JANUARY 1997. I AM WAITING IN LETHBRIDGE to hear whether I will be allowed to interview the Sams at the Drumheller Institution about their suicide-prevention work, even though the prison is in post-riot lockdown. In the meantime, Hilde tells me that there is to be a sweat lodge ceremony at an addiction treatment centre in nearby Cardston, led by a Blackfoot elder, Art Calling Last. He also leads ceremonies and counsels native inmates at the Lethbridge jail. The sweat is held on the third Friday of every month, and is open to guests, non-natives included. Hilde had gone herself some months earlier and encourages me to accompany one of her staff members, Orville Powder. A Métis from northern Alberta, and a former inmate and addict himself who had been involved with training the Sams at Drumheller, Orville regularly attended Calling Last’s sweats and other ceremonies. “I think you could use it,” he says, teasingly. He has been telling me since I arrived that I am “too serious,” and seems to see it as his personal mission to make me laugh. As it happens, my visit to the prison is postponed a few days, so I agree to go to the Cardston ceremony the following day.
On the way there, we pick up his teenage brother, Kirk, who sits shyly in the back seat of Orville’s Jeep, speaking up only to complain when he gets tired of listening to his brother’s tape selection, mostly powwow drumming and singing. “Put on The Doors, man,” he pleads. So it is to the sounds of “Light My Fire” and “Break on Through” that we travel to the sweat, along roads that head straight into southern Alberta’s Rocky Mountain foothills, grand and beautiful in the distance under the big blue sky of a clear winter day.
The idea of spiritual cleansing and healing through intense trial makes sense to me. It lies at the heart of most religious mysticism, though rituals of enactment are few and far between for most people in contemporary cultures. I’ve been drawn to native spirituality in the past, wary at the same time of the white wannabe syndrome. I’ve avoided the kind of New Age pseudo-native events offered in the city, feeling I would rather wait to be invited to a sweat, when the time seemed right, and the ceremony genuine. Now I feel excitement and anticipation, but also apprehension. I have been told of the power of this experience I am about to undergo. It’s not to be taken lightly, and I know I must prepare myself psychologically somehow. Hilde and Orville advise me on what to expect. If the heat gets unbearable at any time, I should bend my head forward to the ground, where the rising air is slightly less intense. Orville says try not to panic, he’s seen people scream and freak out and try to blast through the door flap before a round of praying and singing is over. Such reactions are frowned upon as obviously disruptive to the other participants and the spirits summoned through the songs and prayers. “Just stay calm and wait till they open the door at the end of the round,” he says. “You don’t have to go back in if you don’t want to.” He fills me in on other small protocols, and I feel as ready as I am ever going to be.
We arrive and change our clothes for the sweat in the nearby centre’s washrooms—shorts for the men, loose gowns or long knee-covering T-shirts for the women. Several hundred yards away on the building’s flat grounds, the lodge looks tiny, a waist-high, tear-shaped mound. We approach it through the snow, shivering in the January air, past the people tending the fire heating the rocks to be used in the ceremony. Kirk is helping out. (“I can’t go in there,” he says, looking over at the lodge. “It’s too scary.”) We step out of our boots, and after waving smoke onto ourselves from sweetgrass burning in a bowl on the ground, crouch to enter the lodge, Orville taking his place beside the seven men already on one side, and Calling Last, back and centre. I crawl in and join the four women seated cross-legged on the other side. We’re a mix of natives and non-natives. Only one other man and I have never been to a sweat before.
There are formal introductions around the circle, and ritual offerings of food and tobacco presented to animal and ancestral spirits. The passage into the lodge is secured shut. We sit in the dark now, the rocks steaming and hissing as water is sprinkled on them. The close air is heavy with cedar, sage, and sweetgrass smoke. Orange sparks rise from the rocks in the centre and dance momentarily in the rich, utter blackness as the elder begins the songs and prayers for the first of four rounds. Everyone joins in.
We’re to call on the spirits, our ancestors, to come to us in this time and space. I try to quash ironic thoughts about what my good Protestant Irish grand- and great-grandparents would make of this, whether they’d particularly want to come, whether I would want them to. I concentrate on my mother and other dead relatives I loved and hope for the best. The leap into this unfamiliar world happens so fast—like sitting in an airplane wearing a parachute, confident that you understand what you are about to do, then being overcome with blind terror as the door opens onto the sky, and you realize that you must actually jump into it.
The unknown. One moment, I am calmly acclimatizing to strange sensations, sounds, smells, and the tight, hot space in which I cannot see an inch in front of me, and cannot leave until someone or something says it’s time. Then, within what seems like seconds of singing along in the dark, a horrible, claustrophobic panic sets in, and my heart beats rapidly, making me breathless. My mind tells me this is impossible, I must get out. Now I understand what Hilde and Orville warned me about. I cannot imagine how I will sit here for the next twenty minutes, or however long it is, for I don’t actually know. I contemplate the freedom I normally take for granted, the way I am used to doing whatever I want with my body and mind, moment to familiar, unchallenged moment. Briefly, I see myself as some maddened feral creature, furiously digging up the earth with my paws at the edge of the lodge behind me, desperately clawing my way out to safety and blessedly fresh, cool air. This desperation is followed by an immense urge to cower, to cosy up to the shoulder of the person next to me, already as close to me as humanly possible, and whimper. I feel ridiculous even having such impulses.
But something carries me through these moments of primal fear. For once, I don’t have to understand; I just know that something real and uplifting is taking place. I can accept that here, my reasoning brain represents only a small part of myself. I must trust in and rely on something other than that. I must acknowledge greater connections to the universe, those parts of myself I ignore most of the time, the ones I can’t see or control or understand. Somehow, I fend off my instinct to cringe and flee. I bend my head back and resolve to open myself, to surrender to this unfamiliar spiritual territory, to breathe through my panic. Tears mingle with sweat on my face as new sounds pour from me. I try to absorb the strength and spirit of the others, to kindle some faith that if they can get through this, so can I.
Now I feel an extraordinary shifting of inner forces. It’s as though this fear is some large, tough weed that has rooted tenaciously in the depths of my being, choking off the other things that want to grow there. Sitting with my head back, calling to the spirits, I feel this overpowering, clogging thing being pulled up from the centre of my body, up through it, out my open throat.
Then it’s gone.
I can’t quite believe it. I simply do not feel fear anymore. I’m almost giddy with relief and surprise. By the time the round ends and someone outside opens the flap to let in the pale light and cold air, I have become so immersed in the rhythms of the singing and praying that I am amazed at how much time has gone by. I feel fine, wonderful. I know I will make it through the next rounds, though I still can’t quite grasp how I passed from animal terror to this serenity so quickly. I don’t want to be too cocky about it, so I sit silently, reminding myself that the next rounds will be even hotter. Everyone is quietly friendly. We lounge around, stretch, and rest ourselves, as new heated rocks are brought to the inner circle.
Orville had told Calling Last that he was bringing someone, and the elder has in turn told some people here. One woman turns and says, “I hear you’re a writer from Toronto?” Turns out she is originally from there. She mentions the name of someone, a writer she knows there, but I’ve never heard of him. She continues, talking about stables and equestrian events. I gradually realize that she thinks I am a rider—this is ranch country after all. One of the men in the group is a former rodeo champion who runs a nearby horse and cattle ranch with his wife. She is also participating in the sweat today, graciously filling me in on the meaning of various parts of the ceremony. So finally I say, no, no, I’m a writer, and everyone laughs at the mistake. The easy shift from solemnity to irreverence makes the whole atmosphere even less intimidating.
We carry on through three more rounds. There are other intense moments, moments when I do have to put my head to the ground to avoid being overcome by the heat, and the emotions. But it’s also exhilarating. Other things happen in there, difficult to explain, sacred. A lightness of spirit, a good, calm energy, runs through all of us as we finish and emerge to change back into our regular clothes, our regular selves. I sleep peacefully that night back at my friend’s place in Calgary. When I wake up the next morning, I can still smell the sweetgrass in my hair.
I’ve thought a lot about the ceremony since then. Somehow, it seems to have hit me in the same unfamiliar places that my grief did, made manifest things I was discovering about myself anyway, over the long haul of surviving, realizing that in a strange way, grief has made me whole, has pierced me in the larger part of myself I have kept buried. I have had to call on this part in order to survive Daniel’s death. I’ve had to dig beneath the surface of myself to find the resources, the intangible, to cope. I am thankful I found what I needed. I have had to bring to the light things about myself I didn’t like much as well. So, my wound, paradoxically, is healing me. That larger part of myself I barely knew was there is keeping me alive. I am learning that it is indeed possible to survive anything, and not only survive, but flourish and thrive, as others have done, through life’s multitude of tragedies.
These truths are only things I can try to keep reminding myself of, things I do not always remember. I understand how it is for those who give up, how unbearable certain moments can seem. To get through such moments, the only thing we can do is forgive ourselves, and others, for being human; to “name our brokenness,” and learn to pick up the pieces—again and again—and, like Sisyphus, to keep shoving the boulder up the mountain.
Three years after Daniel’s suicide, I was beginning to feel and acknowledge a distinct moving away from my intense bond with that event.
June 1997. Sitting on the patio of “the Dip” on College Street, having coffee with Tony Burgess, writer, former drug addict, and a man with a delightfully bizarre sense of humour. I first met Tony in the summer of 1993, when he and Lynn Crosbie came over for dinner one evening at Daniel’s. I liked him immediately, and the night passed with lots of joking and laughter. But there were pains and problems lurking beneath the cheerful camaraderie—for all of us, I guess. Not long after, in the fall, Tony went back to the drugs he had tried to kick, and nearly died of an overdose. He was alive only because a compassionate passerby called for an ambulance when he found him out cold on the street.
He fully intended to die, Tony tells me later, and it was not his first attempt. He had spent years in and out of various institutions, being diagnosed with a host of mental illnesses and character defects. He had led a restless life travelling the country, never really settling anywhere, getting into lots of trouble, a brilliant mind out of control most of the time, the creativity under wraps of chaos. After his 1993 suicide attempt, he spent months in intensive detox and recovery.
Few of us knew about all this until much later, when Tony was up and about again, clean of drugs and counselling others going through ordeals similar to his own. In the summer after Daniel’s death, Tony rented an office beside mine in the building at the corner of Euclid and College. He began working on some fiction. Occasionally he would wander over and knock on my door, and we’d sit and talk about our work, Daniel, addiction, the mysterious workings of brain chemistry. Tony would usually end up making me laugh. The work he began there has since been published in a trilogy of eccentric and poetic novels: The Hellmouths of Bewdley, Pontypool Changes Everything, and Caesarea. They’ve been received well critically; Bruce McDonald, of Hard Core Logo fame, has bought the film rights for Pontypool, intending to make “the great Canadian zombie movie.” Tony appears to have conquered something with his last suicide attempt once and for all, something he doesn’t want to, or have to, revisit. He and Lynn have since split, but remain good friends. He is in another relationship now, with a woman whose career as a criminal lawyer has taken them both to live in the community of Wasaga Beach, edging into cottage country due north of Toronto.
Back in the summer of 1997, The Hellmouths of Bewdley had just been published to good reviews. Tony hadn’t yet moved from the city, and seemed to be just getting used to writing seriously, without recourse to substances other than his own very active imagination. It was good to see how much things were looking up for him, the infectious hope he had, for his writing, for his personal future.
Again, we’re laughing. A reporter from the small town of Port Hope, near the village of Bewdley northeast of Toronto, where there is not a large audience for avant-garde fiction, has gotten wind of the book. He called Tony to ask whether he had set his stories in Bewdley for any particular reason. “We in Port Hope always thought that a circus freak show decided to settle there,” he said. Tony had not anticipated consternation among Bewdlians over his fictional portrayal of their town, nor for that matter to be made an honorary citizen. Over coffee, he rumbled with laughter wondering if he should avoid the place, for fear of lynching.
The book weaves eerie, shocking tales of life in and around the fictional town, and there are graphic scenes involving suicide, written with such terrible clarity, you know they could only be based on the real experience of the person writing them. Tony told me that his father finally summoned the courage to open this book his son had written, this book that must seem to him so strange and difficult. Over the phone, his father had told him, “I read some of the stories, son, but parts of it I can’t. But I want you to know, I am proud of you.” I feel tears welling in my eyes at this. “That is wonderful, Tony, I am so happy for you,” I say, and mean it. Of course, I find the image moving, of a father bravely tackling the creation of a son he doesn’t necessarily understand, yet loves nonetheless. In describing his family background, Tony had once said, “Sure, it was dysfunctional, the usual stuff, but I don’t blame my family for my problems—I always gave worse than I got.” But I also know that I want to cry because I wish it was Daniel sitting across from me recounting all of this. I wish it was Daniel telling me he had heard his father say those words.
I ask Tony to inscribe my copy of Hellmouths, and when I get home I read what he has written: “To Moira, who knows that a hellmouth can also be breathed through.” I treasure it. Now, Tony and I email each other occasionally. He is busy on his latest novel, in a home work space he calls a “nest,” on a riverside property where he can catch fish off the dock. Last spring, he played Curly in a production of Oklahoma! at the local little theatre. “Outrageous fun,” he says. “I’ve never worked harder in my life!”
Fun. By the summer of 1997, after several years of turning my attention toward the tragic in life, I begin to see messages everywhere to lighten up. I could identify with Spalding Gray’s self-styled protagonist in Monster in A Box, endlessly working, incapable of truly relaxing until he’d grappled with every last mysterious complexity, even titling his monstrous manuscript Impossible Vacation. When the editor of Seasons, the magazine of the Ontario Federation of Naturalists, calls to ask if I would like to spend ten days in the province’s remote Polar Bear Provincial Park and write an article about it, my first impulse is to turn her down. Too much work to do on the book. But I stop in mid-”it’s impossible.” When would I ever get such an amazing opportunity again? And so I agree to go and write about this incredible, untouched place, including its polar bears. I get to view a group of them from behind a bit of willow scrub on the tundra, as they lounge on the austere coast of Hudson’s Bay, waiting for the ice to form again so they can return to their winter seal hunt. Thousands of geese and other birds fly over us and the vast, magnificent landscape.
As a direct result of this trip I nearly talked myself out of taking, I am now in a relationship, with the photographer assigned to the same story, and have moved to a new city. Different partner, different life. We live near the Ottawa River, and I can leave my back door and run along pathways that trace its banks every day, clearing my head before and after writing. The balance of urban and wild here, the better air, sits well with me. We go birdwatching together; thanks to this man, I now know the difference between a semipalmated plover, a kildeer, a lesser yellowlegs, and a least sandpiper. An accomplished naturalist, he can identify birds by their distant calls; spot at a glance tiny, jewel-like beetles sitting in sleek emerald splendour on forest leaves; stand by the side of a secluded road at midnight and call a barred owl out of the bush as it flaps to a perch above our heads and stares down at us with its brown saucer eyes. He’ll stop the car to examine a snake coiling along the pavement. He’ll pull the telescope out of the trunk to let me get a better view of the indigo bunting he saw flit through the roadside greenery, or a family of hooded mergansers floating lazily in a reed-filled marsh.
The key to his supreme enjoyment of life seems to be that he can see what is going on, really going on around him, in whatever natural place he happens to be. Where others might plod obliviously past all these small natural phenomena, he delights in teeming, fascinating life wherever he finds it, and stops to examine and savour it until he has exhausted his curiosity—till he’s had a new experience, knows something he didn’t know before. When the inevitable question of suicide came up as we were getting to know each other, his eyes widened and he shook his head. “I just cannot imagine doing that,” he said. “I mean, never in a million years.”
Good answer.
Later, when I was packing up my things to move to Ottawa, sorting through piles of personal papers and things to file for research, I stopped to reread an essay sent to me by my friend, writer M. T. Kelly, a year after Daniel’s death. It’s called “A Canoeist’s Thoughts in February,” and he had sent it to me after I had taken a canoe trip in northern Ontario with a group called Wild Women Expeditions the previous summer. At the top of it he wrote: “Dear Moira: Best as always in this cold and hard winter; and on your wild woman journeys.” It’s a piece about patience, endurance, and keeping vigil, through memories and in anticipation of future experiences. It discusses how canoeists, like gardeners perusing their seed catalogues as they dream by winter fires, become lost in the contours of maps, in thoughts of future trips on beautiful summer waterways. And it ends with a quote from The Jesuit Relations, by one of the seventeenth-century priests who came to the New World to convert the heathen, and found that the heathen had a thing or two to teach them about survival. The priest reported that when he was ill, depressed, suffering from “what an earlier time would call a black night of the soul,” the Montagnais (now the Innu) told him:
Do not be sad; if thou are sad, thou wilt become still worse; if thy sickness increases, thou wilt die. See what a beautiful country this is; love it, if thou lovest it, thou wilt take pleasure in it, and if thou takest pleasure in it thou wilt become cheerful, and if thou art cheerful thou wilt truly live.
One crisp late afternoon in autumn, walking along a cottage road in Quebec with my new partner, he points up to the sky. Two ravens spiral against the brilliant blue. “They’re playing,” he tells me, like a patient tour guide to an overly earnest alien. I watch the big black birds swooping through the sky, diving down, flying up to each other, touching beaks and gliding away, looping back together again slow moments later, on another current of air. It’s hard to imagine what the purpose of it all might be except sheer pleasure.
In the winter of 1998, the ice storm that severely crippled eastern Ontario left my companion homeless for more than two weeks. I thought some fun was in order, and so we went to a performance of Slava’s SNOWSHOW, featuring the renowned Russian clown Slava Palunin, at the Princess of Wales theatre in Toronto. As the show begins, Palunin shuffles onto the stage holding a long rope that he seems to be fashioning into a noose. Great, I can’t help thinking. But the clown does not hang himself. Instead, another odd figure is tugging at the other end of the rope, a figure who through a mimed, comic exchange, turns the first clown’s attentions away from the self-destructive things he might do with the rope. Later, in the show’s powerful climax, the little clown is flattened and nearly vanquished in a vicious snowstorm, brought to theatrical life with glaring lights, pounding music, and a seemingly endless flurry of small white paper “snow” squares blasting off the stage and from the ceiling, blanketing the audience and the players. When the storm finally ends, and the clown rises again, it seems like the natural end of the performance, but there is more. Suddenly, gigantic multicoloured balls the size of Volkswagens bounce out from the stage and float slowly and majestically over the heads of the audience, who are still shaking snow squares from their hair and clothing. Long after the show ends, many stay standing at their seats, their heads upturned as they bat the huge balls back and forth to each other all over the theatre.
Only a true grinch would not get caught up in the silly spirit of it all, and the normally subdued Torontonians here, young and old, are having one whale of a time, their faces animated with the thrill of this impromptu game. Walking out of the theatre, I can’t help smiling at the conservatively dressed older man who probably spends most of his time doing something Toronto-ish like managing investment portfolios, as he beams away himself, unaware that several squares of white paper are still nestled in his thinning hair.
Despite the melancholy caste of many of Palunin’s comic tableaux, the show imparts an affirming message: Life may be absurd, you may be clownishly up against the odds on many occasions, but you might as well stick around. You never know when giant balls will descend from the heavens, a gift of simple, joyous play. In this sense, Palunin’s clown reminds me of Camus’s version of Sisyphus, the rebellious mortal “accused of a certain levity toward the gods,” the absurd hero, the man who manages to find happiness even as he descends the mountain to begin the task of pushing his boulder to the top all over again. “A moment comes when the creation ceases to be taken tragically; it is merely taken seriously,” concludes Camus. “Then man is concerned with hope.”
Right now, it doesn’t seem so difficult for me to concern myself with hope. But I suspect that suicide and its related issues will never be far from my consciousness. Shortly after moving to Ottawa, I sat in a chair in my finally unpacked new living room reading a newspaper article about a man who dramatically shot himself on a California freeway. Onlookers gawked and a local television station captured it all on video. The name of the man was Daniel Jones. In the early months after Daniel’s suicide, reading such a thing would have caused me agony, might even have made me question my own sanity and feel a grim paranoia about the perversely destined nature of the universe. Now, the coincidence merely rattled me momentarily.
Another recent item that caught my eye was a letter to the editor of the Ottawa Citizen from a young man who had gone to a hospital emergency ward suffering acute pain from a chronic illness. The physician on duty told him curtly that he should either learn to live with the pain or commit suicide. I felt the blood rising to my face as I read of this callousness, so illustrative of the ignorance about suicide, so unacceptable from someone who is supposed to be devoting his life to healing people, not adding to their suffering.
I am building a life here, reconnecting with friends who moved to Ottawa years ago, friends I was never able to see much before. One, Kathleen, now a mother of two boys, is a singer-songwriter, and a music therapist. Her clients have included everyone from elderly people with Alzheimer disease to children with cerebral palsy. Now and then, she sneaks away to a recording studio, and hopes to soon have enough material for a cd. I laugh when she tells me that she is in the middle of putting to music—blues, of course—Dorothy Parker’s famous poems, including her quintessential take on suicide and the futility of life:
Razors pain you; Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp;
Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give;
Gas smells awful; You might as well live.
August 1994. A happy memory. Daniel and I are visiting my sister and another close friend in London, England. It is Daniel’s first time overseas, and it’s fun to be showing him around, exploring the city. We take leisurely walks up Hampstead Heath, through Highgate Cemetery, where a group of Korean tourists are laying long-stemmed red carnations on Karl Marx’s grave. From my sister’s place in the east end, we board a double-decker red bus each day and wind our way into the centre of the city, wandering in and out of the used-book stores, buying a paisley shirt for Daniel on Carnaby Street, taking his picture outside a boutique called OBSESSIONS—the title of his first published novel. When we get to the British Museum Library, I can practically feel Daniel’s pulse quickening. For a book lover, this is heaven. Its shelves groan with historical treasures, its floorboards trod on through time by so many illustrious figures that it would be hard to keep track of them all. In row upon row of glass cases, gems of literary culture have been placed on view, manuscripts of famous works, from Milton’s Paradise Lost and the novels of Jane Austen and the Brontës to paper napkins bearing the original scrawled lyrics of Beatles’ songs. There are illuminated medieval texts, the Gutenberg Bible, children’s classics, exquisitely designed ancient texts in Arabic and Chinese and other languages—it is possible to spend days here browsing, thoroughly engrossed. We do spend hours wandering from case to case, our heads touching as we bend to peer into them. Daniel is silently and completely fascinated. Eventually I leave him and head to the museum. When I return, he is just as calmly engaged as when I left. Finally, he realizes he can’t take it all in at once and wrests himself away. “We have to come back,” he says. “Soon.”
Later that night, he flops back on the fold-out sofa in my sister’s living room, puts his hands behind his head, sighs, and looks at me with an expression of amazement. “I’m happy,” he says, as though he cannot quite believe it is true. “Just happy.” It is wonderful to see him enjoying himself so much, so shockingly rare, by his own account, for him to feel such simple pleasure in being alive. It did not last, of course, and throughout the fall and into the winter I watched him return to the state of guilty self-recrimination, as though he felt that deep down he really did not deserve to feel any joy, and must banish it as quickly as possible, lest anyone get wind of the fact that he, Daniel Jones, loathsome human being, was blessed with a momentary peace of mind, a sliver of grace.
But serene he was then. Near the end of our trip, we had dinner at the home of other friends, Jan and Keith. Jan and I were both celebrating birthdays. The evening ranged from intense and heated literary debate to utter silliness. I took a picture of Daniel taking a picture of Jan; he is leaning back in his chair, his head tilted back. He wears the mirthful, mouth-open, eyes-crinkled-up expression of someone heartily laughing. I see that I have caught behind him part of the shiny birthday banner that Jan has garlanded across the back wall of her dining room—the word HAPPY hangs suspended right over his head. Of all the snapshots I give to his mother after his death, this is the one she frames and places on a shelf in her kitchen.
It is natural, and necessary, to want to salvage something from the wreckage of a loved one’s death by suicide. You want to find a way to remember the good times without drowning in memories of the person’s bad end. In April 1994, two months after Daniel’s death, I returned to my sister’s home in London for a week, to retreat and try to regain some of my bearings. It was difficult retracing the journey I’d taken in Daniel’s company only eight months earlier; to stand in the same airport where my sister’s friend Jo had seen us off, and Daniel had hugged her and we’d all laughed and he’d said to her, “Friends forever, right?” It was painful to sleep alone on the same sofa where Daniel had proclaimed his happiness, to board the double-decker bus and sit in silence as it lumbered into the centre of London, recalling how happy I’d been myself the last time I was here.
I walk with a stride more resolute than I feel toward the museum and into the library. The fact is, I like it here myself, liked it before I brought Daniel here, and want to see it one last time before all the books are moved to a new building, amid much controversy. While it may be more conducive to preserving books and manuscripts, a new building can never have the character of the old library. As I walk through, peering in the cases once more, recalling Daniel beside me, I feel as though I am doing this on his behalf. For myself, I am struggling to keep a good memory good.
Now, I can retrieve other memories without feeling overwhelmed with the weight of my sorrow. Of course, I am sorry that Daniel had so few genuinely happy and peaceful moments in his life. But I am glad that I was there to share at least some of those rare good times with him.
I am not sorry to have known Daniel Jones. Perhaps, as my friend Laima said, we hurt each other just by being alive and different, but I think we teach each other by virtue of our existence too. I cannot pretend that Daniel’s dark side, and his suicide, did not and does not trouble me greatly. Not everyone saw the compassionate, deeply tender, and vulnerable side of this man. I feel honoured that I did, and am now able to say such a thing comfortably in the past tense.
Daniel is dead. I accept that. It is not something that can ever be undone. As the poet James Fenton speculates about his dead friend in the breathtaking poem “For Andrew Wood” in his collection entitled Out of Danger, I don’t think Daniel would “have us forever howling,” or want us to “waste quite away in sorrow.” I think about what he has lost, and I look to his own writing:
That last morning I spent with Assa, I locked the door to her studio as she had instructed. I walked down the wooden staircase at the side of the garage where her studio was. It was the first day of spring, and water poured from the eavestroughs on the side of the garage and onto the snow, which had mostly melted. I walked up Major Street to Bloor and sat in a doughnut shop drinking coffee until the taverns opened. It was my twenty-first birthday.
I drank beer all day. In the early evening I walked down Major Street and stood at the end of the driveway leading to Assa’s studio. The light in her window was on, and I could see Assa’s silhouette against the glass. She stood at the window looking out onto the street where I was standing. I could see the dark shape where her deformed arm was. It seemed to me that she was crying. I could not see Assa’s face, but because I was drunk I thought that I could see her crying. I thought that I could see the tears running down her face. Also, I thought that I was crying.
I was too drunk to notice that it was raining. Because I was drunk, I had confused the rain with tears. The rain ran down Assa’s window, and the same rain soaked my hair and clothes. I had been rained on for twenty-one years, but I had never noticed it before. I stood at the end of the driveway, and the rain soaked my hair and my clothes and my skin. I felt the rain on my skin, and it was the same rain that fell on Assa’s window, and the same rain that had always fallen. For that moment, I felt like something made of flesh and bone and skin, like something human.
These are the last words of “A Torn Ligament,” the last short story in Daniel’s collection, The People One Knows, which he did not live to see published. I find the passage an extraordinary evocation of a lonely young man standing in confusion on the threshold of becoming an adult; of sadness and suffering, anger and longing, a telling portrait of an emotional turning point in his—the narrator, Daniel’s—life. The reader can’t help but hope the moment leads to redemption, yet suspects that it might not, at least for a while.
What does a young man do, a young man accustomed to numbing his feelings of terror and sadness with alcohol, in the moment after the one in which he allows himself to feel real in his own skin? I believe the older man who wrote those autobiographical words, the Daniel I knew so briefly, as he looked back with tender regret on his young, broken self, and the young woman he hurt, was also at such a turning point. There is a yearning for recovery and relief, a keen unspoken desire for healing amid the anger and despair. And that later moment in Daniel’s life could have gone either way, too. Earlier in the same short story (quoted on page 57), he wonders if the relationship between him and the young woman might have turned out differently. “I do not know. I do not know,” he concludes.
But we know how Daniel’s story turned out, how his life ended. Mine has gone on, and I have found a way to be happy—or sometimes just ordinarily unhappy—while bearing my sorrows. Daniel’s death has cast a shadow over my life, and I have had to walk with it awhile and get used to its presence there, allow time to put it behind me, and once more give pride of place to the living souls now at the centre of my days. After much searching, stumbling, standing up, falling, and standing up to push the boulder up the hill again, I do get on with my life.
But I think of him, of course. I wish he had lived to know how to distinguish rain from tears, and to cry them, as many as he had to. I wish he had lived to learn how to feel his connections to others, to himself, without fear. To be less astonished by happiness.
I wish, more than anything, that he had lived to truly understand and accept that he was, above all—like loss and grief, love and survival—something human.