JUNE 1993. IN A COLLEGE STREET fruit and vegetable market, I watch Daniel as he carefully selects tomatoes and places them in a bag, absorbed in his task, his expression peaceful, lit by something. Could it possibly be happiness, that “rare, infectious bliss” Lynn described in her poem?
“I have never been able to live, except the occasional brief moment, without a sense of horror, disgust, self-loathing,” Daniel wrote in his suicide note. Was this one of those moments? As I study his face, his astonishing eyes, their impossible shade of aqua blue, his sleek, flaxen hair pulled back in a ponytail, my affection turns in a flickering second to an awareness, in some way terrible, of how quickly Daniel has opened himself to me, more quickly and completely than I have to him. It’s he who cries over his past, I who comfort; once, when Daniel leaned against me in his sorrow, I felt overwhelmed by his call for emotional first aid, not sure which wound to treat first. There were so many.
Standing there regarding Daniel, I am struck by a wave of intense emotion; more than anything—remarkably, as I see it now—a harrowing sense of the man’s vulnerability ambushes me, the same feeling of awe I feel when holding a newborn, or staring into a box of puppies, a primal sense of duty to protect, also the power to harm.
My next thought, a vivid flash, is: You must never hurt him. As though I had extra responsibilities here, of an adult to a child, or at least, of a stronger being to a weaker one. Yet I know it isn’t possible to be close to someone and not hurt that person, sooner or later, even if you don’t consciously want to. “Sometimes we hurt each other just by being alive and different,” my wise friend Laima once said. Could a person be as fragile as Daniel seems in this strange, charged moment, and survive the ordinary ups and downs of any life, any relationship? Why does this grown man kindle such a fierce, maternal urge in me?
I hurry away from the moment, burying its uncomfortable revelations as quickly as I can, returning my attention to the mushrooms and lettuce and green peppers heaped around us. When Daniel and I emerge onto the street with our bags of groceries, we are both smiling.
February 1994. I am sitting at a table in the Palmerston Library, perusing a pharmaceutical compendium, researching an article I’m writing about the antidepressant Prozac. Out of interest, I flip to the page that describes the antidepressant that Daniel takes, an older form of drug called an MAO inhibitor. He had tried Prozac, but it had failed to treat his symptoms as effectively. Here are listed potential side effects, always unsettling reading, regardless of the medication. I feel a surge of alarm as I scan through one of this particular drug’s provisoes: People taking it should not eat cheese, which contains a chemical that can react badly, even fatally, with a chemical in the drug. Didn’t we have lasagna for dinner last night? I recalled that Daniel had mentioned this prohibition before, yet he ate the cheese-laden meal.
Comically, as I see it now, I rush from the library to a pay phone and quickly punch Daniel’s number, burbling to him about this cheese business, and is he feeling all right? Daniel laughs and says, “No, no, it’s aged cheeses that are the problem. Mozzarella and ricotta are okay.” I feel relieved, and a little foolish. “Don’t worry about me,” he reassures me. “I’ve lived with this for a long time. I know how to take care of myself.”
We have this conversation roughly one week before his suicide. It is also during the weeks of late January and early February that he is getting seriously discouraged about his writing career. He is anxious about the disastrous state of his financial affairs: his student loans and interest, accumulated over many years, looming larger than ever, his credit cards maxed out, his income meagre and not looking up since he was laid off a part-time job as a creative writing instructor at York University earlier in the year. Apart from the forthcoming publication of his book of short stories, it seems there is little light at the end of the tunnel—and all this piled onto his deeply rooted and complicated feelings about success and failure. This was something he wrote about with bleak humour in his fiction; it is possible for intelligent people to be keenly aware of their emotional problems, yet unable to solve them. The current psychotherapy industry, not to mention Woody Alien’s career as a filmmaker, runs on that truth.
It was during this time, too, on a day when Daniel received another rejection letter from an arts-grant committee, that he collapsed on the bed beside me, sighed deeply, and said, “You know, you should leave me. I mean for your sake, you should get the hell out, because I’m going straight down the tubes, I’m telling you that.” He continued in this self-disparaging vein, saying how it was clear there was no hope for him and his writing, especially if he had to give up this apartment and go and live in some cheap and grungy basement bachelor unit, an intolerable scenario that conjured up old memories of agoraphobia and alcoholism, which he likened to “living like a rat.”
Had Daniel succeeded in chasing me away right then and there, perhaps he would have killed himself a few weeks earlier than he actually did. I don’t know. Regardless, our dynamic of caregiver and cared-for went on, with an inevitability that is easy to see now. Daniel’s extreme pessimism struck me as over the top then, the depression talking in a particularly bad moment that would surely pass. And so I said what I thought was the only right thing to say, and meant it: “Daniel, I know these are really rough times, but it will get better. It has to. Regardless of what happens, you are my friend, I love you, and I’m not going to abandon you.” This may not have been music to a suicidal man’s ears, but I am glad I said it. There are few comforts for a suicide survivor, but knowing that I did my best while Daniel was alive, that I genuinely, if misguidedly, tried to help, that I didn’t lash out or say something I would regret, has allowed me to live with myself a little more peacefully, after the raging chaos of emotion subsided.
Amid the dark memories are other, happier ones. I would stare at photos of Daniel taken at Christmas, and feel a sense of bewilderment. How could the man smiling in these pictures kill himself six weeks later? Here’s Daniel grinning in my kitchen as he whips up mashed potatoes, while my father carves the turkey. Daniel in mock rapture as he savours one of the Harrods’s truffles my sister has brought him from London as a gift. Daniel looking pleased with himself as he sits on the couch between me and Grainne. Throughout January, he, my roommates, and I would linger over dinner at my place, laughing and talking. There were nights out, seeing the odd second-run movie, enjoying a cheap meal out. There were good conversations, quiet moments. There was one disturbing temper meltdown on his part, the only time I ever saw him take out his anger and frustration by shouting at me, after which I told him I was worried about him. He apologized the next day. There was the time I retrieved my phone messages, and listened to a clip of unfamiliar music, puzzled at first, until I recognized the jaunty rhythms of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, from the album Midnight Sun that I’d bought Daniel for Christmas, after he surprised and amused me by saying he genuinely liked that music. This from a man more likely to collect the work of bands with names like the Lunachicks and Bunchoffuckingoofs, and to relax listening to gangsta rap—”last bastion of male anger,” he had once observed, approvingly. There was no accompanying voice message. “So, you called for a reason?” I later asked him. “No, I was just thinking of you,” he said, smiling. I had found his playfulness a sign that he was not as dangerously down as I had thought.
Back and forth, over and over the same ground, sometimes confirming your worst suspicions, long after the fact, goading yourself into asking how you could have been so stupid, and then turning around and seeing an instant replay of an altogether sunnier picture, one that absolves as much as it confuses you in all your usual points of reference and interpretation. How could he, when …?
But he did. That is the fact, regardless of what you saw or didn’t see, heard or didn’t hear, said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do. None of it matters now, even though for a time you can’t help rehearsing it. He did.
April 1994. I’m back at the Palmerston Library, researching a story on hiking trails in Canada for Equinox. I walk down an aisle and am suddenly assailed by the memory of the last time I was here, the crazy dash to the phone booth, the strange conversation we had, my misplaced fear, now so dreadfully ironic, that Daniel’s life was in danger due to a meal I’d served. Death by mozzarella. No, I needn’t have worried, it wasn’t going to happen that way, nor for that matter by way of an ancient chunk of smoked Gruyère. Another occasion when I find myself momentarily caught between laughter and tears.
My step goes leaden, I feel a familiar, instant sapping of energy, an I-don’t-give-a-shit listlessness that makes working difficult. I try to force myself. However, I become so lost in memory and emotion, I am startled when I tune back in and realize where I am. Still in the earliest stages of grief, I am subject to these periodic zone-outs. Usually, they happen in the privacy of my office, when I am alone and can simply turn from my work and stare into space, or rest my head on my desk, or write something in my journal, or cry unseen and unheard. Usually that is enough to restore me to a functioning state. I have wondered how I would have managed in these first months if I had had to work in a more public space.
There is the first time an ambulance comes wailing down College Street, the siren’s intrusive blare travelling up through my office window in the old building on the corner of Euclid, straight to the panic centre of my nervous system. It jolts me from my chair to pace and sob uncontrollably, images of fresh trauma and crisis imposing themselves onto my memories of February 14, a little farther down the street. When silence returns and I am calmer, I cannot settle. I feel lost, at odds, demolished. Finally, I turn off the lights and lie down on the floor, my eyes fixing on the strip of light coming from the hallway under the door. It’s quite soothing really, lying here inert, staring out like an animal hidden in its burrow, the silence interspersed with the carpeted thud of feet passing by, making the floor vibrate a little, muffled voices filtering in. How long did I stay like that? I can’t remember, but I do recall bracing myself for a long time after, whenever ambulances roared by. In downtown Toronto that was rather often.
Sirens couldn’t be avoided, but College Street could be. For about a year, the stretch between Euclid and Grace was my own private nuclear-spill zone. I purposefully detoured around the area, even when it was extremely inconvenient. The first time I steeled myself and ventured into the Café Diplomatico about a year later, I felt a twinge of pain when one of the owners smiled at me in a kind of surprised where-have-you-been? recognition. Please don’t ask, I thought to myself, and mercifully he didn’t. Slowly, I reclaimed the ability to walk down the street, shop, meet friends; even finally and monumentally walk right past the apartment itself, stop in front of the building for a moment and acknowledge my terrible connection to it, and what happened there, without feeling overwhelmed.
All of what I describe are standard symptoms of grief in the first months after a traumatic loss. While knowing this can help a mourner feel less crazy, less isolated, it cannot truly console or make the powerful feelings subside. Months or years can pass before you can look back and place your behaviour in some kind of coherent pattern or context. In the very beginning, shock reduced me to helplessness in my daily routines. I forgot to eat, lost any normal sleep pattern, and failed to perform the most basic of tasks competently. I once walked down the wrong street to a friend’s house, a place I had visited dozens of times, turning off a main thoroughfare one street too soon. I actually got right to the door of the house situated one street over, and raised my hand to knock before realizing with a surge of confusion that this wasn’t Laimas place.
I became irrationally frustrated when these things happened—who the hell moved Laimas house anyway? Has this bank machine gone berserk? This is my PIN number! It’s not? Oh. Sorry. Frequently during those weeks, I lost my train of thought in the middle of conversations, felt a flash of shame: “Did I already tell you this?” Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes no; always my friends were patient and understanding. Eventually, I acknowledged these upsetting mental lapses for what they were, normal symptoms of trauma, early precursors of the deep grief to follow. Now, when I hear of a suicide, I often observe a moment of silence not just for the deceased, but also for the survivors, who are now forgetting addresses and phone numbers and PINs, and who will stagger for weeks or months through a world gone strangely awry and out of their control.
And so, standing in the library on that April day, beset by a flurry of upsetting memories and feelings, my mind simply seizes up, and I revisit the panicky sense of losing control that marked my very first hours and days after Daniel’s death. Blindly, I make my way to an aisle where no one else is standing. I have completely forgotten why I came here, what I am looking for. I don’t want anyone to know how silly and confused I feel. I pull down a book, open it and rest it on the shelf, perusing it as though engrossed in the information there. My tears fall on colourful pages of photographs demonstrating golf swings. When I feel sufficiently composed, I close the book, walk out of the library, and go home. I spend the rest of the afternoon curled up on the couch.
Looking back on Daniel’s suicide and its aftermath, I know I continued to function in a curious state of self-preserving denial, which lasted until well after the death had been confirmed beyond all doubt. Denial used to be considered a bad thing, and it can be, if someone gets stuck in it. I have met people who admitted that they shelved the grieving experience at the time of their loved one’s suicide, in some cases not revisiting it for decades, even when they rationally accepted the death as real. In many cases of suicide, the seeds of this denial are planted long before the act itself is completed. Few suicides happen genuinely out of the blue. There are often signs and clues strewn along the survivor’s backtracked path, making them ask themselves interminably, Why didn’t I see? Some don’t want to do that, at least not for a very long time, until they are at a safe distance from the event itself and able to separate themselves from guilt, blame, responsibility—feelings that may or may not be appropriate.
At best, unexperienced grief in the wake of a suicide lies deceptively dormant. In reality the feelings leap and prowl through an unexamined life in bouts of inexplicable anger, depression, anxiety, a panoply of addictions, faltering or broken relationships. At worst, denial can constitute a form of delusion, in which the unwilling mourner believes against all the evidence that the death was something other than a suicide—an accident, a murder, an incomprehensible act of God—or, bizarrely, that it did not occur at all.
Venal or merely obtuse outsiders may seek to capitalize on this kind of denial when it manifests on a mass scale. On a cold November night in 1996, I sat in a Toronto concert hall with a group of rapt young fans of Kurt Cobain, once the lead singer of the alternative grunge band Nirvana, who killed himself in 1994. They had come to hear the conspiracy theories being peddled by two journalists who have built a laughably shoddy case for suggesting that Cobain did not kill himself, but was the victim of a murder nefariously orchestrated by his wife, Courtney Love. Also in the audience that night were Love’s legal representatives, flown all the way from L.A. and standing forbiddingly in their suits among the kids. The journalists delivered their gossipy goods, mainly based on the allegedly suspicious statements and actions of Love herself, and supported by, of all people, her superannuated hippie of a father, Hank Harrison, also present that evening to add his stale act to the exploitative circus. Courtney’s daddy-o absurdly invoked the spirit of Neal Cassady, a crony of Jack Kerouac’s who died decades ago, for a stunned young audience that had clearly never heard of him. Then, in what must go down as one of the most brilliant Freudian howlers of all time, he absolved himself of all responsibility for his daughter’s teenage delinquency and other later personal difficulties by saying, “How could I have caused her problems, when after her mother and I divorced, I hardly ever saw her?”
The evening was a sorry spectacle. Classic denial after suicide, complicated by the fame factor, was laid bare in small, spurious details itemized in such a way as to suggest murder. The vastly greater weight of evidence pointing to suicide was oafishly misread or discounted.
Extreme cases aside, grief experts are now more inclined to view a certain degree of denial as a normal, healthy, even necessary part of any bereavement process. Initially, this reaction shields sufferers from the most life-threatening stress, so they can begin their march through the thick woods of grief toward accepting and integrating their loss. Just as a newly felled tree continues to nourish and support roots, so novice human mourners cannot in a moment absorb the enormous truth of a loved one’s unexpected death. As I learned in the hardest way through losing Daniel, when we bond with others, they root deeply within us, and when they die, we discover just how intricately and integrally their roots have entwined with our own. For a while after the truth sinks in, the roots seem to scream in protest. Eventually their grip loosens, and they return to the grieving heart’s soil, where the space made by a living person’s presence is painfully transformed into enduring memory. We come to accept that these people who once shared our lives and then left us suddenly will never be as they once were. As we grieve, we learn to regard them, in our memories, with a more muted passion, though no less love. We sow the seeds for a new relationship with the dead. In this altered, yet no less profound way, they live on within us.
Still, it is a marvel how stubbornly reluctant we are to birth our griefs, to surrender to the hard labour, the searing pain of a traumatic loss such as a suicide. To do so means relinquishing all joy or happiness for a time. We must accept the past, present, and future as a project with new and unanticipated specifications, and one we may find an awkward design, a bad fit, a place we would never have imagined ourselves occupying and don’t care to begin work on.
Our living attachments are exceedingly complex, kinetic, full of spark and energy, arcing and flexing through intricately constructed, subtly engineered, at times exquisite, private architectures, their points of connection seemingly infinite. When all is well, we dance confidently, gracefully, through our works of intimacy in progress, sure of our footing, and the solid foundations we trust are beneath us; we built them together, after all. To have to tear all this down before it’s completed, to feel yourself crashing to the floor when your partner, whose rhythms are just beginning to run along smoothly with yours, suddenly drops you and disappears—it is hard to know what your next move should be, counterintuitive, wrong somehow, to have to dismantle this place you treasured and were coming to know so well.
Perhaps there are tough souls capable of instantly bringing in the wrecking ball, and watching it thoroughly demolish the whole edifice of a relationship without a flinch, sustaining barely a scratch on their hard hats. I suspect there are few with such nerves of steel. And few would care to go to the opposite, unhealthy extreme, taking up squatter’s rights in the condemned structure and dancing alone through its empty rooms into eternity. There lurks always the gruesome spectre of Dickens’s Miss Havisham, her life eerily stilled of its natural momentum in youth, her perpetually worn wedding gown mouldering as her own flesh decays, and she forever waits for the man that got away. What an electrifying human truth lies at the heart of this classic fictional portrayal, and how telling that one of the most memorable characters in English literature embodies the tragic state of eternally unresolved mourning.
Most of us are neither hard hat nor Havisham in our grief reactions, but we do need time to contemplate what we are losing before we are prepared to let it go, especially when the loss has been sudden. Exactly a month from the day I found Daniel dead, I wrote in my journal:
I realize there is a part of me that does not want to let go of Daniel—that to “get over” my grief is to abandon him, a part of myself, the person I was, the hopes I had when he was alive. This is so hard. I know that in a way, I have not yet said good-bye to Daniel, that I can’t yet, that I begin to cry at the thought, though I know it is inevitable … Still so much tenderness and longing in my thoughts about Daniel. Like lingering on the shore before pushing my boat away, never to return. Feel lost and utterly alone at the thought of this. Keep replaying things in my memory, knowing this won’t change anything, or make death any less final.
Anyone who has suffered a major grief will recognize the feeling of being held by the past, in the very early days after a death. We want, need, to restore our bearings, reorient ourselves, walk through the familiar, now empty, rooms, gaze at the spaces. We need to imagine the past, perhaps rehearse a few of the remembered steps, for old times’ sake, so that we have the courage to say goodbye, shut the door, and sail away for good with our memories: Here’s where this happened, and that reminds me of the time, and over here, wasn’t this where … There’s no formula or strict schedule to follow, but somehow this work of ordering and placement, this fixing in memory must happen to enable the present and future to unfold and begin to have coherent meaning again. And work it most definitely is, though not the kind done nine-to-five, not the kind you clock in and out of, that comes with a handy job description. Given the demands of most people’s lives, it’s work that tends to get done when no one—perhaps even you—is looking, rather randomly and haphazardly, often under social pressures to integrate quickly and unobtrusively into normalcy and routine again.
In the initial stages of grief, it seems that literally every moment and every thought is infused with an awareness of the absent person and his or her death. You cannot expect to bypass the mourning process, so as not to pose embarrassment and discomfort to others at this point. Such a demand may feel as hopeless as trying to fit an ocean into a wading pool; it can’t be done. Thankfully, I never felt such a push from friends or family, who were patient and compassionate when I was thoroughly immersed in sorrow. Even with all this support, I recall times when I worked and went about my business with a facade of normalcy in place, while silently screaming within.
The brittle and unyielding nature of day-to-day contemporary lives can make people in mourning feel even crazier and more lost. Over the past few decades, many have formed support groups to help themselves, whatever the source of their bereavement. The impulse to do so is understandable, and many people who would otherwise grieve silently and alone find immeasurable comfort in those Tuesday-night, church-basement circles that now exist in virtually every city of North America. Here their tears and bewilderment and anger are accepted and understood, and they may find themselves eventually strong enough to comfort someone else. Yet it is a sad comment that so many find that they cannot get this kind of support through their existing social networks. Until a setback such as a sudden death hits us full on, most of us are perhaps unaware of the degree to which our lives are structured as though by the design of an anal-retentive, nineteenth-century efficiency expert, called into the factory to maximize production. Throw in grief, and the assembly line of a modern individual’s life is potentially pitched into disarray that may not be accepted or understood in his or her wider community. Those in mourning can feel isolated and marginalized. Others may skirt awkwardly around them, not sure what to say, ever watchful for signs that at last, the person is “back to normal.” (Anyone with experience in bereavement will tell you that listening, and simply being there, is more helpful than saying the “right” things.) Most corporate bereavement-leaves fall far short of the time an employee may need to genuinely absorb the shock and be restored to “normal.” A one-size-fits-all approach to mourning is bound to be of limited use; we must each grieve at our own pace and in our own way. Styles of grieving do differ dramatically, from culture to culture, family to family, and person to person.
In our homogenized, productivity-worshipping, secular society, the message seems to be that it would be best if grief didn’t exist at all. If it must, we will grudgingly allow it a modicum of spaces in our lives. Such rituals as traditional days of the dead strike us as morbid, strange, even frightening. We prefer to water them off as quaint holdovers from primitive times that continue to exist in less developed countries only for the benefit of tourists. In reality, such sacred and ancient festivals that dwell deliberately for a defined period of time on our connection to and feeling for the dead are thoroughly healthy expressions of the most essential of human needs. If we allowed ourselves to channel our grief in this intense, contained way, we might actually resolve it sooner, and the dead could be integrated into our lives more seamlessly.
“I’m grievin’ as fast as I can!” wrote one woman wryly, in an online support group forum for suicide survivors. She was describing how unreasonably pushed she felt when, only four months after her husband’s suicide, a friend had pronounced that a pretty young woman like her shouldn’t be alone, insisted she started dating again, and tried to set her up with a man she thought suitable. The grieving woman was horrified to be called upon to fulfill someone else’s agenda for what was best for her. All she wanted to do, all she could do at this stage, was nurse her unhealed emotional wounds.
With this kind of pressure to cheer up or shut up, some mourners push themselves into an appearance of having healed, long before that is really the case. It’s an expectation that also stems from a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of grief and mourning. Grief isn’t just about keening and wailing; it isn’t primarily the hysterical gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair. It is a process, a long one, that involves much reflection, many quiet moments, and the time and space in which to digest one’s whole loss. This takes years. While it may begin with all the stock images of grieving, it gradually becomes something far less obvious, though no less consuming. Victoria Alexander, author and editor of Words I Never Thought To Speak, herself a suicide survivor, suggests that for most people, the grieving process after a suicide may take seven to ten years to come full circle—to bring a mourner to a point where the suicide is no longer a central defining reference point in her life. This does not mean that mourners spend all those years in grief’s full regalia; if they did, their condition would come under the category of “complicated mourning” and they would best be treated clinically. No, the initial post-suicide shock is only the stone hitting the water; it is the ever-so-gradually diminishing concentric circles of the inevitable ripples that suicide survivors are left to trace. With such a large stone, there are a lot of circles to follow, until the surface of the water is smooth again.
Regardless of one’s circumstances, the tasks of grieving after a traumatic loss are often invisible, largely unconscious, and in the beginning, once the disorientation and Novacaine numbness of initial shock has worn off, tend to be done twenty-four hours a day. Before I experienced it myself, I didn’t understand how physical grief over a sudden loss is, how instinctive, how deep in our bones, from the initial moment of shock on. During the first weeks after Daniel’s death, I lay like a stillborn foal in my bed after nights of bad dreams, my arms stretched uselessly in front of me, feeling as though they had been ripped from their sockets. They literally ached, in a way that no amount of rubbing or favouring would alleviate. Later, I read that mothers who lose their infants often report this particular symptom. If the physically intimate relationship we share with a lover is analogous to the mother-infant bond, then it made sense to me: It was as though Daniel were an extension of my own body that had been violently wrenched away, and like an amputee suffering the phantom pain of a lost limb, I retained a body awareness that still yearned to encompass my absent other half.
I also noticed early on, while sitting curled up in a chair talking to a friend, that I had unconsciously taken on a gesture of Daniel’s. Often, he would prop his elbow on a table or a chair arm and cup his hand over his skull, especially after he shaved his head, occasionally moving his fingers as though to massage his scalp, in an attitude of combined protection and weary concentration that reminded me of an old scholar or sage ruminating on some ancient philosophical problem. There I was, doing exactly the same thing. I don’t know whether I had ever done this before Daniel’s death, whether some of our physical habits had begun to transfer back and forth in shared familiarity. In some way, at that moment of recognition, it brought comfort. As with the aching limbs, I later read that taking on the deceased person’s gestures and behaviour is not unknown in the first stages of grief.
Certainly in the first weeks, as the grief books also describe, I was, to put it mildly, preoccupied. From the moment I rose with my throbbing arms, I washed in Daniel water, read Daniel in the newspaper, put him on with my coat, and breathed him in with the cold morning air. Daniel’s dead, Daniel’s dead, Daniel’s dead, went some relentless engine in my head as I stepped heavily along the street each day to my office. I lived in the oversized black turtleneck I had given Daniel for Christmas. Entries for March and April in the journal I kept reflect my mental state. “Desolation … there is no other word … I feel a horrible brokenness … lost, hopeless … comforting myself with thoughts of him near me, while knowing I’ll never see, feel, touch him again … the comfort his presence brought me that I can’t find now … angry at people for all the ways they are not Daniel.”
For months, I experienced a vivid, surreal world through heightened senses rubbed raw. I had little interest in reading anything except poetry; I wanted my truths straight up, to hell with the slower, watered-down effect of sentences and paragraphs. Permanently primed for intensity, ever alert for fresh onslaughts of huge emotion, I found a way to make everything I perceived connect in some way to Daniel’s death. It must have been May, because I recall the tulips and irises swaying brightly as I walked down Palmerston Avenue, past all the huge, impressive old houses with their lovingly tended gardens out front. A stooped old woman looked up from sweeping her walkway and smiled toothlessly at me. A woman about my age walked by with a little girl skipping beside her, sweet and lovely in a soft blue velvet tam. A group of teenage schoolgirls trooped by in their uniforms, all glossy hair, smooth, lean limbs, and lusty lungs, boisterously loud and with no idea that they should do anything other than take up all the space they wanted, their nonchalant perfection breathtaking. A thin, bent old man in a tweed cap and long coat shuffled slowly along with a cane some distance behind them. I wanted to stop in the middle of all this life unfolding as it should and shout, Why is it that you are alive and Daniel is not? Why is it that I am alive and Daniel is not? My outrage was blindly selfish, urgent—I wanted Daniel to be alive, and right then, so I could savour and delight in him the way I did all these other living creatures, whose lives were surely no more important and worth celebrating than his. I suppose in my rage I was even arrogant enough to imagine they were less so.
Another strangely physical phenomenon that often occurs during acute grief is imagining that you see the deceased alive—and everywhere. It can be shocking. Once, when sitting with a friend in a long, narrow, dimly lit restaurant, I saw approaching in the distance along the aisle … Daniel! Had to be him. Same walk, same long legs, same fair complexion, big eyes, bald head. I sat transfixed, somehow resisting the impulse to rise from my chair and run to him in some farcical, slow-motion, “Thank God you’re alive, darling!” reunion. I sat speechlessly trying to maintain my composure, as the young man began wiping down the table beside us, and I saw it wasn’t Daniel at all. After regarding my reaction to the resemblance without comment, my friend silently studied the menu, slapped it shut, and briskly suggested we order some wine.
Yes, I saw him walking down the street, passing in cars, stepping onto elevators, leaving doctors’ offices; it is not just Elvis who never really died and now wanders the doughnut shops of the world. It is as though all the psychological wiring that once found precise connection on the unique planes and contours of your loved one’s face now flails wildly in search of any reasonable facsimile set of features on which to alight and fasten. Maybe all this unconscious seeking and finding of the deceased is indeed a matter of brain circuitry. The ability to recognize familiar faces is a cognitive tool honed from earliest infancy, so basic to our natures that we take it for granted. A rare neurological condition impairs this essential life skill. In grief, it is as though the reverse happens: Your ability to recognize one particular face shifts into hypersensitive overdrive. Not just faces either, of course, but gaits, tones of voice, and gestures. I wasn’t the only one to experience this; even Daniel’s psychiatrist admitted to me in a touching letter that he had on occasion seen Daniel in the street himself.
When it happened to me, in the beginning anyway, I felt as if I had regressed to the primitively reasoning creature I’d become in the initial moments of shock after finding Daniel: a childlike bargainer, arguing against all known laws of the physical universe. Here was tall, bald-headed Daniel, loping toward me along the street, or in a restaurant, and suddenly half of me is thinking with an idiot hope my other half knows is pathetic: Maybe he isn’t dead after all! What if … I mean, what if???? Maybe he faked it, maybe he crawled out the window, managed somehow to lock it from the inside, left behind some kind of doppelganger stand-in that managed to fool a dozen police officers, four paramedics, anda team of coroners, so that he could begin a new life as a waiter at La Hacienda on Queen Street. I mean, maybe it could happen, maybe it just could!
Yes, well, call in agents Mulder and Scully on your own personal X-file. Invariably, your theory is blown, as the person comes closer and reveals beyond all doubt that he is not who you thought he was. Yet even irrefutable evidence doesn’t stop the search. I don’t know how many Daniel sightings I’ve had over the past six years. Probably dozens, though they are now rare. Where I would once become upset, I now only smile when I see a tall, fair-skinned young man with a certain stirring resemblance and Danielesque demeanour—a good thing too, since the shaved-head look came back into vogue, and it seemed for a time that Daniels were popping up everywhere. Inwardly, I blow each one a kiss and wish him well.
Perhaps more than any other, this aspect of grief highlights the gulf between our emotional and our rational selves, a gulf that widens and deepens as we suffer; or maybe it is simply that, at these times, we are suddenly thrown off balance when our emotions come to the fore and take over. What a shock to be so felled by your own humanity, your own utter fallibility. To be taken in by these tricks of my own spirit was somehow a blow to my pride. At times throughout these months I felt like nothing so much as a painfully exhausted marathon runner, wishing I could plead with my crazily driven coach to let me stop because I had lost my own sense of purpose and didn’t care to go on.
Above all else, there were tears, so many for a time that I angrily wanted to ask whatever God or gods exist whether there shouldn’t be a statute of limitations on the number of tears one human being can cry in a lifetime. Why do some people get out of this life having cried perhaps a few spoonfuls, while others of us produce the equivalent of several brimming cisterns?
I cried standing at my dresser, picking up the dusky-blue lapis earrings Daniel had given me, along with a matching necklace of beaded thread, with an elegantly cut lapis pendant hanging from it, wafer-thin and subtly veined with meandering trails of soft gold, smooth on its surface, rough around the edges. A gift beyond Daniel’s means, offered not for an occasion, but just because he wanted to give it. Where did this wild generosity of his come from, the same largesse that prompted him to buy lunches for people who were in worse financial shape than he was, or sometimes even when they weren’t? It was only one of many gifts that Daniel gave me in our short time together, until I had to ask him to stop, because charming as it was, he really couldn’t afford it.
I cried sitting on the sofa reading a newspaper obituary for poet Charles Bukowski; the old boozer who transformed his adventures in liver destruction into numerous poems and stories, as well as the screenplay of the film Barfly, had outlived Daniel by a month. Daniel and I had gone to see a play based on Bukowski’s prose one night when we were just getting to know each other. I had laughed to myself when Daniel had suggested going along to something called Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, produced by a Vancouver fringe theatre company called The Way Off Broadway Group and performed in a tiny theatre space at the corner of Dovercourt and Queen. We both found the play engaging, if bizarre. For all his confusions about women, there is something bullishly honest and humane about Bukowski’s comical, chagrined view of the world. I had thought it propitious that Daniel and I both laughed at one point when no one else did, and later sat silent as others around us reacted with amusement to some gag or other that left us unmoved.
I cried when I passed the fruit and vegetable market, because I remembered the moment I had been fleetingly terrified of Daniel’s vulnerability. I cried because I had shoved the thought away, and because the apricots brimming from bins outside reminded me of those tender, perfect apricots he held out to me the first time he had stood on my doorstep.
I cried in the living room on the first grey day of spring, Daniel’s birthday. While it rained from morning until night, I lit a fire and listened to his favourite tape, Pablo Casals playing Bach.
I cried at my desk, a month after Daniel’s death, writing a card to congratulate a friend on the arrival of her infant son, named Isaac. “He laugheth,” she had written on the birth announcement. Oh Isaac, I thought to myself as I wrote, I hope that is so for the rest of your life.
I cried picking at the wood grain on the chair where Daniel had sat year after year in his psychiatrist’s office. I stared at the pattern in the carpet as the doctor said to me firmly, kindly, “You are not responsible for his death.” I didn’t yet quite believe it.
I cried in my father’s backyard on an overcast summer day, drinking a cup of tea he had made for me, as I looked out at the steel-grey waves of Lake Ontario. Behind me in the house, I could feel my father hovering awkwardly, looking out the window at the lake too. “I wish there was something I could do,” he had said to me shortly after he had heard the news. I had no way then to guide him or anyone else, and I still didn’t months later, sitting there alone in the yard where my father had taken pictures of Daniel and me standing together beside one of the flowering mock orange bushes the summer before, pictures discreetly tucked out of sight by this following summer. I guess he had found something he could do. It must have been difficult for my father to comprehend. He had lost his wife of forty-seven years, my mother, less than three years earlier. He was only now really adjusting to his own life as a widower. He had liked Daniel, even ventured to read one of his chapbooks, one I thought relatively safe for a member of the older generation to tackle, The Job After the One Before. It described a young man’s ill-fated attempts at gainful employment after being sprung from a mental ward, and culminated in a furiously funny climax in which the protagonist is dumped into a mailbox with a stream of letters. My father said he thought it was good, that Daniel’s pared-down writing style reminded him of Hemingway. He said he thought he understood some of what Daniel must have been feeling—the financial stress, the professional disappointment. Still, he said, it was hard to understand, wasn’t it?
Yes, it was. Still.
And I cried many times at my computer, writing words that I still did not want to believe Daniel would never read.
When not crying, I spent many moments in a state of stunned suspension. I remember being alarmed once at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, after some reminder or another had thrown me off guard, wondering if I would ever get that smashed-up look off my face. Or standing spooked in the darkened upstairs hallway wrapped in a towel, my hair wet from a shower, caught between rooms, my housemate having put on John Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things” as background music. She sat quietly working on an essay at the dining room table, not knowing how it would twist me up as I remembered Daniel, our bodies, exhausted, wanting for nothing together on the previous summer’s hottest night, that song dancing over us, dense and pungent as a tropical wind.
One evening, my friends rented the movie Breakfast At Tiffany’s. Something about the George Peppard character lying in bed smoking, his languid writerly depression, his cynical resignation, his redeeming tenderness, reminded me so much of Daniel that I felt a panicky, trapped sense of sadness. This grief at its heaviest, most oppressive, and inescapable wasn’t something I felt I could share with my friends, who were nibbling popcorn and simply enjoying the campy, nostalgic film. I sat sweating in silence, with what must have been a weird, tight smile on my face, my eyes burning with unshed tears, and I kept thinking, Daniel, my poor dead man, I will never forget that it was, of all things, “Moon River” I caught you humming in the bathtub that time. That’s the memory that burst out the first time I poured apple gel in a bath after you died, the image of you rising like a genie on the fragrant scent, lying there so peacefully, your long legs crossed at the ankles and resting up the wall. “Such a nihilist, “I had teased, and you had looked up from the bubbles. I don’t think you even knew you had been humming out loud. Or what you were revealing. You just smiled and kept on humming. And now I can hardly endure thinking of it, sitting here on an ordinary Saturday night, watching a video with friends, pretending things can be normal even though you are dead, and dying myself a little inside.
And then, anger.
Oh, that. In the beginning, right after Daniel’s death, I was too destroyed by the sense of shock and loss to feel it. The first book I read as I tried to understand what was happening to me was Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide, by Christopher Lukas, a suicide survivor, and Henry M. Seiden, a psychologist. I read the considerable portions of the book devoted to anger—in particular, anger at the deceased—with a sense of detached curiosity. I could relate to the descriptions of trauma, the bargaining, the denial, the waves of emotional response, including guilt, anxiety, blame, anger at others and at myself. I could voraciously digest their advice that “instead of being passive victims of their fate, survivors can make accommodations and can respond to their fate; they can become active in their own behalf and active in their own lives … we are talking about the use of as many parts of the survivor’s being as possible, about becoming unstuck, about continuing a process in which the survivor is a participant, not an observer. Responding, not reacting.” But be angry at poor, defeated, dead Daniel? I couldn’t imagine it. In fact, the book’s authors emphasized the importance of this kind of anger so strongly that I tried to feel it, as if conscientiously doing some kind of self-improving mental exercise. I soon realized it was pointless. You either feel something or you don’t. I couldn’t manufacture anger just because some grief experts thought I should.
Gradually I did begin to ask myself why it was that I did not feel this rather key emotion. I met someone I had not seen in a long while on a bus shortly after Daniel’s death, at a point when I was still looking and feeling haunted. She had heard about the suicide, though obviously didn’t know many of the details. I was shocked when, after expressing concern for me, she contemptuously called Daniel an asshole. While she meant it supportively, I suppose, I wasn’t in any shape to hear such bluntly expressed judgments, and felt myself shrinking back, still protecting Daniel, his retreat from the cruel world. A male friend had called in the days after the death, his voice sounding gravelly, as if he’d been crying. But I heard an unyielding coldness and anger when he said the first thing he had thought when he heard the news was what a jerk Daniel was to have done this to me. All I could think at the time was, Done this to me? But he is the one who is dead! In those early days, I see now that I spent a lot of time deflecting other people’s anger toward Daniel and suppressing my own. Other people had less at stake in expressing it.
I did come to see that that was how it was. My anger was indeed there, but I was pushing it to one side, allowing the larger, predominantly sorrowful thoughts and feelings to deluge forth as they had to. As early as March 1994, I wrote in my journal that I was “starting to feel some anger,” though I then added “maybe.” Now I can recall what I could not risk admitting then: that for a moment, as I stood in Daniel’s apartment, legs trembling, heart pounding, shouting, and vainly knocking on that locked door, barely able to accept what the terse contents of the little note tacked to it meant, I did rebuke him: You have no right to place your life in my hands, is I believe how it went. So I had had the self-protective wherewithal to at least think it, before burying it away for several years, before it seemed safe to allow it to surface again.
And now, at a distance of years, it doesn’t seem such a bad thought. I’ve always felt that the notion of “rights” applied to suicide is meaningless—regardless of whether people, or those around them, believe they have a “right” to kill themselves, legally, morally, or spiritually, people will do it if they feel compelled to do so. Insofar as all adults capable of reason are responsible for their own behaviour and its impact on others, I must have felt in some visceral way that Daniel, for all the pain he bore, had trespassed against me; that it would take some time for me to truly and wholeheartedly forgive; that in fashioning a life-or-death situation whose outcome depended in part on the chance that I might come upon the note on the locked door before it was too late, he had placed a burden of responsibility on me that I had not known was there, and that I did not feel I deserved to carry. This was especially true when, having failed to stop his death-in-progress, by an unbearably thin margin, that burden of responsibility rolled heavily over into an even bigger burden of guilt.
Daniel’s death hurt many people. I would not presume to guess how these people, in their own hearts, interpret his act through their own unique relationships with him. Though Daniel expressed his regrets, this act of placing me on the freshly scorched earth—the only person, had I known, likely to have stumbled in a little sooner and have thus altered the course of our lives—stuck with me for a long time. You have got to have a little anger in your heart for someone who does that to you, even if he didn’t mean to, even if he felt sorry for doing it, even if—especially if—he is dead. It has taken years to be able to articulate the primary, specific, root cause of this particular anger.
The anger I did feel was first turned against others, toward myself, toward the whole, terrible, hopelessly flawed human reality that had been so trying for someone like Daniel to navigate. It is common for suicide survivors to feel this way toward people who have killed themselves, who may seem in the wake of their deaths to be pure victims of circumstance, brilliant, beleaguered souls brought down by a world too brutishly stupid to appreciate their extraordinary gifts. Often what makes artists so acutely visionary and sensitive to beauty also makes them keenly susceptible to pain, the human equivalents of those ferns that curl inward at the merest brush of a passing creature. In some ways, Daniel felt life that deeply, and suffered for it, like all those others simultaneously blessed and cursed.
But compassion for the dead is one thing; deification is another. While I could feel the former, I knew I had to beware of the latter, in order to truly heal myself and restore my life to its own bearings. Inevitably, the anger I felt toward others finally served as the conduit for my anger toward Daniel. Months after his suicide, it rolled in on a dramatic summer rainstorm, and lashed out of me finally with the sheer and abrupt force of the thunder and lightning that flashed through and rattled the windows of the room I was sitting in.
It was, all too appropriately, a dark and stormy night, the downpour finally erupting from the preceding stillness of the kind of heavily humid day in which everything and everyone seems to be lying low, in wait for something to give, burst forth, bringing some relief from the clammy heat. I was alone in the house, staring at various legal papers, documents, and manuscripts, the distasteful detritus of Daniel’s death, spread out before me on the dining room table, as appealing as the yearly tax chore. I had to draft some letter or other to some lawyer or other. I sat there, reluctant to deal with it all again, contemplating all the ugly, hurtful things that had been done and said in the six months since February, the misery this suicide had brought into several lives. The cliché that death reveals the best and the worst in people happens to be true. I hated some of the behaviour I’d witnessed, hated that I’d been exposed to it, felt crushed by the cruelties, petty and large, heedlessly meted out. It amazed me that people didn’t see the absurdity of pointing fingers at another one for not seeing the obvious; if Daniel had been so clearly suicidal, why had they failed to prevent it from happening themselves? I was beating myself up enough anyway to make further blows somehow redundant. I hadn’t asked for this, none of us in the maelstrom had, but I couldn’t write myself out of the biography, even if others might have found it emotionally preferable if I had.
I’m not sure which was worse, other people’s efforts to airbrush me out of Daniel’s personal history, or when that failed, to demean the relationship we’d had. The underlying motive—to question the nature and depth of my grief over the loss—stunned me. The attitude struck me as going against some fundamental truth—that a person can affect us profoundly in the space of moments; quality and kind of relationship determine the nature of grief felt after a death. I wasn’t interested in questioning other people’s grief over the loss of Daniel; I found myself fiercely on the defensive when I felt others trying to discount mine. As I read later, the bereaved often tussle for the thorny crown of Designated Mourner, especially after a suicide, as though it is such a prize, as though there could be, with rare exceptions, only one. “For someone who was so organized, he left quite a mess behind,” observed the estate court judge who eventually validated Daniel’s suicide note as his legitimate last wishes. She was painfully right.
As I sat and reflected on all of this, it suddenly seemed so daunting, so oppressive, so pointless. As I stared out at the bushes whipping around in the wind, their delicate clusters of creamy flowers being pounded by the heavy rain, I felt seized with a white-hot anger. “You fucking bastard,” I believe I hissed out loud. I pounded my fist against the table, stood up and sent the entire pile of papers flying across the room with an impulsive sweep of my arm. I rampaged around the room, wanting to shout at the ghost of Daniel, “You were loved! How could you do this, when so many people cared about you? How selfish of you to just throw your life away and leave the rest of us to clean up after it! How dare you show such contempt for the love freely offered to you!”
I felt better almost immediately. Cleansed, unclogged, as though my emotional path had been cleared of annoying, useless scrub in this frenzy. Now I could catch my breath and walk calmly on. I did feel anger at Daniel again, but never of the same magnitude. Perhaps after this catharsis, I could accept that it was there, that it might leap forth again, along with other emotions, but it didn’t have to overwhelm me, and I didn’t have to keep it at bay. I was getting a little closer to accepting the ups and downs that characterize grief, the unpredictable waves of emotion that with time, you learn to accommodate, until finally it feels once again that you, not your raw emotions, are the one driving.
To sustain anger at the person long gone would only compound the tragedy. As necessary as those moments of fury at Daniel were, they could not dominate the way I felt and thought. I needed to heal, however slowly. Just as I knew that Daniel was loved, I also understood the reasons why it had been easy for him to forget that. Just as I knew that the outcome of Daniel’s act might be judged as selfish in what it took from others emotionally, I know that for most suicidal people, the last thing their act is is selfish.
This notion of the person’s selfishness is one of the most persistently aired and least examined views of suicide. It’s rooted in the natural emotion of anger, but it’s an inadequate base for any coherent analysis of a suicidal person. At the point when many people seek to eradicate themselves, they have the lowest self-esteem imaginable. They may well feel they are, in some fundamental way, already dead; the final, suicidal act may seem a mere formality to a person in that state. Choosing to live, for any one of us, is in many ways a far more selfish thing to do. It requires robust self-esteem to pull off a life well-lived, bold self-assertion, and an unapologetic sense of entitlement to breathe air, take up space, and fashion an existence we believe has meaning to ourselves and to others. If suicidal people could imagine that for themselves, they’d be laughing. And living.
No, maintaining a sense of moral superiority over suicidal people is misplaced, even cruel. If you have never experienced suicidal feelings yourself, and view with incomprehension anyone who does, consider yourself lucky, not superior. Victims of chronic and severe forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia and manic depression, for example, come by their suicidal impulses genetically; neither they nor their families can be considered guilty of any moral failing. In many cases, expecting someone to simply buck up and conquer suicidal feelings is like asking a man with two broken legs to skate in the NHL. Indeed, former star hockey player Sheldon Kennedy might never have left the ice if he hadn’t been kneecapped into depressive despair by his early experiences in life. He suffered sexual abuse and intimidation at the hands of a sadistic minor league coach throughout his teen years. Now Kennedy, in his early thirties, devotes much of his time to campaigning for greater public awareness about child abuse. “Suicide was a happy thought for me from the moment [the abuse] happened until it ended,” Kennedy admits. In speaking publicly and without shame about his past, Kennedy provides an unusual role model for men, and could do more to reduce suicide rates than a raft of psychiatrists and drug manufacturers. Owing to his age, sex, and history of abuse and subsequent depression, he stands in a high-risk group for suicide, and simultaneously among those least likely to speak openly about their emotional difficulties and seek help. In one radio interview in the summer of 1998, when Kennedy was rollerblading across Canada in his crusade to raise public awareness, and funds, to help victims of child abuse, he recounted how a well-dressed man with an expensive car approached him and told him haltingly that he, too, had been abused. Then he began “crying like a baby,” in Kennedy’s words. “I was the first person he ever told,” he continued, incredulously. Perhaps things are changing for the better, for men. “Now we’re patted on the back for speaking out, but we used to be considered weirdos or losers,” Kennedy reflected. Still, it takes guts for a man to do this; by going against the macho grain, Kennedy reveals genuine strength. Yet he also admits that battling his emotional difficulties is an ongoing struggle, with potential setbacks.
Others are not so lucky. Martin Kruze was one of many young men sexually abused as a boy by staff at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens hockey arena. Shortly before he killed himself in 1997, he had gone public with his story. A flood of similar allegations followed his courageous act from men he had emboldened to step forward after years of silence. Kruze rocketed from complete obscurity to a guest appearance on Oprah and many other talk shows in Canada and the United States in a matter of weeks, as had Sheldon Kennedy. But it seemed the psychologically damaged Kruze was unable to withstand the taxing demands of sudden fame. Or perhaps he had expected the limelight would at last sweep away his private darkness for good. When it didn’t, and on a day when he was unable to secure a bed in a psychiatric ward, he walked to Toronto’s infamous Bloor Viaduct, as he had on previous occasions, and this time jumped. His grieving family continued his campaign to help victims of childhood sexual abuse, and have gained Maple Leaf Gardens’ financial support for a clinic to serve these abuse survivors.
Not long after Kruze’s death, Toronto’s Bloor Viaduct was in the headlines again, after a young student at a Roman Catholic boys’ school jumped to his death, apparently in fear of being disciplined along with several other boys over a yearbook prank involving stories of alleged abuse from some staff members. An inquest followed to determine what had led to the boy’s death; it was suggested, among other things, that the news coverage of Martin Kruze’s suicide jump may have planted the seed of the idea in the boy’s mind. This and other incidents caused much general public consternation over what to do about the alarming increase in the numbers of jumpers from the architecturally splendid yet lethally alluring viaduct. Eventually, it was decided that boundaries should be erected, though this struck some people as absurd. At a time when services for the mentally ill were being severely disrupted and in some cases eliminated, it was surely no surprise that more than the usual number of troubled souls were trailing away from the hospitals that no longer had room for them, to deal with their problems in the only way they thought was left. Now, said some wryly, the poor and desperate wouldn’t even be allowed that last-ditch exit from their pain. Many suggested that rather than boarding up lovely old gems of Victorian engineering and design, the powers that be should reinstate the essential mental health services they were mistakenly treating as trimmable frills.
That and other debates continue. In the years after Daniel’s death, I have found myself fascinated by the differing public reactions to various high-profile suicides. I am curious about my own, often contradictory thoughts and feelings as well. While the judgmental, sometimes simply ignorant tone of some coverage bothers me, I have come to appreciate that it is impossible to expect people, including me, not to make at least some judgments in the wake of a suicide. Just as we feel differently about a sadistic serial killer than we would about a battered wife who kills her husband after years of abuse, so we cannot help discerning the mitigating circumstances, or lack of them, in various suicides. Who could regard an aboriginal teenager who hangs himself after a life of abuse in a string of inadequate foster homes as anything but a blameless victim? Perhaps Martin Kruze had his obnoxious, demanding, manipulative side; still, knowing what he had been through, most felt only sorrow after his death.
BRITISH TEEN TAKES FATAL OVERDOSE AFTER ‘FATTY’ TAUNTS, ran the headline of another tragic story. “Neighbours said a gang of up to 15 youths gathered outside the family’s house for several consecutive nights … They attacked the home several times, throwing a block of margarine through the window, shouting abuse about lard and fat, and calling her ‘smelly,’” the sad report elaborated. Whatever psychological difficulties or family problems the girl suffered before the bullying (and later evidence said there were some), it would be unreasonable to suggest that the severe taunting of her peers was not a key factor in her decision to end her life. The link between extreme bullying and suicide is now being formally explored by psychologists. Regrettably, it is a common phenomenon.
Stories of deaths like these horrify us. We instinctively want to avenge them. Yet, how much more complex are our reactions to news of men (and sometimes, but rarely, women) who kill their families before killing themselves. Suddenly, we don’t care what they may have suffered, what rendered them “poor copers,” in the professional parlance, what brought them to the point of being capable of such heinous deeds. We flock to the funerals of their victims in droves, mourning their loss, their innocence; we bury the suicides quietly and grudgingly, with cursory eulogies heard by few in attendance. We would, it seems, rather condemn than understand, keeping our anger and incomprehension fresh for the next time it happens, rather than attempting to figure out why it happened at all, and how to make sure there is no next time. Suddenly, we are thrown back to the medieval past, when suicides were unconscionable felons, their bodies mutilated and left in the road for all to contemplate in horror.
Most media claim to be sensitive to the issue of suicide. They usually have some sort of official policy regarding how, or even whether, they will report instances of it. Despite this, I see inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, and sensationalist treatments and commonly held misconceptions about these deaths all the time. DISCO DUDS LED TO SUICIDE OF PUB MANAGER, INQUEST HEARS, went the headline of a 1998 story reprinted from England’s Daily Telegraph in The Ottawa Citizen. One wonders why this, of all stories about suicide that must cross an editor’s desk, deserved international play, except to give readers in Canada’s capital a little chuckle with their morning coffee. My own unimpressed reaction was: “I somehow doubt it.” As experts state repeatedly, the causes in any individual case of suicide are “multi-factoral”—perhaps in this thirty-nine-year-old man’s case, being forced to wear “flared pants and a wig” did drive him to despair. Yet I am sure the story is infinitely more complicated than that. Had this pub manager been drinking or using drugs at the time? Had he ever suffered depression or attempted suicide in the past? What led to the breakup of his marriage? His ex-wife’s testimony was reported exclusively in the thirty-seven-line-story. In presenting a simple, and indeed humorous, cause-and-effect story, the newspaper promoted a clichéd and inaccurate view of suicide. Cheap thrills, indeed.
Despite the steadily swelling annals of the discipline of suicidology, most people still hold often wildly contradictory views of suicide, sometimes even when looking at one and the same suicide. It’s called a cowardly cop-out, or an act of bravery to be admired in some silent, backhanded way; a cry for help or a selfish affront; the easy way out, or the hardest decision a person could ever make; a sin, a sacrifice; egoistic, altruistic; an act of pure insanity, an act of supreme rationality; something that can and must be understood, painstakingly reconstructed by means of a “psychological autopsy”; something that doesn’t and never will make any sense, no matter how you pull it apart and put it back together again. All, or none, of the above.
Nothing changes your perceptions of suicide like being near one. I thought that having been scarred this way, I would always be unreservedly sad toward any news of other poor souls who had succeeded in “completing” their suicides. In most cases I was. I felt a grim sorrow when it was announced that Mervin Goodeagle, a 19-year-old native actor on the CBC television drama North of 60, had hanged himself. I imagined the impact of his death on his family and community, on the cast of the program, and on all the native people, especially young ones, who looked to the show with pride. I imagined the heavy responsibility those involved with the program would feel, in the wake of such a high-profile young person’s suicide, toward those communities, where life is sometimes unbearable and suicide so prevalent. I wondered how the programmers would ultimately handle the news of the loss, given the important consideration of the suicide “contagion effect” to which young people are particularly vulnerable.* They handled it well, with understated dignity, running at the end of one episode a montage of scenes featuring the young actor, showing his name and birth and death dates briefly, with sombre background music. The message seemed right, a respectful goodbye that did not glorify the suicide.
Some time later, I heard on the radio news that the actor Graham Greene was in hospital under a suicide watch, after he’d holed up in his house with a gun, threatening suicide, engaging the police in a standoff. In what I’ve often thought was a ludicrously inadequate media buzz-phrase, the news announcer stated gravely that Greene had been “despondent over family matters.” No doubt. Most people who barricade themselves in their houses with guns probably have been despondent about something, family matters being one of the usual suspects. But I was shocked, actually saying out loud to the radio, “No, you can’t!”
As in, no, you can’t. Greene, an enormously gifted actor in both comedy and drama, was one of the first native performers to make it to the big screen in roles that would have at one time been played by white people in makeup, new roles that went beyond insulting stereotypes, and might not even have existed before, on which Greene could put his own personal stamp. It may be true, as the old poem goes, that “each man’s death diminishes me,” but it seemed as I absorbed the news that there were some deaths by suicide the world could less afford than others, and surely this was one of them. It perhaps shouldn’t really be a surprise to learn that such a unique and talented person is human, living a life filled with dilemmas and conflicts of a kind that might strain anyone to his emotional limits. Months later, seeing a full-page newspaper ad featuring Greene spiffed up in tailored duds, courtesy of Toronto clothier Harry Rosen, for a day of being Graham Greene—the public Graham Greene anyway—I felt curiously relieved, as though all was right with the world, so long as Graham Greene was not despondent over family matters.
I think about what Rabbi David Marmur said about suicide, when I interviewed him in his office at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto. He spoke of the Jewish belief that each life is a gift from God, one to be cherished, lived to its fullest. In some sense, he told me, faithful human beings are “prisoners of hope.” And if one of those prisoners of hope makes a jail break, is there room for forgiveness? I wanted to know. “Yes, yes, of course, forgiveness, there must always be forgiveness!” Marmur replied with passion. He told me of a brilliant colleague and neighbour he had had while living in England in the 1950s, a man of huge intellect and learning, and also of crippling paranoid delusions that medical knowledge at the time could not successfully treat. When he killed himself, it was a terrible loss, but also there was relief, to imagine that the man would not suffer anymore. Yes, I thought, leaving the rabbi’s office, we all have our stories surrounding suicide, all have our ways of seeing it. Prisoners of hope. I liked that.
I thought I had no trouble accepting such a lesson—kind, forgiving me. Then my feelings were tested when I read of the suicide in February 1997 of fifty-nine-year-old Jack Hickman, “merchant banker, corporate ethics reformer, alleged fraud artist,” as one newspaper obituary described him. I first read of him in a profile of a flashy young society matron in Toronto Life magazine only three months earlier. Katherine Govier’s article, “Surviving Harvey,” documented the life of Pia Southam since the suicide of her wealthy scion husband, Harvey Southam, in 1991. Following that, she had married Hickman, a move that her friends considered hasty and ill-advised. She explained: “He lifted me out of my blahs. He had no fear of my situation and what I’d been through … We’d listen to Lakmé at volume five at four a. m … I began to feel liberated ….” She told Govier this before Hickman’s suicide.
I winced. When I read Southam’s rationalizations of what the dapper Hickman offered her, I understood them. I too, had become involved with someone before I was really finished with my own grieving, perhaps hoping against hope that there could be an easy exit from all the pain. It had been predictably short-lived. Ah yes, I thought as I read the Toronto Life piece, Lakmé in the darkness before dawn. I could just imagine how Southam must have seen it.
But while Lakmé provided the music of the night, it was “Hit the Road, Jack” at high noon. The harsher light of day and a couple of years of difficult relations revealed Hickman as a troubled man with questionable financial dealings in his past. Some apparently saw it coming, and indeed there was an uncomfortable foreboding embedded in Govier’s piece, but Hickman’s suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in an old Rolls-Royce that belonged to Southam stunned many.
Reading his obituary, I was taken aback by the emotion I felt. Three years after Daniel’s death, I thought I was beyond judging the unfortunate dead, especially those I didn’t know. Evidently not. For the first time, my first and foremost response to a suicide was pure anger at the deceased. Creep! I thought to myself. Fifty-nine-years-old, living a materially privileged existence, fancying yourself the big heroic savior of a widow and her two children, and now look what you have done! After everything they had been through! You ought to have known better than to pull such an evil stunt. How could you be so selfish? Yes, I unabashedly applied the S-word I so hated to hear others use.
Later, I ranted all this to a friend, someone who, as I recalled, had been inclined to suggest that Daniel bore some responsibility for understanding how his act would hurt people. She listened to me trash Hickman, then shrugged. “Well, we don’t know what he was going through. It’s always complicated,” she said. She was right. Yet her calm assessment struck me as a telling contrast to my own emotional upset. It eventually became clear to me that my reaction was spurred by something that had more to do with me, and my identification with Pia Southam as a suicide survivor, than it did with any necessity to judge the character of the deceased Hickman. I saw in an instant that in my unusual degree of anger, I was revealing my deepest fear: that I would have another relationship, and that suicide would happen again. Here was proof that it could. In fact, statistics suggest that it is not that unusual. I could not imagine how someone could survive such tragedy a second time. It was this that had gotten under my skin, that had caused me lash out at a complete stranger, and a dead one at that. Suicide will do that to you. Maybe others could look casually at suicides as they gained passing attention in a parade of news, and not ever question the emotional basis of their judgments; for me, it seemed, there was no choice. And maybe that is not such a bad thing.
The storm has ended, a residue of wind shushing through the trees and bushes around the house. Through the screen door, I can feel a slight soft breeze, smell the soaked earth, hear drops of water falling at intervals from the eaves and splashing on the wooden backyard deck. After my own raging, I too am calm. I have picked up all the papers strewn across the floor and placed them once more in a sedate pile on the table. Enough of this trying stuff for one night, anyway. I think I was beginning to see that I could be angry at Daniel, as well as compassionate and forgiving, that one kind of emotion did not cancel out another but could coexist with it. I rise from my chair and something strange happens. I am wearing the lapis necklace Daniel gave me. Maybe I have been unconsciously pulling at it, I don’t know, but as I stand up, the thin, beaded thread holding the pendant snaps at the back of my neck, slithering down the front of my tank top. I yelp with surprise and grab at the broken thread as tiny blue beads ping and dance wildly over the hardwood floor. The pendant itself tumbles from the end of the thread, spins into a corner with a clatter. I crouch on the floor, clutching the stone in one hand, trying to gather up all the beads, scanning for strays, picking out a few from where they have embedded themselves in my knees. Finally, I seem to have them all. Carefully cupping the beads, pendant, and thread, I walk to the kitchen, tear off a piece of paper towel, and place it on the counter. I gently pile everything on it and fold it into a secure envelope. I take this upstairs and put it in the jewellery case on my dresser. I will repair it later, I think to myself.
But I never did. Somehow, this precious gift, beautiful but broken, sits well with me as it is, more “right” than imagining myself carefully trying to restore it. Some things are beyond repair. The remains of the necklace are tucked away still.
Has someone, somehow, let go of someone else? I don’t know. In the calm after the storm, I only know something feels different, maybe even better, now that I have roared at Daniel’s ghost.
*When the Hobbema native reserves in Alberta experienced a dramatic increase in youth suicides in the 1980s, elders and other counsellors discovered that the teenagers had wrongly grasped a traditional teaching that when a person dies before his time, he wanders lost in the spirit world. Several young people who had survived suicide attempts said that after young friends of theirs had killed themselves, they had decided to go too, so that the other person wouldn’t have to be alone. Non-native specialists had failed to understand the meaning of this, but once it was revealed to the elders, they were able to clarify for the young people that it didn’t work that way; if they died before their time, they too would wander alone. This elder-based counselling, along with a massive and concerted community initiative, brought the suicide rate on the reserve down to almost zero in the early 1990s. But gradual erosion of programs saw the rate creep up again. Today, on many native reserves, the suicide rate, especially among young people, remains catastrophic. Speaking to an audience of aboriginal youth in 1997, Phil Fontaine, Grand Chief of The Assembly of First Nations, acknowledged, “There isn’t one aboriginal family that hasn’t been affected by suicide.”