True Story Thursdays vol. 3

What brings a man to face the sun
One morning with a loaded gun?
A faith in truth, a faith in lies
It matters not--the soldier dies
~my father


So. Suicide.

The View From Hell just linked to an interview with a man who had attempted suicide. The guy's best friend came to visit him, put a mic on him, and they just had an honest chat about why. What he was feeling, what his thoughts were. The man later did kill himself, but thanks to his friend, his words are there for us to hear.

Listening to that interview was a surreal experience for me. It didn't make me sad, exactly. I could empathize with Brian, could wish that there had been some way for him to transform himself, find a new way towards life and love and happiness. But each person has to find their own path to happiness in life--and since this man couldn't, and I wasn't there, who am I to say that another way was open for him?

It's hard for me to write about this, and not only because of Dad's death by suicide last year. These are the kinds of emotions, the kinds of thoughts that I usually can only express in poetry or lyrics. I recently attended an open mic with my younger sister, where we both performed songs that came from that same creative pain, the need to take our feelings of loss and hurt and separation and give them some kind of external form.

There's a point in the interview above where the suicide's friend says something like, "it was then that his pain ended, and ours began." Maybe that's how you know you're still alive, still gasping for breath against the tides of fate and time. Even when you can't tell the difference between the pain the comes with new growth and the pain of destruction, as Dad used to say, "pain is a message." Part of that message is that there's still something alive in you, something alive enough to grow, or to be destroyed.

I've held on to two kind of contradictory mindsets ever since it happened.

The first is the rational, up-where-I-can-reach-it part that says it was the pain that was too much for him, pain I couldn't take away, that no one could have.

There was physical pain. From worsening diabetes, from years of smoking, from the buildup of stress that took its toll on an aging body, and from old injuries, both minor and dire. A fleshly testament to "things that never happened" that very much did happen. A kneecap, for example, shot off by an agent who never existed, who'd come to Chicago in 1968 to distribute lethal weapons to the student protesters at the Democratic National Convention. The body of that agent--a few fractions of a second slower on the draw than my father--was disappeared, the weapons confiscated, the protest went on without a massacre, the midnight hospital visit chalked up to a "range accident" in the wee hours of a night when all the ranges were closed. He didn't mind about the secrecy, wasn't proud of the fact that on that night it took killing to prevent more killing. It was work that needed to be done, it got done, and that was enough. But Dad limped for the rest of his life.

There was emotional pain--from being squeezed out of a life-changing business deal by corruption in the organization he was trying to improve, from a bitter decade-long divorce that left him and Mom both bankrupt and us girls with a laundry list of emotional scars that he either failed to prevent or helped to cause, depending on which incidents you want to look at and how you want to look at them. There was an apartment full of research sources for projects that never got finished--a series of novels, a better bullet, a recoilless rifle barrel, a painstakingly-crafted theory on the role human life might play in the larger universe. But there was always something more pressing, more urgent, something driving him onward away from those things. Always, there was that something inside that wouldn't let him stop, take a deep breath, and focus all that brainpower on creating the things that really moved him, rather than just thinking or talking them out.

I tell myself, have been telling myself, that these were the reasons. That stroke that took away his half his range of motion, left him to painstakingly type his final emails one letter at a time because his hands weren't steady enough to write them out, that was just the wind knocking over the first domino in a long, straight line. They'd been stacked up and ready to go for a long time, and there wasn't a damn thing any of us could have done about it.

But the emotional part of me is still sure, deep down in there, that it can't have been that simple. That there had to have been some magic words I could say, some magic set of actions I could stumble upon, that would have helped him jump across the gap in his mind, to escape that thing that inexorably drove him. He said often that he didn't fear death. What he feared, and didn't talk about as much, was the people he cared about not being prepared to face life and meet its challenges.

So, say my nagging emotions, I could have given him more of a reason to stay. Could have made him feel like I still needed him, like I wasn't ready to go out and face the world on my own yet. Could have sat for four or five hours every night and listened raptly to all his stories about the adventures that never happened, the inventions that never got built, the extravagant, world-changing schemes we would embark on "if I win the lottery, or the deal goes through."

But it wouldn't have been honest. The stories and schemes depressed me and made me feel inadequate. Here I was at the age of twenty-six, having accomplished, in my own eyes, nothing special, where he at the same age had already had more exciting, action-packed adventures than you could fit into a long-running TV series. When he talked about what could be done to change the world given vast resources, I saw his experience of having had them, of seemingly being able to conjure them out of thin air, of knowing which people to ask and how to ask them, how to get everyone moving in the same direction. I was just feeling my way into the idea of getting all of myself moving in the same direction. It wouldn't have been right to turn my whole life into a sham in a desperate bid to convice him it wasn't the right time for him to die if he was bound and determined that it was.

Reminds me of a scene from the novel Komarr. This doesn't spoil a major plot point for this novel, but if you haven't read the series, trust me, Lois tells it better. The protagonist, Miles, is a short fellow with a helluva limp whose forceful personality makes up for what he lacks in size. Years back, in another novel, he helped engineer a mass escape from a prison camp. As the shuttles were taking off, packed to the gills, one of the prisoners who'd wedged herself in the doorway next to him fell out. He reached out to try to grab her hand as she fell, but their fingertips just barely touched, and he couldn't grab ahold of her. She fell to her death, while Miles and everyone else was lifted to safety. The memory haunted him, appearing in nightmares, and he tortured himself with the idea that if he'd just reacted a fraction of a second more quickly, he could have pulled her to safety.

In one scene in this novel, Miles and another character are walking near a riverbank in a park, and she slips and starts to fall toward the water. Flashing back to that horrible memory, Miles grabs her arm, determined not to relive the other woman's death. But because of the difference in their size and weight, what actually happens is that Miles is pulled down into the stream right along with her.

It's a metaphor I use surprisingly often, both in my own thoughts, and in talking out difficult emotional experiences with other people. If I had turned myself inside out trying to pull Dad back from the brink, most likely what would have happened is that he would still have died, but I would have been left to face his death emotionally and spiritually bankrupt. I can't know what would have happened if I had acted differently. But the thing I most regret, the thing I grieve about, isn't something I did. It's something he did. Something that was his decision to make. And I can't let myself take that decision away from him, even inside my own mind.

In some circumstances, taking emotional responsibility for things beyond your control can empower you to change your outlook on them. You look at something that happened in the past, or that was the result of actions that other people didn't intend to turn out the way they did (and hence aren't sorry for), and you take the blame on yourself because you haven't got any other place to put it. Once you've done that, you feel like you have power over the memory, over the experience. It's not accurate--assigning blame never really is--and it's probably not the best strategy, but sometimes that little edge of feeling like you have control is all you've got to pull yourself away from a toxic stew of emotional backlash that threatens to consume you. Once you've gotten a little bit of distance, it becomes possible to sort out all the real reasons why things happened the way they did. It becomes possible to reposition your anger and disbelief a little bit without totally cracking up or acting out against someone else--someone who's maybe hurting just as badly, or who couldn't handle the weight of your feelings without cracking up themselves.

Here, though, I know I can't hang on to that responsibility forever. Dad did what he did for his own reasons, and though I think I've got a pretty good idea of what they were, I can't go through my whole life never letting myself be angry with him because I think I know exactly what he was thinking. I can't make up an imaginary Dad (even if it's composed of, say, 78% of what real Dad was thinking) and mourn the fact that I didn't say the magic words that would have made him change his mind.

All I can do is live. Pull myself up out of every hole I find myself in, and try my damnedest not to paint myself into any corners. Live well, and grow, and change. Live so that whenever I face death, whether it comes to me or I go to it, one thing I won't leave my mourners is a long list of deeds undone.