AS THE MONTHS AND YEARS HAVE PASSED since Daniel’s death, I have often looked back on those final days and wondered how it was that I never translated my inchoate fears of what might happen into the dreaded word “suicide.” At worst, I thought that if Daniel’s depressed mood continued to spiral downward, it would render him helpless to cope with living alone in his apartment and he would have to stay with me, or someone else who could help him recover. The most grim thought of all, I wondered if he would have to be hospitalized. That seemed like rock bottom, and I was prepared to do what I could to make sure Daniel didn’t hit it. I knew that his greatest fear was of a return to the severe terrors of agoraphobia he had experienced years earlier, when he was trying to conquer alcoholism. As he saw it, the drinking had merely masked the depression and phobia he had begun to suffer in his early teens, and that had laid in wait to pounce on him as he struggled to become sober.
The young American novelist Andrew Solomon, writing in The New Yorker in 1997, brilliantly described his harrowing bouts of depression at its most extreme—so paralyzing that he spent days in bed, lying in his own urine, rather than face the terror of even simple movement—in words that hauntingly echoed for me Daniel’s own graphic accounts of the affliction. So far, Solomon remains alive, with the aid of medications, supportive friends, an extraordinarily nurturing father who literally spoon-fed and washed his thirty-one-year-old son when he could not do it himself, and an admirable, unsentimental desire to affirm the value of life. Still, he heard what he calls the “seductress” of the suicidal impulse in his darkest times, knows others who have surrendered to it, and does not smugly suggest the siren call could never tempt him again.
Yes, that’s how bad it gets for some. And even then, survival is possible. Yet Daniel viewed the prospect of another round of alcohol abuse followed by the hellish symptoms of withdrawal as unendurable: “I’d rather chop my head off than go through that again,” he once told me dryly, as we sipped coffee on the outdoor patio of the Café Diplomatico one balmy day in June. He had explored some of the more horrifying aspects of that nightmare in his novel Obsessions. At the time, he seemed determined to never again find himself in such darkness.
Now, I know that given Daniel’s set of “risk factors,” and the place he would come to occupy as a statistic, he was practically a textbook case of a suicide waiting to happen: a young white male with a history of depression, alcoholism (though sober for eight years), previous suicide attempts, with a recent marital split and financial difficulties. These latter problems he sought to solve by doing something else that is a telltale sign of suicidality: getting rid of possessions, in his case, an impressive collection of modern firstedition books. There were also strained relations and outright estrangement from some family members and friends, and a string of disappointments concerning his work. Of course, if Daniel was in one of the highest risk groups for suicide, it occurred to me later that I, as someone predisposed to fall in love with a young man of this description, by virtue of my own age and sex and more personal identifying markers, had also entered a high-risk group, statistically speaking—the league of women demographically poised to mourn the suicides of these men.
There are statistics, diagnoses, categories and risk factors, trends and theories, and then there are real people and their unique lives. It seems that many still lack a language with which to adequately express, even to themselves, the nameless, formless despair that feeds on itself and grows bigger and more dangerous, more self-destructive. We speak now commonly of “depression,” though it is, as author William Styron writes in Darkness Visible of his own frightening bout of it, “a noun with a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word.” Forsaking any sense that profound feelings of sadness might have a spiritual dimension, a greater purpose, if only to alert us that something is very wrong internally and externally with our lives, with our whole beings, we seem to expect people armed with medical degrees and pharmaceutical compendiums—wisdom and compassion optional—to take away our pain, solve our problems, make us better with a scrawl on a prescription pad. But any understanding of depression (for lack of a better word) that reduces it to its organic causes and effects alone, and the people suffering from it to mere biological entities with lists of symptoms to be treated, is an impoverished one.
By all indications, however, suicide was always a possibility for Daniel. “It’s like all the trains came into the station at once, and there just weren’t enough tracks,” mused a friend shortly after Daniel’s death. The expanding freight of misfortunes culminated in what suicide experts refer to as a “triggering event.” In Daniel’s case, it was the news in early February that publication of his book of short stories scheduled in a matter of weeks—advance manuscripts of the work had been sent out to the media for review, and he was to read at Toronto’s Harbourfront reading series in March—had been delayed indefinitely. It was a situation fraught with acrimony and complications that did not die with Daniel, and which it must be said he played a part in creating, as he followed what appears to be in hindsight a relentless course of escalating self-sabotage. As is clear from his suicide note, it felt to him like a final, stunning failure, one that he did not believe he had the strength to redeem.
Yes, I look at all this today and can practically see a large movie marquee blinking brightly in the darkness above Daniel’s apartment, announcing:
VALENTINE’S DAY SPECIAL!
ONE NIGHT ONLY!
THE SUICIDE OF DANIEL JONES
STARRING DANIEL JONES
(This followed by, in much smaller letters, somewhere near the bottom: and Moira Farr as the girlfriend—who didn’t know).
In the context of statistics and risk factors I learned about after the fact, it seems odd that Daniel’s suicide would shock anyone who knew him. Yet despite the risk profile he theoretically embodied, or the fact that his writing had always been rife with references to suicide—indeed, took the reader all too closely into the troubled mechanics of the suicidal mind—no flashing sign proclaimed the imminent event. During his final days, Daniel did and said things and behaved in ways that he must have intended to throw me and others off the suicidal scent. Again, this is a not uncommon pattern for suicidal people. Time after time, survivors report with heartbreaking irony that if anything, the depressed people they have lost seemed in better spirits than usual in the days leading up to their suicides.
Those who study suicide say that the energy required to carry one out usually comes only when the person’s depression has lifted somewhat. What family and friends think with relief is a positive uplift in mood may only reflect the person’s own relief that he or she will soon be dead, and therefore no longer burdened with intolerable pain—or “psychache,” a term coined by Edwin Shneidman, the psychologist considered the founder of the field of suicidology. And so, all kinds of clues that seem so obvious once the person is gone add up to something quite different while he or she is still alive and functioning, doing it better than has been the case for some time.
And maybe that is true. In one of the most painfully resonant observations I have read on the subject, Alfred Alvarez writes in The Savage God: “A suicidal depression is a kind of spiritual winter, frozen, sterile, unmoving. The richer, softer and more delectable nature becomes, the deeper the internal winter seems, and the wider and more intolerable the abyss which separates the inner world from the outer.” I felt a terrible sadness when I first read these words, for their implied interpretation of all the changes Daniel tried to make in the last year of his life. Perhaps his embarking on a new romantic relationship was partly a desperate effort to allay the deep depression that always threatened to terrorize him. Once the first glow of the romance began to dim a little, I wonder, did he feel a huge sense of disappointment and even fear? Did he ever articulate the thought to himself that even grand feelings of love weren’t going to chase away his black dogs for good? Was this experience the painful backdrop for his unfolding suicidal plan? It hurts to think so, and for a time after his death, brooding on this fuelled much of my sadness and self-pity. Like the bumbling loser protagonist of E. Annie Proulx’s novel The Shipping News, I flagellated myself with a series of incriminating headlines bannering my brain:
STUPID WOMAN WANTS TO SETTLE DOWN
AND LIVE HAPPY LIFE, FALLS FOR DEPRESSED
WRITER
STUPID WOMAN FAILS TO SAVE SUICIDAL
BOYFRIEND
SAVE SELF, FRIENDS, EXPERTS URGE STUPID
WOMAN
For a time, I regarded with disgust a world that skips merrily along on unexamined romantic fantasies that love conquers all, love is all you need, love lifts us up where we belong, any kind of love is better than no love at all, and so on. I had so wanted to believe it. Daniel and I loved each other, no question of that. But, contrary to the pop propaganda, love wasn’t enough to obliterate despair, saved no one, did not mean never having to say you’re sorry, failed to lift us higher and higher, or coax us into believing that with this love of ours, which had no beginning and had no end, we could make everything all right. I endured an unpleasant period when I privately and bitterly seethed at those who believed that love had gotten them or someone they cared for through a tough situation. I envied them their unsullied faith in their own human powers, their sunny belief in a mellow and benevolent God who, when not restoring fallen baby sparrows to their nests, spends his time making everything nice for special little them. I viewed with contempt their ability to embrace an expansive sense of love’s capabilities, at a time when mine had been thoroughly destroyed. If there were a Heartbreak Olympics, I figured I deserved gold, and for a time, all I wanted to do was to rest on my dubious, self-awarded laurels.
This kind of bitterness is not uncommon among the mourning and the traumatized. Any illusion that you have control over your life or that of another has been viciously ripped away. Suddenly, you are cast out from the world of unravaged souls able to trust their own good emotional navigation, their own personal goodness, while you limp along, hopelessly flawed, a pariah, uninvited to the celebration of happiness you imagine everyone else is enjoying. If anything spurred me to get serious about facing the grief, it was my shamed feeling that I couldn’t genuinely extend good wishes for happiness to others.
Owning up to the fact that I was wasting a lot of time and energy feeling sorry for myself was humbling. “The world breaks everyone, and afterward some are strong at the broken places,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Perhaps his own eventual suicide indicates he did not include himself in the strong “some.” But it seems appropriate that a 1990 book heralding the new and widening focus on human “resilience,” as opposed to dysfunction, in social work and psychotherapy, takes its title from this bit of Hemingway. The book’s author, Linda T. Sanford, a Boston psychotherapist, interviewed people who had overcome extreme abuse and loss in childhood, many of whom had chosen work in helping professions. Some expressed dismay that their lives had been marked so severely by trauma, and wondered if they might have been different people, making different choices, if they had not had their bad experiences. But they were people who succeeded in spite of—indeed, because of—their wounds, people who tried to use their understanding and knowledge positively, genuinely believing they were wiser counsellors to the bereaved and traumatized owing to their own experiences. They could help others more effectively, since they could truly empathize with their pain; in this sense, something good had arisen from their own difficulties, something they came to accept and value on its own painfully born terms.
Healing, to be real and complete, doesn’t mean that scars reminding you of severe past wounds disappear. It can and should mean a restoration of one’s faith in the enduring possibilities of life and love: your life, your love. Tolstoy recognized this when he wrote, “Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.” The wise novelist’s words appear on the introductory pages of a well-regarded handbook for grief counsellors.
And so, though it stings to imagine it, for I naively assumed that the support and love I offered Daniel might at least offset some of his depression, I now wonder if he was playing some horrific game of chicken with himself in those final days. It is hard to read his suicide note’s careful accounting of what he finally decided to do and why, hard not to turn away from the unforgiving glare of the words he wrote in a trembling script, less than two hours after our last goodbye:
between 6:45 and 7:00 took approx. 45-50 Ativan (1 mg.) … shaking all over, but fully conscious … I would liked to be nearly passed out before closing the bag(s) completely around my neck with the rubber bands. Will this happen? I have handcuffs, to cuff myself in a position where I am incapable of tearing the bags … should I have to suffocate myself in full consciousness … I will go through with it, but it seems extremely unpleasant … I have long wanted to do it, but fear alone has prevented me.
I knew he was despondent over yet another rejected writing-grant application the previous week. He did not mention the postponed book to me, which he would have known about several days earlier. Yet he refers to it in his lengthy suicide note and, as though helpfully laying out evidence, he neatly compiled the terse, rejecting correspondence that must have stung so harshly in a prominent place on his desk. Lots of conflicting clues indicate now that he was enduring a kind of ambivalence towards life that is common among suicidal people, seesawing between “I will/I can’t” almost until his final hour.
Evidence suggests that the suicidal state is indeed hellishly Janus-faced. American journalist George Howe Colt, in his 1991 book, The Enigma of Suicide, cites many examples of people who, after surviving serious suicide attempts, express relief that they failed, and gratitude that their lives were saved—lives which, up to the very moment of their self-destructive actions, they apparently did not wish to continue. In one extraordinary instance, a man who survived a jump from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge (often referred to as the suicide capital of the world, though now fenced to prevent jumps, and routinely patrolled and monitored for would-be jumpers) explains how the moment he leapt off and was airborne, he understood with horror that he had made a mistake and suddenly felt a frantic desire not to die. Accounts such as these do nothing to comfort the loved ones of successful suicides, who may prefer to think that the deceased did not feel anything in the moments before dying or they were so sure of their course, they at least got their wish, and are no longer suffering. Painful though it may be to face, it is more likely that this is not so. It is standard now in the treatment and study of the suicidal to assume ambivalence, on one side of which is indeed a desire to live.
Those of us close to Daniel, and there weren’t many at that point, hadn’t been given enough overt reason to look seriously at how desperate he had become in so short a time. I had thought about calling his psychiatrist or one of his friends to confide my worries but didn’t, considering that meddlesome. Daniel’s psychiatrist, whom he liked and trusted, and had visited regularly for eight years, was stunned by the news of his death, and pored over his session notes from the previous weeks and months, vainly searching for decisive signs of Daniel’s shift into crisis that he might have missed.
Even Daniel’s efforts to divest himself of possessions and previous attachments, in one regard a classic precursor to suicide, could also be interpreted as healthy emotional housecleaning that he felt was overdue. Daniel had a rueful self-awareness of the obsessive-compulsive underpinnings of his book collecting. While visiting my sister in London, England, the previous summer, we had stopped at a curio shop window in which were displayed an array of T-shirts adorned with witty cartoons and captions. One showed a nerdish fellow with a serious expression sitting at a table on which were spread small round objects. The caption underneath said, “Fred was upset to find a Rice Krispie in his Corn Flake collection.” Daniel burst into a loud cackle of appreciation at this, tears forming at the corners of his eyes as we wended our way home. “I’m laughing because it’s true! It’s sick, that’s how bad it is, this collecting business.” (The next day, my sister went to buy the shirt for Daniel. It had already been sold; the problem is clearly endemic. Instead, she bought us each a T-shirt printed with the clean, green-and-white cover graphics of the original Penguin paperbacks — The Thin Man for Daniel, and Farewell, My Lovely for me. It was one of the first things I gave away after his death.)
And so, by Daniel’s own account, the hobby that gave him pleasure could also be a burden, just one more thing for the mind to find fault with and patrol for disorder to a picayune degree. On one occasion, Daniel returned from a bookstore foray with a remaindered novel by William T. Vollman, which had been listed in a collectors’ magazine as potentially valuable. Daniel had laughed as he showed it to me: “You see, I didn’t buy it because I want to read it. I have no idea why it’s considered valuable. But it was there, so I had to get it.”
On another occasion, I was perusing Daniel’s shelves and sat down on a box, one of many that littered the room, as he sorted through and put aside things he wanted to get rid of after he separated from his wife. “You’re sitting on my Tamarack Reviews,” he said, hovering behind me. I looked up, not sure what he meant. “It’s a complete set. There may only be one other one in Canada.” I stood, and Daniel, looking grave, took the box and placed it off in a corner, out of danger of being sat upon again. I couldn’t help teasing him a little afterwards. “How about I sit on your Tamarack Reviews?” I would say, when he seemed unnecessarily bothered by some minor matter.
Daniel’s obsessive-compulsive side also found expression in day-to-day routines. Unlike other men I’d encountered, Daniel was competent domestically, perhaps overly so, with a need to be surrounded by clean countertops and very organized shelves. Order comforted him, and his urge to stave off anxieties in this way was far greater than my own. My more laissez-faire style must have troubled him on some subconscious level. I had to smile at such times, as when, after I’d loaded a washing machine at the local laundry and slung the large canvas bag loosely onto a table, Daniel reflexively picked it up and folded it neatly.
Daniel himself was all too aware of the negative side of this compulsive obsessing over matters that pass almost unexamined through less fretful minds. There were occasions when he would explain some complicated situation to me, why he couldn’t do this or that, the double, or quadruple edges of some decision that had to be made, the mutually exclusive options that were not options at all, the endless looping spirals of detail painstakingly discerned and teased out and closely regarded. Sometimes I felt I’d lost the thread of the thing entirely and wanted to scream in frustration. Daniel was expert at fashioning existential knots around himself, the kind that only tighten further each time you try to loosen and move free of them, while I stood on the outside wondering impatiently why they couldn’t just be cut away altogether.
No, life was not simple for Daniel, and he lamented that himself, especially when it came to literary business. “I feel like I’m from the eighteenth century,” he once commented with dismay, as he groused about some linguistic offence committed in print that he wished to protest formally in a letter. He feared he’d be made to feel foolish by people who either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. He was punctilious about his own writing and editing, and could be savage about others’ mistakes or sins of sloppiness.
If details threatened to swamp him, a larger part of Daniel’s love of books and language was far from onerous. “I was aware of the delight that reading and purchasing books held for him. I was not, however, aware of his total passion for collecting until seeing his complete library,” wrote a Toronto book dealer, Janet Fetherling, in a catalogue she compiled of Daniel’s collection, which she bought after his death. “Here was someone who put his dust-jacket covers on with a folding-bone, owned specialised bibliographical reference material, and possessed a computer program for his records. Considering everything else he did, I don’t see how he found the time.” Daniel also found time to search out and read largely unknown works published by small Canadian literary presses. After his death, more than one writer remarked to me how pleasantly taken aback he or she had been to be approached by Daniel after publishing something in a chapbook or small-press edition, and how appreciative of his thoughtful comments and words of encouragement. The Canadian literary world can be a dispiriting place, where obscurity until awards have been won is the norm, sour grapes are a dietary staple, and praise where it is due a rarity. In this withering atmosphere, Daniel knew how much a small gesture could mean to a struggling writer. As he sorted through his books, he gave several to me that he thought I might like. The last one of these was The Lover of Horses, by Tess Gallagher, partner of the late American short-story writer and recovered alcoholic Raymond Carver, and herself a writer whom Daniel admired.
Even selling books could give him deep satisfaction. “Daniel enjoyed the disposal of books as well as the acquisition of them,” Fetherling also observed in her catalogue. “I’m sure I’ll buy more, and have just as big a collection sooner or later,” Daniel told me wryly, as he prepared for the grand clearance. It didn’t occur to me to confront him and say, “You’re not selling these because you plan to kill yourself, are you?” Especially in the beginning of our courtship, this sorting and selling seemed something he wanted to do, a symbolic starting over, and I didn’t question it.
Daniel had, after all, endured so much through his painful young years, and with immense effort, had survived serious depression, phobias, and the terrible places, both physical and emotional, that his alcoholism had taken him—alcoholism that functioned as a mask and a distraction from those other disorders. As is the case with hardcore addicts, once Daniel stopped drinking, he faced the real work of dealing with his fears and emotional problems. With much help from others that he acknowledged, he did that work, and had made his way. Without consulting a suicide risk—assessment checklist, there would have been no reason in the minds of his friends and colleagues to bring in the commital forms. Daniel would have vehemently rejected them anyway. In earlier poems and stories, he had captured the unique pathos of living in a mental ward. Daniel would have viewed a return there as a disastrous defeat and step backwards; for so long, he had moved himself away from that world, from that possibility.
When suicides happen, especially when we feel in hindsight that we failed to see what we should have seen, we must forgive ourselves. Demographers and various medical experts aside, we don’t generally view the people we love as micro-data units under the cold light of a larger statistical checklist of telltale signs, or assess them with clinical detachment (“I’m sorry, Daniel, but after consulting the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I’ve reached the conclusion that you are at a high risk for suicide. Get help, and goodbye”). Would the suicide rate be much affected if we did this? It’s absurd to seriously imagine so on a sociological level, but naturally I have asked myself whether knowing what I know now, I might have responded differently to Daniel as he slipped further into his lonely decision.
Forming a relationship with Daniel’s parents, in particular his mother, was one of the many unexpected things that happened after Daniel’s death. Our bond was a painful one, but it was also healing in unforeseen and subtle ways. I can say with some certainty that this relationship would not have unfolded if Daniel had not died. In such strange twists does suicide throw a wild card into the deck you thought you knew well enough to predict, drawing you off in startling directions, challenging you to play an unfamiliar new hand.
Daniel had been estranged from his father for many years; there was only a handful of contacts between them after Daniel left home for university. Nor did his sister keep in touch with Daniel; I met her only once, at his funeral. Daniel was not comfortable visiting his parents’ home, and maintained a connection only with his mother, who met with him occasionally when she visited Toronto. Clearly, the reasons for this estrangement were a source of great pain to the family, and there was little of the difficult times of the past that they wished to discuss. I knew how Daniel viewed it, and it was in fact with considerable wariness that I approached his family at all. But I saw how his parents suffered, how deeply they grieved the loss of their son. Sustaining anger, blame, guilt, and shame aimed at ourselves or others would not bring him back. Painful and emotionally complicated though it will always be to consider the reasons why, the Joneses and I got to know each other.
There is a strong physical resemblance between Daniel and his father, gestures and expressions in common that were difficult for me to watch playing over Mr. Jones’s face when I first met him. Daniel’s mother was shattered by her son’s death, and she and I tried in our different ways to support each other in the months just after his death. We were obsessed with its details, as though repeating it over and over in our minds, backtracking and probing around and reconstructing it would finally allow us to accept it as real. Those who study bereavement know there is a risk that grief-stricken people will become stuck in this phase of mourning, and counsellors gently steer people along this intense course. Yet fixating on the details of the death in the immediate aftermath of it is normal, even necessary for some. It constitutes a means of orienting the wounded heart and mind to the new reality that should not be suppressed.
Over lunches together, Mrs. Jones and I perused photos taken in the months and weeks before the suicide, and pored urgently over the events of Daniel’s last days, as if our own lives depended on getting a clear and precise picture. In some ways, they did. We shed tears together. As time went on, we sent letters back and forth, just to keep in touch, sometimes speaking of Daniel and the pain we felt, sometimes just sharing news of our lives. There were visits to the Joneses’ home in a small community in southwestern Ontario. On one occasion Mrs. Jones and I knelt on the floor surrounded by photo albums and shoeboxes full of more photos and the usual parents’ mementoes of a young son’s or daughter’s life: This was Daniel when, and here he is again, and again and again. A sweet-looking blond boy, swinging on swings, playing cowboy with his sister, opening Christmas presents, visiting the zoo, off to the high-school formal with a pretty girl.
Mr. Jones was less expressive of his emotions during our visits, yet he struggled to understand too. Ironically, he gave me one of the most tender remembrances of Daniel, as we stood by the open trunk of his car unloading an array of plants from a local nursery. “The first book he ever read was Mrs. Duck’s Lovely Day,” he told me. Daniel would sit on his lap as a child barely old enough to talk and recite the jolly little tale. He was so bright, Mr. Jones marvelled, so quick to memorize and read, so naturally good at every subject in school.
I ached with sadness listening to this. Such a grim, absurdly long way from Mrs. Duck’s Lovely Day to Final Exit, the suicide recipe book the coroner found resting in plain view on a bookshelf near Daniel’s body, the book that so helpfully provided the method of self-destruction Daniel had employed, as well as the template for his suicide note cum last will and testament. I share Dr. Sherwin Nuland’s mixed feelings, outlined in his excellent work, How We Die, on the place of a book like Final Exit in our culture. Its claims of humanitarian concern for the pain of the terminally ill won it a longstanding spot on bestseller lists starting in 1991, and it is still available in glossy paperback. I have found myself hiding it behind other books when I come across it on bookstore shelves, a small personal protest that helps me more than it hurts sales of the book, I am sure. It continues to be implicated in the suicides of more and more depressed people, beyond the terminally ill population for whom it is supposedly intended. I sympathize with those who face lengthy suffering from terminal conditions, and I don’t believe in censorship. Still, I find the book’s existence and widespread availability an affront.
Now I want to know, how does a person travel in thirty-four years from such blissful innocence to a state of fear and self-loathing so powerful that it seems the only way out is to die? I know it happens all the time. Some people don’t even make it to thirty-four. Some don’t even get a grace period from too much knowing in their very infancies. Yes, unconscionable though the thought is, children, too, kill themselves.
Later, in my long quest to understand why this happened to Daniel, why it happens to anyone, I experienced a moment of epiphany while reading Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child. The renowned Swiss psychoanalyst explores the early underpinnings of adult neurosis, all the subtle and intricate familial and social pressures that lead a person from earliest infancy to squash his unique qualities and construct a “false self.” This narcissistic self seeks to safely negotiate the world on the world’s terms, craves to be loved, but fears to its core that this love, so essential for its very survival, will never be given if the true self is revealed in all its resplendent, yet apparently unacceptable, colours.
To a greater or lesser degree, we all fear this, molding ourselves to fit the place we are given to occupy in the world, however accommodating or untenable it may be. If we’re lucky, as we grow into adulthood, we find ways to adjust as necessary to live more comfortably in our own skins, and muster the courage to allow our real selves to emerge for others to accept or reject as they wish. As mature people, we manage to sustain a healthy, balanced sense of self, despite external judgments, good, bad, or indifferent. We know and accept who we really are. The not-so-lucky instead totter along a precarious course, swerving dizzily between inappropriate grandiosity (“I’m great, it’s the world that’s an ass and the cause of all my problems!”) and vicious self-hatred (“Could there be a lower form of scum than me?”). Some get stuck in one or the other of these dead-end pathways, or make side-trips down the more dangerous roads of addiction, mania, depression, and suicidality.
But even these hazardous states can eventually be transcended, Miller says. She includes an extraordinary quote from one of her patients, a woman who had survived a serious suicide attempt when she was 28 years old, and reflects at age 40 on how she came to view herself and her life differently over twelve years:
The world has not changed, there is so much evil and meanness all around me, and I see it even more clearly than before. Nevertheless, for the first time I find life really worth living. Perhaps this is because, for the first time, I have the feeling that I am really living my own life. And that is an exciting adventure. On the other hand, I can understand my suicidal ideas better now, especially those I had in my youth—it seemed pointless to carry on—because in a way I had always been living a life that wasn’t mine, that I didn’t want, and that I was ready to throw away.
Often, this passage has floated up from memory to comfort and sadden me. On the one hand, it is a testament to the possibility of healing, growth, and transformation, irrefutable proof that a suicidal person can overcome and make sense of his or her self-destructive yearnings. It happens all the time. I’ve done it myself.
How often I have wished that Daniel could have done it too. In choosing suicide, it seems he was in some way attempting to kill off a false self that no longer served him well, that never had, really. If only the fog of depression clouding his mind had lifted enough in those decisive moments for him to see that it is possible to discard a false self metaphorically, spiritually, that killing off the body that houses the self is literally a case of overkill. It is part of the human condition to transform ourselves. Less violently, we shuck off old ways of being, false or otherwise, and ease into new ones throughout the span of our lives. To let go of the past, however, you have to imagine that something is there to succeed it, and in the end, Daniel, regrettably, lacked that sense. For him, it seems, change equaled trauma, growth equaled terror. In such a state, paralysis and suicidal depression don’t seem so out of place.
I believe that for a time, Daniel had faith in the future, but when a pattern of disappointment kindled despair, he felt himself pulled back into the past, overwhelmed by its echoes. Touchingly, he still grappled with the yearning to redo his early years. “Sometimes I feel like I’m 110 years old,” he plaintively told me once, “and sometimes I feel about eighteen.” Daniel expressed this in his short story “A Torn Ligament,” from his last collection, The People One Knows, published posthumously:
I was an alcoholic for ten years. I have not had a drink for six years. The story I am writing is not a complicated one. It has been written before. I am a writer in my early thirties. I want to capture on paper those years when I was still young, before I wanted to be a writer. I want to do this because I wish I could live those years again. I want those years back that I wasted as an alcoholic. I want to be twenty again, not in my early thirties.
The difficulty—and this is why I must rewrite the story, to get this right—is that I can write the story about my past, but I can no longer feel what I felt then. I want to say: This is how it was to be young and to think I was in love. But I no longer know how it was. I cannot remember. If I say, This is why I drank, this is what it felt like to be young and to think I was in love—if I say this—I know that the story will be a better story, but also that it will be a lie.
In the story, the woman whom I call Assa is portrayed as if she does not love the narrator—does not love me. But is it not the alcoholic young man—me—who is unable to love Assa? Is it possible that I was not able to love her, that I hurt and rejected Assa? Could the story have turned out differently? I do not know. I do not know.
Painful as it is to read Daniel’s precisely executed fiction, I force myself, and it reveals much. It often strikes me that in his writing, he operated with the cool-eyed detachment of a coroner, performing the autopsy on his own life and dutifully reporting the findings, however unpleasant. To write so clearly of such obsessive solipsism—to observe and comment so subtly on one’s own failure of imagination—takes some richness of imagination, an impressive level of creative intelligence. Daniel had to have achieved some protective distance from the self he wrote about in order to perceive the young narrator’s dilemma with such acuity. But not quite enough distance, it seems in hindsight, to move safely beyond the emotional paralysis that set in with all that looking backward. In the eyes of a man in a state like that, there could be, literally, no future. It’s no coincidence that “no future” was one of the original punk movement’s most famous anthemic assertions—a recent book that explored the early years of punk is entitled Please Kill Me. Daniel, as a fiercely troubled, talented young man determined to drink himself to death, was inexorably drawn to the scene’s nihilism, which he documents with raw force in his novel, also published posthumously, 1978.
I think of Alice Miller’s false-self theory as well when I look at the last photos of Daniel, taken a few weeks before his death by a friend. There is Daniel, all leather jacket and buckles, his ears multi-pierced, his head recently shaved bald, his demeanor alienated young-mannish. But for me, the Daniel in these pictures is a disturbing pastiche, a jumble. His large, expressive eyes belie the toughness I assume he meant to project. The first time I saw the images, they troubled me, even before his death. The tragically hip persona he seemed to aim for simply didn’t convince, not me anyway. After his death, the photographs struck me even more as gravely out of kilter, images of a man not sure just who he is or who he wants to be, a thirty-four-year-old who’s really eighteen going on 110—a bit of a mess.
Now it is an overcast day in late September, eight months after Daniel’s death. I am standing with Mr. and Mrs. Jones at the grave site where their son’s ashes are buried, a family plot in a sprawling cemetery in Hamilton, Ontario, where a tree has been planted, and where a salmon-pink marble bench, JONES carved simply into it, sits on the well-tended grass. Jones, of course, is the family name, but also the one-word moniker that Daniel used to go by as a young poet, and with which many are still in the habit of referring to him, though he added “Daniel” later, and regretted having used only his last name as an affectation of youth. (The Library of Congress, he discovered to his chagrin, will not change the names of authors, ever, for any reason, and so he is “Jones” and only “Jones” in that system forever and ever, amen, based on the entry for his first book of poems, The Brave Never Write Poetry. Live and learn. His later books appeared with his full name despite this.)
Standing silently at the memorial spot, seeing the name stark like that, it is these echoes I hear, of this old Jones—”Jonesy,” even, to some of his former cronies—that Daniel despised and seemed so driven to kill off. No, that Jones was not a very attractive character, although he certainly had his admirers, people who revelled in the outrageous rebellion of the bad-boy poet, the drunk punk who dared pull down his pants at a public reading, who made rude scenes challenging those he found pompous or otherwise objectionable, who wrote defiantly obscene poems, such as the one still considered a classic by some, “Things I Have Put into My Asshole.” (These things include the CN Tower.) Though it would without doubt pain Daniel to know, this youthful rant against authority and convention, Toronto-style, written more than a decade earlier, got posted by an anonymous fan on telephone poles and buildings around downtown Toronto after his death, and on several anniversaries thereafter.
Oh, Daniel. I know this is not what you planned, I couldn’t help thinking as I stood there, not what you would have wanted to be most remembered for, nor to rest into eternity in a cemetery in the home town you didn’t remember fondly (though where else, I wonder—in an urn sitting on the counter of the Bar Italia, where you used to like to meet people and drink coffee?). It was your friend Kevin Connolly who made a remark to me, a little angry at you and protective of my sanity when I was too far gone in my grief, as a tangled group of friends and colleagues waded through the mire of decisions about how your work would be handled after your death: “Maybe he should have thought of this and stuck around. I think the living have some rights here.”
It saddened me that people who hadn’t been a part of Daniel’s life for years rushed to publicly eulogize the young man they remembered from ten or twelve years earlier. Of course, they were and are entitled to their memories. I had also known, or more accurately known of, Daniel back in those days, when we were both students at the University of Toronto’s University College—we even won the same college literary award one year, a fact that made me laugh when many years later I saw listed on Daniel’s résumé the esteemed Norma Epstein Award for Creative Writing. As wide-eyed, bright young things from modest homes in provincial towns, where higher education is not a given, and only a few high school students considered odd in some way leave to pursue it (and to escape feeling odd), we shared the experience of navigating an unfamiliar groves-of-academe world that operated on social formulas and codes of which we were painfully innocent. We traded recollections of our days slouching miserably through the same Victorian hallways with our knapsacks of literary anthologies and fat old novels during the late seventies and early eighties. Daniel’s fictionalized account of these years appears in his novel 1978. If I was a typically gloomy female undergraduate, scribbling my Plath-inspired poems, drawing liberally on all manner of death imagery, Daniel experienced feelings of alienation, anxiety, and depression to a far more alarming degree. Passages of 1978 that describe the narrator at his most stone-drunk and debased, barely able to dress himself properly or function in his job as a kitchen helper at the college’s dining hall, are chilling.
Why did this young man carry so much anger? It seemed Daniel by then felt extremely alone, at odds with the steel-town, working-class reality he had recently come from, while furiously unable to fit into the culturally complacent world of middle-class student life, such as it was at a rather stuffy Canadian university that still served afternoon tea in china cups at the genteel Women’s Union reception room, and retained its share of ageing, duffer faculty members. It is no wonder that a whip-smart, creative, and undeniably fucked-up boy like Daniel would do the emotional equivalent of sticking his finger in a light socket during these years. He wasn’t the only one—1978 is also a document of the brutal world occupied by young punk wannabes, many of them primally screaming their complicated emotions, produced by family dysfunctions, a fragmented society that seemed to reward the compliant and marginalize the less acquiescent, and in which questing, sensitive young people might well conclude they had “no future.” If the alcohol-dazed Daniel found any kind of home in those days, any kind of resonance between his inner self and outer reality, it was in the stark, violent, unforgiving culture of punk.
Our paths hardly ever crossed, except one night at a party I attended in the tiny apartment of a friend in 1982. The place was overflowing with hopelessly jejune university students, mostly in their early twenties. It was hardly a salon soirée or Dadaist happening, but all of us were doing our best to pretend that our avant-garde activities were on a par with those of the artistic denizens of Paris in the twenties, or some other bohemian, and of course better, time and place. There were poetry readings, some dance, or at least, movement, performances, much drinking, and dope smoking. I noticed the tall, skinny, blond guy with rather fierce eyes, the skin dark beneath them, sitting in a chair to the side. I recognized him from around the campus. Tonight he was talking loudly, bossing people around, acting like he owned the place. A young man and woman moved to the centre of the living room and began playing cello and violin. They were not very good, and the little crowd looked bored. The blond man began waving his hands at them like some ill-tempered stage director. “Oh, oh, you’re awful,” he said, fixing them with a heavy-lidded, contemptuous stare. “That’s really bad, do you think you could stop? Really.”
I remember being amazed anyone could be so bold and so cutting. Abysmal the pair might have been, but it would have been kinder to just grin and bear it. People began snickering and murmuring among themselves. There was no way the two could continue playing; they quietly packed up their instruments and skulked away. What an asshole, I thought. For the rest of the night, he buzzed around, exuding an air of being far above everyone else. In hindsight, I imagine that he was masking the fact that he was scared shitless, of everything and everyone.
“Who was that?” I remember asking a friend some time afterwards. He told me he was Jones, the poet, and regaled me with further tales of his legendarily atrocious, alcohol-fuelled misbehaviour. I was indignant at some of the stories, particularly descriptions of at least one violent public fight with his girlfriend at the time. I told my friend that if he ever hosted another gathering that Jones would be attending, he could count me out.
I forgot about this Jones over the next few years. Eventually, I stumbled on his writing again, found some of it good, some of it not to my taste. I also heard somehow through the grapevine that he had given up drinking, had married, was getting his act together. I would see him now and then bouncing along with his distinctive jackrabbit gait around the College Street West neighbourhood and environs where we had both ended up living. When we met up again in 1993 and I told Daniel of my less than fond memories of him, he was mortified. He said later that he assumed I would never want anything to do with him, and admitted that it was all true, just how bad he was back then. But it was hard to make the connection between the younger, disturbed character I’d heard of and observed myself, and this kind, generous, attentive, rather subdued man in his thirties. Our numerous long and candid conversations convinced me that he had indeed grown and changed.
After his death, every time I read or heard a remembrance that disregarded the man Daniel was trying to become, I marvelled at the blindness that allows someone to imagine that nothing of importance happened in another person’s life once they, the eulogizer, were no longer a substantial part of it. While these people mourned the past, I was mourning the present, real time, and a future that was never going to be.
“He was a predator,” one woman who had apparently dated Daniel briefly more than a decade earlier was quoted as saying in one newspaper column. I shook my head, recalling the man who had stood on my doorstep one day the previous spring, a box of custard tarts from the Portuguese bakery down the street held in one hand, and a bag of fresh, blushing apricots in the other, how he’d smiled and practically said “Aw, shucks, ma’am,” as he handed me these offerings, and came through the door and into the kitchen. He scooped up my cat and began stroking her ears. There was nothing insincere or aggressively louche about this Daniel I got to know. Any revelations about his past behaviour came from his own mouth; he was quite capable of beating himself up over it with no posthumous help from others.
Was it only “Jones,” the angry young drunk, who would be remembered now? I stared at what seemed to me distorted tributes, and thought of one of the pieces of writing he was working on when he died, an essay on male alcoholic writers. He believed they tended to be celebrated and admired for all the wrong reasons. He had felt his own alcoholism as a yoke, a burden, something he had had to break free of before he could write anything he could respect. I struggled to figure out myself how best to honour the memory of the sober, still conflicted, older man I watched struggling so hard to mature and transform himself. This was one of the cruelest ironies of all surrounding Daniel’s suicide—that the old, alcoholic self he did not value, the false self he most wanted to kill off, was the self that was immediately, publicly, ghoulishly, resurrected.
DEAD POET SOCIETY, screamed the headline on the cover of the entertainment weekly eye, beside a huge photo of Daniel, two years after his death. In the article, former cronies whinged about his work, in their judgment gone downhill since the heady days of their association with him. From the two-hour conversation I had with the reporter, he extracted one sentence fragment, in which I’d divulged that Daniel left a note tacked to the locked door of the room in which he’d killed himself. The story seemed to have been written, complete with yellowed snapshots, long before the young reporter asked for an interview. Jones the outrageous stalked the world again. It was a sad and incomplete portrayal, a projection of spurious, romantic notions of what it means to live “on the edge,” with the appalling implication that once Daniel had stopped abusing himself with alcohol, he lost his inspiration—even, preposterously, “sold out.”
It wasn’t the first such inane projection to surface. “He could have been a Jean Genet,” went one wistful musing in a previous tribute, suggesting that if only he’d been more diligent and patient, he could have realized his talent, and that it was simply a hissy fit over not getting enough attention that had sparked his suicide. When I read this, I thought, what utter horseshit. He could have been Daniel Jones, and that was good enough! I grew irritated with the repulsive drive to situate his death as a literary event, which he in some ways had succumbed to himself. I wanted to shout, Don’t you see, it wouldn’t have mattered a good goddamn if he never wrote another word—his life had value beyond his literary efforts, and it’s a crying shame he didn’t see that himself.
These were the raging thoughts that plagued me in the confusion after his death, and again during the week, two years later, when every time I passed a café or corner store, Daniel’s photo, trapped with the dead poet society headline in unforgiving newsprint, stared up at me from leftover eyes strewn in their racks throughout the city for all to see. I recalled the relaxed July morning that photo was taken by Sam Kanga, a young photographer, with Lynn Crosbie and Clint Burnham posing along with Daniel at the pool tables at the Bar Italia for the cover shot of The People One Knows, everyone chatting comfortably, hamming around for the camera. “I’ve never seen him so serene,” Lynn told me that day as we sat sipping coffee afterwards. “When he called and sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me on my answering machine, I knew he must be in love,” she teased. Her friend was usually so much more reserved and serious, his leisure pastimes more along the lines of perusing the Grand and Toy catalogue, dreaming of new office supplies. Before he’d gone away for the weekend with me in Killarney, he had called Lynn to tell her that he was doing this unusual thing, perhaps hoping for moral support and sisterly approval from a fellow depressive. “Your books and catalogues will still be there when you get back,” Lynn had counselled. “Just go have some fun.”
Now I avert my eyes from that summertime photo of Daniel the serene. “Don’t let other people taint the sense of love and significance you feel about your time with Daniel,” advises Daniel’s psychiatrist. “He loved you,” he assures me. But this is not much comfort, no shield against others’ twisted, hurtful perceptions.
Contemplating the long remove between the fantasies people have about death, especially suicide, and the paradoxical reality of it always saddens and angers me. Daniel, of all people, understood how little glory there is in depressive illness, and admitted to the end that he feared pain and regretted what he was doing, even as he did it, arguing to himself and anyone who read his note that he had no other option. Yet possibly he wished to the end that he could still, maybe, find one. A poet from Daniel’s former circle began cynically referring to his suicide as a “career move.” He even wrote a bitter little poem about it. It appalled me that someone who’d once counted himself a friend of Daniel’s would display such callous disregard for his final tragedy, but it should not have surprised me. People naturally seek to distance themselves from horror with this kind of glib, black humour. It is easier to bend someone into unflattering caricature without thought for the impact it might have on those he knew and loved.
Several rumours circulated after Daniel’s death: He had just found out he had AIDS; he had plagiarized his forthcoming book of short stories; he’d been seriously hitting the bottle for months, and had been spotted getting hammered in various bars; as editor of the literary magazine, Paragraph, he’d planned to include in the last issue he edited before his death a series of photographs taken by a friend in which she depicts herself as a character in various suicidal poses. Actually, Daniel had long admired her surreal and haunting photography on a wide range of themes. She has since won international acclaim for her work. She later told me how stunned she was to be approached by someone who remarked, “I guess you must feel bad about those photos,” as if they had somehow instigated her friend’s suicide. Had someone also relayed to me that Daniel had been spotted slaughtering goats on the waterfront one midnight by the full moon, I would not have been surprised.
It was hard to take the rumours seriously, disheartening to imagine them believed. When the coroner’s report from the obligatory autopsy cited “traces” of alcohol, some swooped in to say “Aha!” The finding confirms nothing. There was no alcohol in Daniel’s apartment, save mouthwash and possibly cough medicine, and Daniel hadn’t left the place for several days before his death. He was no Aqua Velva man (Hermit Sherry had been his plonk of choice at his worst point a decade earlier), though he might have gargled. It would have been difficult for someone who hadn’t had a drink in eight years to suddenly start a wild binge, yet hide it entirely from someone with whom he had almost daily contact. There is no good cause for such speculation; at most, Daniel’s fear, justified or not, that he might return to a life of alcoholism would have been just another reason in his mind to kill himself.
For some, though, suicide equals melodrama. There must be some obvious cause and effect, some single coherent reason why it happened, someone to accuse. I was myself accused of all manner of baroque nastiness, from murder to bad manners, and of anonymously penning a story sympathetic to Daniel and critical of his publisher in the national satirical magazine, Frank. To this day, I have no idea who wrote the curious squib in question. It might have been well meant, but was filled with sloppy factual errors, and caused more problems than it solved.
When the prosaic truth fails to live up to expectations, overheated imaginations are brought into play. This impulse to embellish is linked, I think, to the ambivalence we all feel, yet may not wish to acknowledge, about the person who has left this way, surely making a statement, a damning comment, a “take that,” or a “woe is me, and here is the final proof.” It’s easier to respond with a black-and-white theory, to fashion a coherent narrative momentum and linear chronology for the person’s life, which stops with the resounding THE END of his suicide—and the epilogue containing the final judgments of the living.
“Ah, the ‘pitchfork’/’halo’ scenario,” said Karen Letofsky, executive director of the Survivor Support Programme in Toronto, during a counselling session after Daniel’s death. There was comfort in learning that these kinds of stark, cartoonish reactions are quite common, as people seek to either sanctify the deceased or throw him into the burning fires of hell. Short shrift is given to the irresolute, contradictory nature of suicide—the person’s motives, the circumstances surrounding the event, our responses.
If the living must live with mere interpretations, speculative and incomplete, they must also live with a burning curiosity about just how the person who did the deed interpreted the suicide himself. This is certainly the case in the period immediately following the death. Marc Etkind, author of a slim yet astonishing volume of collected suicide notes entitled … Or Not To Be, describes himself as a television documentary producer who, “except for a handful of coroners and psychologists … has probably read more suicide notes than anyone else,” and suggests that virtually everyone on the verge of suicide, certainly those who leave notes behind, has a distorted perception of what he or she is doing, and the impact the suicide will have.
If suicide notes are indeed attempts at communication, then they are dismal failures. We all hope that as we near death, we’ll have a moment of understanding, where our thoughts crystallize and we can sum up our existence with eloquence. But if the suicide attempter had this moment of understanding, he probably wouldn’t kill himself. And there lies the ultimate paradox of the suicide note: If someone could think clearly enough to leave a cogent note, that person would probably recognize that suicide was a bad idea. Or as Edwin Shneidman writes, “In order to commit suicide, one cannot write a meaningful note; conversely, if one could write a meaningful note, one would not have to commit suicide.” Suicide notes, written when people are at their psychological worst, are anything but the voice of clarity. Instead they are bizarre, rambling, angry and, above all, sad documents of disturbed minds.
While I agree that people who kill themselves are at their psychological worst, I would also argue that the notes they leave behind are not entirely meaningless. A suicide note can be rife with meaning—just not the one solely intended by the deceased. It would be hard to top “Dear Betty, I hate you. Love, George,” one of the shortest notes Etkind includes in the book, for succinct conveyance of a point; indeed, the essential marrow of meaning at the heart of an entire life, that may have eluded both poor George and Betty, but not a distant reader of such a compact novel in a note.
However dubious on an emotional level, suicide notes require a certain degree of rationality to write, and have been recognized in law numerous times as “holographic” wills, that is, legitimate statements of the last wishes of the deceased. It is this principle that guides the concise instructions for writing a suicide note in the form of a legitimate will in Final Exit. And so, Daniel, capable of reading a book, absorbing the information it contained, and acting on it, was executing a relatively straightforward series of physical steps in a logical fashion, including the writing of a suicide note. In it he says that he hadn’t planned to write it, just scribbled it “off the cuff.” It does not surprise me that Daniel, being a writer, would join the fewer than one in five suicides, according to Etkind, who leave suicide notes. And for someone who had not intended to write a note, he certainly picked up a head of steam quickly enough upon beginning the task. Along with its expressions of self-loathing and extreme psychological suffering, the note is filled with instructions that detail, with characteristic punctiliousness, if not always straightforward logic, what he wanted done with his work. He also revealed his self-doubts: “To plan my final publications is a bit self-centred—I will be dead; the work may not be any good.”
Difficult though reading this in the days after his death was, it was Daniel’s situating of his suicide in a literary context that I found hardest to accept. I empathize with any writer’s frustration, even despair, over how difficult it is to fashion a writer’s life, particularly in Canada, where to sell a few thousand copies of a work of fiction or poetry is to be a roaring success, and to sell a few hundred is more the norm. Yet I cannot accept that this was worth dying for. Nor can I accept Daniel’s placement of his suicide in linked formation with suicides of the past (he dedicated his note to the late Robert Billings, another Canadian poet who combated mental problems and killed himself amid a turmoil of bad relations with friends and publishing colleagues), thereby somehow dignifying the act beyond its depressive underpinnings. In this, I believe Daniel was dead wrong. Others too viewed Daniel’s suicide as in some way redeemed by its larger literary import, even went so far as to hope that his suicide note would eventually be published as a literary text, a final addition to his oeuvre.
I found it all offensive. The one thing I will not do is make Daniel’s death lyrical. There is nothing exalted about death, particularly suicide. It is grossly physical, ugly, and monstrously intrusive, from the finding, removal, and identification of the body, to the autopsy, the funerals, and memorial services, the morbid tasks that must be performed far longer than anyone imagines could possibly be endured. Suicide is also so terribly banal, the moment of death itself mechanical, mundane, more anticlimactic than anyone’s “Goodbye, Cruel World” fantasies would have it. I think most of us, in our death-denying culture, don’t like to ponder how close our living selves are always, potentially, to death. How fragile we are. One moment, a man is standing in his bathroom flossing his teeth, or filling a coffee pot at the kitchen counter; the next, he is downing an overdose of pills and placing a plastic bag over his head; moments later, life unceremoniously transforms to death. Daniel’s autopsy report itself I only scanned quickly before stuffing it into a file folder for good, and have had to block it from my mind. The thought of a young body clinically invaded that way, let alone one I knew intimately, surpasses my ability or desire to imagine.
It is the living who must cope with the horror and absurdity of it all. One of the most helpful books I read in the aftermath of Daniel’s death was Words I Never Thought to Speak, a collection of interviews with suicide survivors at various stages of their grieving. For me, the most moving and comforting anecdotes were those that revealed the awkward and ludicrous moments that seem so at odds with the magnitude of the tragedy: Imagine Alvin and the Chipmunks singing Wagner’s Ring Cycle. My heart went out to the son who told of how his family sat in charged silence as they drove to Dad’s funeral, in the car in which he had only days earlier gassed himself to death; the young bride who, after scattering the ashes of the man she’d married less than a year earlier, stood by the ocean, wondering anxiously what to do with the plastic baggie that had contained them. Who wouldn’t feel for the daughter of poet Anne Sexton, agonizing over whether to honour her mother’s quixotic wish to have the palindrome “Rats live on no evil star” as her gravestone’s epitaph? (After much soul searching, the young woman, who’d endured her flamboyantly narcissistic mother’s suicidal behaviour from childhood until her late teens, when Sexton finally succeeded in killing herself, in the end opted against it. It is hard to fault her in that decision.)
Now, I can only conclude that if Daniel the writer put his faith entirely in words, placing his very life in their power, Daniel the man was summarily betrayed by them. I believe he might still be alive if he had learned to define himself as something more than a writer—as “something human,” to quote the final words of his short story “A Torn Ligament.” To me, there is one thing he did reveal in his final note, in the very fact that he wrote it at all. As he sat in that dark corner of his life, feeling lost without words, taking pen to paper, he asked that his grammar and spelling be cleaned up (he was acknowledging the growing influence of the tranquillizers he had swallowed before he sat down to write), should anyone ever publish the note. He envisioned a future, even if he did not imagine that he would be there. It mattered to him enough to try to shape that future in some small way, with words, to the end.
Those who write of the future must possess a shred of hope and faith, a sense of connection, that there are things they would like to have happen, and things they would not. And anyone with this hope, no matter how strong their desire to die, probably also harbours somewhere within themselves a desire to live. Whether he intended it to or not, Daniel’s suicide note, all twenty-one scribbled squares of notepaper, tells me that. Yet whatever future Daniel imagined, it was not the one that came to pass. Ultimately, words failed him.
Eventually, I accepted that just as the dead typically don’t get all their wishes, or leave the legacy they envisioned, if they envisioned one at all, so their survivors cannot control what people say or think of the event either. This is nowhere more obvious than in the extraordinary case of the late English poet Ted Hughes, who wrote publicly in his 1997 collection Birthday Letters, for the first time in thirty-seven years, and in the year of his own death from cancer, about his wife Sylvia Plath’s life and suicide. In an article accompanying excerpts from the book in The New Yorker, his friend and colleague Alfred Alvarez wrote that Hughes was always grimly aware of being, in his own words, “a projection post” for the many who preferred their own invented narratives, with him as unmitigated villain, to the thorny truth. Hughes was right: The sweeping condemnation of him, driven by what seems a childish, knee jerk-feminist spin on the tragedy, went into full throttle on several chat sites and forums on the Internet after the publication of Birthday Letters, as the incensed gathered to discuss the scourge of Hughes, and further sanctify the divine Sylvia.
These people have forgotten that the woman they so admire attempted suicide long before she met Hughes, and wrote compellingly about her youthful depression in her powerful novel The Bell Jar. As Germaine Greer suggests in her study of female poets, Slip-Shod Sybils, Plath wrote in the context of a female aesthetic of self-destruction, well developed by then, that nurtured her primal urge toward death. Plath was profoundly, pathologically depressed, living in a cold, foreign country, feeling alone and overwhelmed by motherhood and marital difficulties. She had easy access to a means to an end. The famous poet was not the only person to die by household oven, before the lethal gas that made it possible was removed from the mix by the companies that produced it.
For some reason, we often forget that writers are in fact also human beings. I sometimes wonder whether the notion that writers suffer from depression in greater proportion than others is wrong-headed. Is it not only that because they are writers, they write about their experience, finding expression for their pain in a way that a nurse, a policeman, a dentist, or an abused aboriginal foster child would not? The gifted Sylvia Plath expressed her darkness and pain with accomplished literary brilliance. Yet, regardless of her ability to articulate her experience in language that would be widely admired, even revered as a result of her tragedy, she was still a young woman suffering from what we call depression. In this she was quite ordinary.
Given what I know of surviving suicide, no one need worry that Ted Hughes didn’t suffer enough. (His second wife also killed herself, murdering their three-year-old child before doing so.) His pain and his love for his former wife radiate through Birthday Letters. It is a work of grand and astonishing intimacy I found deeply moving. During my most intense grief over Daniel, it did occur to me painfully that while I would one day be an old woman, Daniel would remain forever the young man he was when he died. In my ageing memory, he will inevitably change, and I wondered how he will seem to me as time passes. Even after five years, I think of him in a more distanced way, as a younger man I once knew, whose plight I witnessed and which still elicits sorrow and pity. Though his death is no longer the centre of my life, he holds a place in my heart, despite changes in my life, my relationships, my shifting self.
Often, after an apparently sudden suicide, people say things like, “We had no idea he was that far gone.” The difficult truth is, maybe he, or she, wasn’t. Maybe that person has lived through far worse times, but this time, there was a gun handy. Maybe just a momentary feeling, a perverse and bleak impulse coupled with a convenient means removes a person from life when a moment later, the same person might have reconsidered, as he or she has countless times before. Living with depression and suicidal feelings is like that. The man who lost his desire to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge the moment he’d done it was lucky to live. Countless people reconsider mid-attempt, begin to approach an awareness that the act, however firm or feeble, is metaphorical in some way, the proverbial cry for help, and live to be thankful they did.
The recent, award-winning Iranian film A Taste of Cherry, an unusually subtle cinematic exploration of suicide, makes this point powerfully. The main character, a middle-aged man who no longer sees the point of living, drives through the desolate Iranian landscape surrounding Teheran in a Range Rover, picking up three different passengers he hopes will bury his body by the side of the road once he has killed himself. All three refuse his strange request, and in the course of their rides with the suicidal protagonist, they engage him in philosophical debate over the question of whether to be or not to be, arguing persuasively for the former.
His final passenger, a grizzled, gravel-voiced old man, relates the story of his own attempted suicide, when he was a younger man, eking out a marginal existence with his family on a failing farm. He had gotten up one day at dawn, walked with a rope to a nearby orchard, and climbed into a cherry tree. He fashioned his noose, placed it around his neck preparing to jump from the limb, when he noticed the exquisite ripe fruit suspended from a nearby branch glowing in the morning light. He was captured by the beauty of the succulent blossoming clusters and could not resist popping one in his mouth. As he felt the cherry burst against his teeth, he was filled with sensual bliss, and knew in that instant that he did not want to die. Instead, he dismantled his noose, picked a handful of berries, and carried them home, where he placed them in a bowl and took them to the bed where his wife still lay sleeping. The woman was lulled into the day by the delightful scent of the fruit he had brought her, never knowing what a momentous turn of events her husband’s gentle act represented. “A cherry saved my life,” says the wise old man, with a can-you-believe-it? shrug, to the suicidal one.
Abbas Kiarostami’s extraordinary film is banned in Iran; strict Islamic law, like most religions, forbids suicide, and the censors there fail to see that a film like this might be one of the most powerful suicide prevention messages they could allow to be disseminated. Secular and modern in tone and presentation, its wisdom apparently cannot be allowed voice among people who would surely find themselves reflected there.
In contemporary Western culture, Spalding Gray’s tragicomic musings on suicide are as wise and revealing as any. Gray has spent his life in the shadow of his mother’s suicide, a grim reality he explores to great humorous effect in his monologue Monster In A Box. In his later work, It’s A Slippery Slope, he recounts a moment out hiking on a high cliff with his girlfriend, when he feels a nearly irresistible urge to leap over the edge. He was not particularly depressed at the time, he just feels the seductive pull of the abyss more strongly than most others, the option of suicide never far from the edge of his consciousness, perhaps utterly central to it, something he is compelled to dance incessantly around. What stops him in the end is the look of horror he imagines would cross his girlfriend’s face as he hung momentarily in the air just before falling to his death. With comic self-mockery, he implies that it may be more his feeling that he couldn’t live with that on his conscience for the last few seconds of his life, than concern for his girlfriend, that stops him. He saunters peacefully on, his girlfriend oblivious to all that just didn’t happen.
These particular contemplations of suicide struck a deep chord in me. They reveal the uncomfortable truth that all around us, within us, at any time, more lives than we care to imagine hang in the balance, spiritually, emotionally. Who can say what small blessing or absurdity will determine the ultimate call? Many who live with suicidal feelings say that, ironically, it is only the comforting knowledge that if their pain became too great to bear they could end their lives that gives them the strength to carry on living. Without that imagined escape hatch, they say they would succumb to paralyzing despair, rather than the mild to chronic depression that defines most of their days.
Yet the immutable fact of a suicide seems to herald our worst assumptions about the person’s mental state, the horrible things that must have driven him or her to it. But this doesn’t answer the question of why it is that many people live through the most abysmal realities, surviving with grace and courage, while others seem unable to cope with comparatively mild adversity. Some people will live with depression and its disastrous fallout for years, never acting on suicidal feelings, doing so perversely at a time when life seems to be going better than ever for them.
It is a less than encompassing general understanding of the sometimes depressingly flimsy and random dynamics of suicide that has made many a suicide survivor, particularly parents, feel tarred and feathered by social stigma that carries an implicit accusation: Your son/daughter killed him or herself, therefore whatever happened in your family must have been infinitely worse than what happens in families where all the kids survive. It isn’t quite so simple. Certainly, it’s difficult to dispute the link between childhood adversity and adult emotional troubles that can lead to suicide. “That the early social environment of suicidal individuals is often markedly disorganized is well established in an extensive literature on suicide and attempted suicide,” writes psychiatrist Kenneth S. Adam of the University of Toronto in a 1986 article entitled “Early Family Influences on Suicidal Behavior,” in the journal Annals New York Academy of Sciences. “Disorganized” in this context may mean, explains Adam, “marital conflict, parental hospitalization, parental alcoholism, and mental illness … along with the more obvious family disruptions caused by parental deaths, separations, and divorce. More subtle variables such as covert hostility, isolation, and rejection by parents have also been found.”
Distinguished pioneer suicidologist Ed Shneidman, in his 1996 book, The Suicidal Mind, brilliantly condenses a four-decade career’s worth of observations and reflections, based on literally thousands of “psychological autopsies” and case studies of suicide. He writes, powerfully:
I am totally willing to believe that suicide can occur in adults who could not stand the immediate pain of grief or loss that faced them, independent of a good or bad childhood or good or bad parental care and love. But I am somewhat more inclined to hold to the view that the subsoil, the root causes of being unable to withstand those adult assaults lie in the deepest recesses of personality that are laid down in rather early childhood…. It is not possible to be robbed totally of one’s childhood, but what does happen can seem to be just as bad. One can have one’s childhood vandalized. Perhaps—I do not know—every person who commits suicide, at any age, has been a victim of a vandalized childhood, in which that preadolescent child has been psychologically mugged or sacked, and has had psychological needs, important to that child, trampled on or frustrated by malicious, preoccupied, or obtuse adults.
Obviously, it would be painful for a parent to read such words after the suicide of a child. In many cases, hard observations like these of Adam and Shneidman are without a doubt true. But in what family is there not some amount of covert hostility? If divorce in and of itself caused suicide, the suicide rate would be catastrophically higher. Clearly, there are subtleties here that have to be taken into account when drawing conclusions about cause and effect involving suicide. I have met many loving parents devastated by the suicides of their young sons and daughters, parents who were not alcoholics, not divorced, not malicious vandalizers of their children’s early years—including parents of offspring with such illnesses as schizophrenia or manic depression, who did everything humanly possible to help their suffering children before losing them in cruel and violent ways; and parents who, in the wake of their personal tragedies, were motivated to educate themselves and help others.
It has been in part that frustrating sense felt by many survivors of suicide that they have been condemned, misunderstood, and neglected by mental-health professionals that has led them to form their own support groups over the past decade or so. Now, their numbers and degree of organization amount to a vocal movement. Not surprisingly, while more doctors, social workers, and bereavement specialists are gaining a greater understanding of the unique aspects of grief experienced by survivors of suicide, tensions exist between the two groups, and they were obvious at the conference of the American Association of Suicidology conference I attended in Memphis in 1997. At times, I felt like a double agent. As a journalist, I found that doctors and counsellors of all kinds were willing to speak to me, and even though I was upfront about also being a suicide survivor, they were frank in airing reservations about allowing what has been an organization of professionals in many disciplines, researching all aspects of suicide, to include a new contingent of mostly lay people whose chief focus is their own loss and bereavement. Meanwhile, survivors warmly welcomed me into their comforting circles, and spoke openly of their own concerns about the condescending desire for exclusivity of some of the professionals.
I came to feel that both groups had their points. Sometimes, watching the psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers make their complicated presentations, complete with dizzying successions of graphs and bar charts projected onto screens, I wondered if they hadn’t strayed a little too far from the humanity of the people that were the ostensible focus of all this theorizing. On the other hand, I was taken aback to learn that a group of survivors wished to reroute the AAS quarterly research journals that came to them automatically when they joined the organization, from their homes directly to local libraries, because they found reading them “upsetting.” Better they go to libraries than into the garbage, but I did wonder if this wasn’t a variation on a Groucho Marx joke about masochism—why join a club whose members espouse ideas you have no interest in exploring, or outright reject before you’ve even considered them? Perhaps both sides need to sit down and listen to each other with more open minds, and concede a few points; sometimes a suicidal person’s best hope is medical intervention, but sometimes too, all the drugs and professional expertise in the world can’t stop a suicide. Sometimes parents do indeed break their children’s spirits; and sometimes, children of decent, loving parents kill themselves too. Not one of us has the definitive answer to all the questions that still surround suicide.
Each person grows in the world with a unique combination of genetic propensities, environmental influences, familial relationships borne along on wonderful and dreadful moments, and a relationship to society that may be nurturing or destructive, depending on how the former factors play themselves out. Of course, it benefits everyone to minimize the things in life that cause emotional pain—the unholy trinity of child abuse, addiction, poverty, numerous other related ills—to educate ourselves about the signs that a person may be depressed or suicidal, and to know how to act if so. It’s a matter of paying attention, of taking the time to develop an understanding of how complex suicide can be. Social and cultural conditions beyond family can indeed play a part in tipping someone over the emotional edge and into the suicide danger zone: Fisheries fail, leaving entire towns with skyrocketing suicide rates. Gambling fuels economic development, street drugs and guns proliferate, and we see the casualties rise. Japan’s suicide rate has escalated in the wake of its recently plummeting economy.
Focussing only on organic, individual causes for suicide to the exclusion of all other factors, and scurrying away in fear and dismissal from social responsibilities and community interventions, will not make it go away. Many people want to uphold a blinkered biological approach to depression: We live in an age of antidepressants of ever-more-refined design, yet the suicide rate is not commensurately lower. If all it took was a pill, a lot of people now dead would be walking around alive and well, perhaps including Daniel, who was on antidepressants at the time of his death. Drugs do play a role for many people, but they are not necessarily the entire answer to a person’s malaise. A suicidal person may pitch from doctor to doctor, pill to pill, only to find his or her appetite for life restored by a lucky break on a job, a new relationship, an unexpected turn of fortune for the better. Touching stories abound, like that of the heroin addict in Winnipeg, who while walking down a street in rock-bottom despair one day, heard the cries of an old woman in a burning house, and without thinking ran through the thick smoke to break a basement window and pull the woman out. Interviewed later, her face glowed with pride and astonishment that she, the worst person on earth in her own eyes, had saved a life—two, including her own. Six weeks after the event, she was clean of drugs, and still visiting the grateful old woman. A depressed mother of two toddlers wrote a letter to Oprah Winfrey, telling her that she was just in the process of putting her kids to bed so that she could kill herself, when she happened to hear the talk-show host interviewing Maya Angelou. Something the poet said struck such a chord, the woman fell to the floor sobbing in gratitude, no longer wishing to die. Corny, but better than years of Prozac.
I write this at a time when the government of the province in which I live, Ontario, is closing several mental-health treatment clinics for children and dismantling a host of related services designed especially for emotionally disturbed children and adolescents. Even the provincial government’s own child advocate has said publicly that the state of mental-health-care services for children is “in crisis,” and that the lack of proper childhood care often leads to later tax-burdensome incarceration in correctional institutions. The untreated mentally ill or emotionally disturbed eventually lash out. We are regressing in dealing with these matters, in a way that can only lead to more tragedy.
Still, with every good intention, and adequately funded, well-designed and managed public mental health programs in place, we cannot definitively predict who will be felled by suicidal feelings and who will overcome them. As with something as basic and lifesaving as cardiopulminary resuscitation (CPR), we can train people to know what to do in a suicidal crisis. At the same time, suicide prevention training for individuals will not in and of itself reduce the prevalence of those factors that lead to suicide, any more than prepping a population to know how to massage suddenly failing hearts can do much to stop people from doing things that lead to heart attacks. As with CPR, when it comes to suicide there is no guarantee that someone with the knowledge to prevent it will be around when the crisis happens. I have met people from families plagued by suicide, in which every member was an alcoholic or drug addict except that one person; people who have survived unspeakable torture in prisons foreign and domestic, severe sexual abuse, violent assaults, their own addictions, and yet who maintain a happy view of life, or have recovered enough to reach out to others. I have met people who have shown me photo after photo of their beloved dead, a person unmolested or traumatized in any obvious way, who put a gun to his head after a romantic rejection or a failed exam or a rough call from a collection agency about a credit-card debt.
I recall suicidal moments of my own, several months after Daniel’s death. I had gone to dinner at a friend’s. It had been a lovely evening of good company and good food. The moment I was alone again, heading home, a frightening numbness set in, and a blunt thought crossed my mind: If I had a gun, I would shoot myself right now. Why not? What is the point of anything? The aggressive impulse was strong and lasted well after I got home and had crawled into bed. What saved me, aside from not having a gun, was the fact that part of me knew why I was having these feelings. By then, I had read of how common it was for people to feel suicidal after a loved one’s suicide. I recognized it as a passing part of the grief.
If I’m honest, I realize it was a feeling I have had before in my life, long ago, in my twenties, that same disconcerting “I’m fine as long as I’m with people, desperate when alone” chronic depression, complete with “suicidal ideation” that had beset me for several terrifying months. So when it reappeared, even briefly, I knew I had to, and could, wait it out. Who knows where this strength comes from, what allows people to go on? But it did. I did. It’s not something to feel smugly proud of, it is simply a reality. Those feelings vividly recalled, although experienced so long ago during that youthful depression, that primal darkness that seemed to seep through my blood, slowing me, making me turn hatred on myself, had a weird and horrible power. Then, as mysteriously and randomly as they had arrived, the feelings dissipated to nothingness. Eventually I could say I was no longer depressed, and could tell the difference between depression and grief, ordinary sadness and a hormone-driven PMS fit of teariness, anxiety, and irritability. This is what living with depression means. Not necessarily getting rid of it, or its potential to return, but learning to know it, identify it, grapple with it like an old enemy, let it run its course, refuse to give it the upper hand. Millions of people learn to do this. Daniel did, too, for a while.
I can probably anticipate that Daniel will always be with me, somehow, and that at times, I will find myself addressing him directly. Nearly everyone I have spoken with who has lost someone to suicide admits that at some time or other, perhaps quite regularly, they speak to their dead. More than three decades after his wife’s death at age 30, Ted Hughes, then in his late 60s, still addressed her directly—the poems are almost all to “you,” the beloved, troubled, and tragically lost Sylvia. He imagined a dialogue with her, an eternal bond. In these fiercely loving poems, there is the world, and then there they are, separate from it, together on their own small planet, Ted and Sylvia, sharing a unique, intimate knowledge. And so it is expressed, in a poet’s tough and beautiful language, this searing truth—as the living person’s narrative moves along, the absent person remains vibrantly real, a thread, thinning perhaps as time unfolds, new relationships evolve, and old age encroaches, but strong as spun gold nonetheless, running through the story that continues to write itself.
For better or for worse, denied or acknowledged, that connection to the dead is an integral part of the survivor’s life.
January 1994. We go to see a movie called True Romance. We eat dinner first, sharing a dish of Love Spice Shrimp in a Vietnamese restaurant near the theatre on Bloor Street west of Ossington. It’s freezing outside. We shiver and run. We sit in the balcony, you put your arm around me. My hand languishes comfortably over your knee. We like the movie. We talk about it in the café next door afterwards. You wonder whether it has achieved Baudrillard’s fifth simulation. I can’t help laughing and teasing you about the pretentiousness of such a statement, and soon, you are laughing too. Words flow easily, endlessly between us. We run back to your apartment, cursing the cold. “I feel so close to you,” you say with intensity, as we lie huddled together.
What is it that we gave each other, anyway? What is it that we “loved”? How did we manage it when we encountered each other, when our broken attempts at lasting connection pitched us back into the unenviable state of searching singlehood, our longings and regrets rather too obvious to ourselves and, we suspected, to others, despite our brave faces? Somehow we did manage it. Even though in the beginning we might have doubted that we had anything of value to offer, there were found bits and pieces, discarded or neglected parts of ourselves we might have forgotten or never realized were there at all. Suddenly, we saw these things in each other with exquisite clarity, and weren’t afraid to feel again as we picked them up like unexpected treasures on a beach, and let them shimmer and play in the new light. It is difficult to understand why or how this happened. When it did, we couldn’t believe our luck. It was the thrilling, elusive thing we all hope for, that deep erotic bonding between lovers, and compared by every modern psychologist from Freud on, to the “oceanic” feelings between mothers and infants. Babies must bond to survive; in “romantic” love, adults seek to duplicate the wonderfully fulfilling sensations of that long-ago connection. On rare occasions, it goes beyond the sexual and hits on something far more profound. It’s what is missing from those dreary, awkward dates from which we slink away with mutual embarrassment, to crawl into our beds alone, telling ourselves wryly that it might be best to pack in this fruitless search, imagining that the kind of connection that we want, that we dream of, does not exist.
For a time with you, Daniel, it did. That you should choose to die in the midst of such hope and promise, such renewed faith in life and its possibilities, is for me the saddest thing of all.
You killed yourself a month after that lovely, light evening. This is not something a person “gets over.” It is just something I live with.
May 1994. I am driving west along Bloor Street. It’s warm and sunny. Chestnut trees are blooming and swaying in the light breeze, and though I am still caught in grief I notice that it makes me happy, somehow, the sun, the balmy wind, the blossoming trees and flowers after such a long and terrible winter. I know it would do nothing for you, or so you always claimed about your indifference to trees and other simple, natural beauties.
Without warning, I catch sight of the theatre in the distance as I approach Dovercourt Road. Suddenly I feel a confused dread, remembering what might have been the last good time out we had together, when we talked and talked, and you said you felt so close to me. So close. What did you mean? If you were still alive, I’d know. Or at least I would have the innocent luxury of imagining I did.
I see for the first time that the theatre is called The Paradise. Some strange sound comes from my mouth when I also see on the marquee, where a movie title should be, three words stacked on top of each other:
WE
NEVER
DIE
I forget about the chestnut trees, the warm, gentle air. As I pass the theatre, I am leaning slightly in my seat against the door, resting my elbow out the window, my hand holding my head, my fleeting springtime serenity dissolved. I’m resisting something, as if I can’t decide whether what just happened is terrible or comforting.
It’s both.
Thanks for the ironies, sweetheart.
Your parents and I don’t say much as we stand awkwardly together at the place where your ashes are buried. What is there to say? Eventually, we get back in the car and begin driving along the gently looping roads of the vast, pristine graveyard, all whispers, cut grass and carved stone. Your mother is crying. I sit in the back seat trying to hold back my own tears. Your father looks over at your mother, with an expression on his face so like yours. He reaches over to put his arm around her.
I close my eyes.