said to whom exactly. I’m afraid I have bad news. Daniel killed himself, yes, that’s right, yes, yes. In the middle of my grim task, an editor calls from Flare magazine, which has just published a story of mine. A local radio station wants to interview me later in the week, and the editor reminds me that in such interviews I should use the name of the magazine as much as possible, as in, “Well, Bob, as I wrote in Flare.…” “Okay, sure, no problem,” I reply. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” she says with a small giggle as she signs off. “Same to you,” I say as I hang up.
The woman officer knocks on the door. I gather some belongings, feeling dizzy, unreal. I follow her silently down the wide, sweeping staircase of this old building that was once an Orange Lodge in Toronto’s good Protestant Irish days, one my paternal grandfather probably belonged to, and which by 1994 was housing an alternative cinema, as well as the offices of various writers and artists. Jeannie is in the front seat of the cruiser, holding my bug-eyed cat in her arms. The cat, as opposed to Daniel, had wedged herself under the old bathtub, and must have cowered there all afternoon.
I sit in the cruiser’s back seat, shiny and worn from all the backsides that have graced it before mine, separated from those in the front by a wall of wire caging. I am surely one of the more docile passengers the car has transported. I stare through the window, up into the sky, beyond the tops of passing houses.
Is there something primal, universally human, in this intense urge to gaze toward the heavens after a death? The night my mother died, I sat outside in the October chill, compelled to watch the sky as dawn came, sure I saw her face in the wisps of cloud, moving slowly, grandly, through all the unique expressions of hers that are imprinted on my memory, passing overhead, dissolving, disappearing. Do we really imagine our loved ones have gone up there? Do we truly expect to see them waving goodbye to us, smiling, telling us they are going to be fine now? All I know is that I can’t seem to stop myself staring up at the whitish-grey, late-afternoon sky, enlivened only by the stark contrast of dark, bare-branched trees, a matte winter canvas on which to rest my battered senses, as the cruiser ferries us home. No, no signs of Daniel up in that frozen, empty sky.
My other roommate, Grainne, has returned from work early, having heard the news from Jeannie. She is standing in the living room when we come through the door. Seeing the look of genuine pain on her face, I suddenly, momentarily, understand how this death is going to affect the people surrounding him, even those who are closer to me than to him; yes, suicide kills everyone, as the English essayist G. K. Chesterton astutely observed. Grainne rushes to put her arms around me. We stand together like that for a long time.
Later in the evening, several other close friends come to the house, and we sit in the living room for hours, long into the night, as the phone rings and I must speak again and again to the growing circle of people who now know of Daniel’s death. We veer from deep and dreadful discussions of this thing that has happened, the reason that we’re all gathered here so abruptly, and lighter conversation that keeps everyone connected to the world beyond this tragedy. I sit in my chair in the corner of the room, nursing an Irish whisky someone has thoughtfully placed in my hand as I return once again from the phone and listen dazed as the people around me engage in an exchange about canoeing. Well, I am thinking, my head fuzzy from the combination of shock and alcohol, as I’m hit by a bizarre urge to laugh hysterically, Daniel is dead, and what better time to plan next summer’s excursion to Quetico Park? It makes no sense, but nothing does. I can suggest no other subject that would be more suitable for a roomful of people who don’t all know each other well, though they know me. Etiquette books say nothing about how to behave in the wake of a death by suicide, though Hallmark has recently designed a greeting card to send to someone grieving a suicide, with distinctly religious overtones. My friends’ gentle, intermittent attempts that evening to socialize politely in the midst of accepting the enormity of the loss at hand were touchingly human. It won’t be the last time that this sense of high absurdity will strike me in my struggle to accept Daniel’s death and its many sad consequences.
By two in the morning, everyone had either gone to bed or left, except the heroic Laima, whom I have known since I was a nervous nineteen-year-old at the University of Toronto. She had arrived earlier in the evening with her husband, Larry, both of them rather gussied up, which I didn’t understand until later, when I remembered that it was Valentine’s Day. My call had come just as they were heading out the door to enjoy a romantic dinner; instead of a relaxed, uninterrupted evening of candlelight and wine, they got suicide and canoeing in my living room. But I’m not aware of that right now, at 2 a.m. I say to Laima, “I just don’t think I can go to bed. I don’t think I can stand any darkness.” She insists I lie down on the couch and at least rest. Hands folded in her lap, her dark skirt flared around her, like some nursing sister of mercy keeping vigil in the flickering candlelight at the bedside of a wounded soldier, my beloved friend says she will sit by me until I do fall asleep. Finally, after a fitful half hour or so, I pretend that I am taking the longer, deeper breaths of sleep, so that she can go home and get some herself. She tiptoes out and quietly shuts the front door. I reluctantly, painfully, drag myself upstairs to my own bed.
All through the night, Daniel is with me, trying to struggle back from death; or is it all me, still trying to rescue him? He hovers in the howling February night outside my window, tapping on the glass, a Heathcliff blown in from the moors. I pull him through and try to still his shivering, to warm his near-frozen limbs. He hangs in my closet, and just in time I cut the lethal knot. He falls to the floor, red-faced and coughing, living and breathing nonetheless. He calls to me from the bottom of a dark well, and somehow I find the strength to pull him up from the echoing depths. He is washed ashore on tumultuous, crashing waves, pulled back into the roaring black water by a taunting and relentless undertow; still, I grasp his hand and drag him to the safety of the windswept beach.
In all of these visions, I imagine someone who does not, who cannot, wish to die. It was a mistake, surely. Can’t a person change his mind? Even when my thoughts aren’t involuntarily racing to produce an image or metaphor to shoulder my pain and fear, I feel Daniel surrounding me—this was the man I’d slept with the night before last, the night before his last night alive, the man who held me in his arms and said, “I love you so much,” in a tone that I will never forget, and that I now understand meant that he was saying goodbye to me. Lying there helplessly, I have what strikes me now as the most pitiable bout of magical thinking: If Daniel were alive, he would be so sorry for the grief he has caused. He would wish he hadn’t done this. He would want to take it all back.
These strange feelings carry me through the night, and are the first in a long series of visions, dreams, and nightmares that I will have as I struggle to fill Daniel’s absence with memories and fantasies of his presence. These images are not comforting: Daniel in prison, meeting me in the visitors’ area, clearly having been beaten. There is no escape, and so little I can do for him: Daniel in some hellish psychiatric institution, where he has been lobotomized and fundamentally changed, no longer himself; Daniel kidnapped and brainwashed by evil forces, locked away in a strange house, where I can’t find the way back out. Or, and this was a recurring and barely conscious hope that I admit with some embarrassment, Daniel is just away, gone to a far-off land; like some long-lost sailor in a classic folk tale he will one day appear on my doorstep, older and wiser, more weathered, altered, still recognizably himself, and filled with stories of pain and glory I am only too eager to hear, as we sip our tea, warm and safe, reunited by the fireside.
Yes, Daniel is many things in these visions, dreams, and nightmares, but the one thing he is not is dead. It will be four years before I have my one and only dream of Daniel in which he is not threatened or horribly changed or in some kind of danger. When I wake from it, I recognize that it was a dream in which Daniel at last appeared to me as he once was, not as I fear or wish he was, and that I had dreamed of him as I might have dreamed of anyone else in my life, without horror.
But it’s only my waking, rational self that understands what his absence means in the beginning of this process of letting go. And on the night after his death, this rational self is utterly swept away by deep pain and emotion.
I couldn’t have known, as I rose reluctantly to face the day that followed, that in this shattered state, I was about to embark on a long, arduous journey of mourning that I had no choice but to make.
The work of grief had only begun.