It’s a sense of primal existential dislocation that plagues me to this day, so that I will find myself in midtown Manhattan in late afternoon, not twenty blocks from where I grew up, and all the same feel like an uprooted alien. Take Sixth Avenue in the mid-Fifties or Third Avenue in the Forties: What streets are these, with all these soaring office buildings, and, more confusingly, who am I? This core sense of anxiety can happen anywhere outside the strictly circumscribed neighborhood of about twenty blocks that I think of as familiar, almost as an annexation of my apartment. It is as though I lack an inner compass, the sort that directs you to the left rather than the right, or guides you when you get out of the subway, so that you don’t end up walking two blocks in the wrong direction, as I frequently do, before you realize where you are.
At some point I must have dropped to the floor of the playpen and begun to cry; it’s not a demanding cry but a soft, useless wailing that expects nothing. I wonder how long I sat there before someone came along to offer consolation, or whether I eventually gave up and curled myself to sleep, perhaps with the help of a thumb or pacifier. Although I was considered a rampant crybaby as a child and remember frequent bouts of tears in my twenties and thirties, these days I cry rarely. Still, that lack of expectation of relief—of the coming end of sorrow—has stayed with me, so that I far too easily tend to fall into a mode of hopelessness when something minor goes wrong. Where another person might move to try and fix things, I sway in the wind, ready to be knocked over, prepared to give up. I admire other peoples’ resourcefulness when their plans go awry—the ones who’ve persuaded themselves that “every bump is a boost,” who pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start over again—but I can’t figure out a way to emulate them.
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Self-inflicted death has always held out a stark allure for me: I am fascinated by people who have the temerity to bring down the curtain on their own suffering—who don’t hang around moping, in hopes of a brighter day. I know all the arguments about the cowardice and selfishness (not to mention rage) involved in committing suicide, but nothing can persuade me that the act doesn’t require some sort of courage, some steely embrace of self-extinction. I can’t help but notice, as I continue to shove myself forward, trying to give my life purpose, trying to write this book about living despite a wish to die, that other people have been giving up—some of them famous, like Robin Williams, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, and some of them not.
Two poets, for instance, killed themselves in the same year, separated by eight months, neither of whom I’d read at the time of their death, though I’m quite the avid reader of poetry. One, Deborah Digges, was fifty-nine, the same age that Virginia Woolf, the writer whose sensibility and novels mean the most to me, was when she decided to pack it in. Digges jumped off the upper level of a campus stadium. She looks very pretty in the jacket photo that accompanies her last collection of poems, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart, a review copy of which arrived in the mail quite by macabre chance some time after she died. Young, too, almost girlish, certainly nowhere near her age; I wonder whether it was her favorite photo or whether she just never bothered to have it updated.
There are other things I wonder in passing: whether Digges’s weekends, in particular, were as shorn of relief as mine. Did she hibernate, the way I do, sleeping away the best part of the day, waking up briefly in the late morning and again in the early afternoon only to thump the pillows back into life before returning to the haven of sleep, ignoring all attempts at plans, redoing my life in dreams, in which I retrieve dead parents and far-off lovers, find myself pregnant with the second child I never had, or married to a long-ago boyfriend who wasn’t my type but whose type I wished I had been. Waking up to find myself in the same bed as always, my nightgown sticky with sweat.
This is the same bed on which I will lie, more than a year later, at 7:00 p.m. on a Thursday evening in early May, feeling there is nowhere lower I can go and wondering whether I have it in me to kill myself and what would be the most reasonable way to do it, should I leave a note, would it have an irrevocably terrible effect on my daughter, are nine stories high enough to ensure death (the actress Elizabeth Hartman, so poignant as the blind girl in A Patch of Blue and then as Priss in The Group, “fell” to her death from the fifth floor), is there the possibility of crashing into the pavement and ending up alive but maimed?
A friend of mine who lives on the upper end of the Upper East Side—“where it verges into Spanish Harlem,” as she says—recently told me about a woman in her building who hung out in the lobby every morning with the doormen, together with her little dog. “I was obsessed with her roots,” this friend explains. “She had two inches of gray, her hair parted down the middle, the rest of it was a very dark brown. And I kept looking at her with my lip curled, it really bothered me, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t do her roots. Then she jumped off the roof and I felt bad that I snarled at her every morning in the lobby and that I wouldn’t talk to her because of her roots.” I think about how I frequently let my own roots grow out and wonder if untouched-up roots are an indication among a certain class of women of increasing despair, like Marilyn Monroe’s uncut toenails.
Then there was the forty-two-year-old poet I didn’t know but had heard of who called it quits on Christmas Day, 2009. She taught at the 92nd Street Y, where for a number of years I taught classes in “The Art of Reading” and memoir-writing, so for all I know we may even have passed each other on the way in or out of the building, might have bonded, shared war stories. As reported in The New York Times, Rachel Wetzsteon was despondent over a love affair that had recently ended after three years. She was also known to suffer from depression, no surprise there. I wonder how she did it and ask a friend who I think might be privy to this piece of information. This friend emails me that the poet hanged herself, or at least that’s the story.
The methodology always being of such interest to me, almost as much as the finality of the act. Who by fire? Who by water? Who by pills? Who by razor blade? Rachel Roberts, the gifted Welsh actress who starred in gritty British films of the 1960s such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life, continued to pine away for Rex Harrison and the glamorous life he offered her long after they were divorced and became an alcoholic, according to her heartbreaking posthumously published journals, No Bells on Sunday. At the age of fifty-three, she swallowed lye and then crashed through a glass room divider, committing a sort of double hara-kiri. Hanging oneself seems to require so much in the way of accurate logistics, I can’t see myself taking that route. I worry specifically that I would kick the stool or chair away at the wrong moment and be left dangling, choking but not dead. Or perhaps the rope wouldn’t be short enough, those kinds of mistakes. I don’t think I am possessed of the steely will and planning ability of a David Foster Wallace, who reportedly taped his hands together before hanging himself.
Virginia Woolf’s method, on the other hand, has always made eminent sense to me. Walking into the River Ouse, with a large stone—or several stones, no one seems to know for sure their number or their size—in her coat pocket to help weigh her down, going under for good, the bubbles coming up in a frothy rush and then a final stillness. (She had tried and failed to drown herself several days earlier, returning home drenched.)
“By the way, what are the arguments against suicide?” Woolf wrote on the 30th of October, 1930, in a letter to her friend the composer Ethel Smyth. “You know what a flibberti-gibbet I am: well there suddenly comes in a thunder-clap a sense of the complete uselessness of my life. It’s like suddenly running one’s head against a wall at the end of a blind alley. Now what are the arguments against that sense—‘Oh it would be better to end it’?” I read somewhere that suicide remained a crime in England until 1961 and am taken aback at the fierce judgment of this view, not all that different in its implications from Samuel Johnson’s definition in his Dictionary of the English Language, written a little more than two centuries ear
lier: “SUICIDE”: “Self-murder, the horrid crime of destroying one’s self.” The word “horrid” seems so supremely condemning; it’s enough to make one feel ashamed of harboring such impulses, much less acting on them.
On the other hand, there’s nothing much to cozy up to in the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s hyper-rational essay in defense of suicide, either, written in 1783, less than three decades after Johnson. Hume takes a scrupulously dispassionate, almost bird’s eye approach to the problem, treating suicide as a minor ripple in a larger, impermeable ecosystem—pointing out that the loss of an individual life “is of no greater importance than an oyster.” This equal-opportunity diminishment is the other side of, perhaps even a corrective to, the melancholic’s habit of seeing nothing but his own despair writ large everywhere he looks. We have, for instance, Max Brod, Kafka’s great friend, recording in his diary: “Took a walk with Kafka; the misery of the Turks reminds him of his own.” (In October 1912 the Turks had been expelled from the Balkans and coverage of the ensuing atrocities had filled the papers.) Still, Hume’s cool-as-a-cucumber version puts me on the defensive, makes me want to separate myself out from other potential suicides in keeping with Churchill’s famous pronouncement: “We are all worms but I do believe I am a glow worm.” To which I would add: “We are all oysters but I do believe I am a glow oyster.”
The Jewish attitude toward suicide, as one might expect, is not all that different from the Christian view: both religions consider it a sin, and those who take their own lives are technically not entitled to Jewish burial and mourning rites. (The Hebrew term for suicide translates into a person “losing knowledge of himself.”) But Judaism is quick to adduce mitigating psychological circumstances behind the act, such as an unsound mind, which allows for a softening of the laws that prohibit giving a suicide a Jewish burial or sitting shiva for him or her. I remember asking my mother anxiously about this when I was young and still religiously observant, worried that suicide would lead to an eternal homelessness, that I’d float around as lonely in death as I felt in life.
In Death Becomes Her, an incongruously lighthearted and often inaccurate book about famous and notorious suicides, drowning is described as “the most mentally demanding and painfully agonizing” method of killing oneself. I wonder if this is true, since so many other passing details are incorrect. (Woolf, to the best of my knowledge, was not remotely “considered unattractive”; many, including her husband, Leonard, considered her beautiful. Ted Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill did not begin several months after he married Sylvia Plath but in the summer of 1962, six years into their marriage. And Anne Sexton’s daughter Linda was not, in the full meaning of the term, her mother’s “lover,” although they did have an inappropriately eroticized relationship.)
While skimming this romp of a history for nuggets worth noting (“Monday is the most popular day to kill yourself, whereas Saturday is the least popular”), I discover that Woolf is described as possibly having suffered from a pathology known as “catabythismomania”: “a morbid impulse to commit suicide by drowning.” The word strikes me as almost comical in its specificity, like one of those German nouns that go on and on and describe an extremely rarefied condition that would seem to be Unbeschreibliche—beyond the level of articulation. Besides, does having a word for such a wish explain anything? Or does it merely reduce Woolf to an exotic and impenetrable specimen of being, taking her ever further away from the rest of us?
I prefer Alison Light’s take on the matter, which offers a humanizing cultural perspective. “Women, apparently, are more likely to choose a suicide which leaves the body whole,” she observes in Mrs. Woolf and the Servants. “Death by drowning, so often the fate of the fallen woman in the nineteenth century, so often idealized as a purgation and a rebirth after the dissolution of the body.” I can see why drowning was viewed in such alluring terms: There is something about water—the ongoing flow of it, the tide coming in and then going out again, time and time over—that suggests a joining up with rather than a ceasing to be, a larger lament than one’s own puny keening. The sound of the waves like a hushed conversation, one that has begun long before you entered the world and will continue to go on long after. (Freud, in his dream interpretations, posited water as a symbol of intrauterine life—of the womb, which makes a poetic sort of sense, especially if one is thinking of a capacious-yet-cozy, imperturbable womb.) Still, the commitment to the act must be fierce—forcing yourself down into the numbingly cold depths, resisting the natural impulse to come up and gasp madly for breath, allowing the water to enter your lungs.
More recently—time keeps ticking, years have passed between paragraphs, and still I’m here at my desk, trying to make sense of things—a dauntingly tall (six-foot-three) and quite beautiful fashion designer named L’Wren Scott abruptly killed herself, at the age of forty-nine. I had lunch with her once at the Lambs Club on West Forty-fourth Street, several years earlier, when there was an idea afloat at Elle that I might write a piece about her. Clever girl, I thought to myself when I first heard the news: Now you will never have to grow old and haggard, lose your luster, sit alone in a coffee shop as the afternoon drains into evening, hope someone will invite you to a concert or a movie to fill up your week.
Her death was deemed newsworthy, unlike some other suicides, because of the glamour surrounding her. Not least, there was her boyfriend of more than a decade—none other than Mick Jagger, he of the strutting gait and rubbery lips—who had, or had not, depending on which account you read or believed, recently broken up with her. Then there was the matter of her recent financial troubles with her fashion label, which had left her six million in debt. But she had also been a force in and of herself, a girl named Laura Bambrough, the adopted daughter of Mormon parents, with inauspicious beginnings in Roy, Utah. What powers of self-invention she must have had, enough to catapult her out of Roy at the age of sixteen to seek her fortune as a fashion model in Paris. When did they begin to sputter out? Did she spend a lot of time concealing her depression, or was it something that came with little history—or little that was discernible to others?
On another point, I wonder at what moment suicide became a verb. I first heard it used that way—as in “she suicided”—from a psychiatrist I dated on and off for a period of years in my forties. When I first met this man he described himself as a sexual “phenomenon”; I wasn’t sure what he meant by it but his undeniable virility certainly contributed to the trouble I had extricating myself from what was a doomed relationship from the get-go. In any case, I found the usage disturbing—dismissive, somehow—as though the wish to do away with oneself could be tied up neatly in a sterile bundle of professional jargon. I came upon that usage again recently in a short story in the journal n + 1, in which a character who is inhabiting the body of a female dolphin writes a letter to Sylvia Plath. “Men suicide to consolidate a reputation, women suicide to get one.” Then, of course, I went on to muse whether there was any truth in this assertion beyond the cynical binary quip of it … the assumption that women lag behind men even here.
Suicide may be called many things—impulsive, calculated, or even self-serving—but certainly in the moment of its enactment it requires a radical daring, a willingness to abandon the known for the completely unknown—other than the knowledge that, as Ernest Becker puts it in The Denial of Death, “one is food for worms.” The notion that taking one’s life is a form of cowardice may have some truth to it but it also serves to soften the blow the suicidee aims at friends and family, underlining the blunt fact that, important or loved as these intimates may have been, they simply weren’t enough. Or it is the kind of thing said to a suicidally inclined person, in an attempt to make the act less appealing. Who, after all, wants to be remembered as a coward?
Still, considering how frightened most of us are at the possibility of our own extinction—how little we discuss the conclusiveness of death, preferring to cover over its finality with timorous words like “passed”—it has alway
s seemed to me that choosing to take your own life demands, yes, a degree of selfishness regarding the emotional pain inflicted on others who have to suffer the consequences of your act, but also a special, aberrant sort of bravery. Not to leave out the desperation, which must be of such strength as to torpedo all other solutions. Or the not insignificant matter of how much physical pain one would have to endure on the way to death. Suicides don’t seem to fret about the possibility of physical pain, or at least I haven’t read much about this aspect of things. And yet if I were being completely honest, I would have to say that it is this prospect, as much as anything, that has stopped me from, for example, jumping off a roof—perhaps a trivial consideration in light of the insensate eternity that awaits, but there it is.
I should also add, in fairness, that there is a side of me that gives myself credit for keeping on keeping on—that recognizes the courage, although it might be of a more ordinary sort, it takes to hold on to life in the face of the wish not to be here. It would be untrue, as well as inherently stupid, to say that I have contempt for people who choose not to kill themselves. It’s just that part of the allure of depression for me has always been its negative bravura, its splashy defiance in the face of what is on offer, its refusal to be moved by the fact that there are no substitutes.
I’ll have none of you, it says, not the wind or the stars or human attachment or the slightly vacant quality of a late Tuesday afternoon, when the streets are not yet full and somewhere a siren is wailing. My own tendency has always been to say no instead of yes to any number of invitations, like an eternal two-year-old. I’m not proud of it but it’s who I am, standing guard against being pulled into experiences I’m not sure I will like. All the same, I’ve fought my own suicidal wishes with as much strength as I can muster, or borrow, and hope to keep doing so. I write this with only a degree of conviction; if I were fully persuaded of the wisdom of hanging around, I’d surely be a different person and this would be a different book.
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