The Noonday Demon (48 page)

I am not given to overpowering suicidal fantasy. I think about suicide often, and at my most depressed the idea is never far from my mind; but it tends to stay in my mind, glossed with the irreality with which children imagine old age. I know when things are getting worse because the kinds of suicide I imagine become more various and to some extent more violent. My fantasies leave behind the pills in my medicine chest and even the gun in my safe and extend to figuring out whether the blades of a Gillette sensor razor could be used to slit my wrists, or whether I would be better off using an X-Acto knife. I have gone so far as to try a beam just to see if it would be strong enough to support a noose. I have worked on figuring out timing: when I would be alone in the house, at what hour I could carry things through. Driving when I am in such a mood, I think a lot about cliffs, but then I think about air bags and the possibility of hurting other people, and that way usually feels too messy for me. These are all very real imaginings and can be very painful, but they have so far remained in my imagination. I have engaged in some reckless behavior that could be called para-suicidal, and I have often wanted to die; at low points, I have toyed with the idea, much as I have at high points in my life toyed with the idea of learning to play the piano; but it never flew out of control in me or turned into much of an accessible reality. I wanted out of life, but I had no impulse to drain my being out of existence.

If my depressions had been either worse or longer, I can imagine that I would have become more actively suicidal, but I don’t think I could have killed myself without hard evidence that my situation was irreversible. Though suicide assuages present suffering, in most instances it is undertaken to avoid future suffering. I was born with a strong optimism from my father’s side of the family, and for reasons that may well be purely biochemical, my negative feelings, though sometimes intolerable, have never felt conclusively immutable to me. What I can remember is the curious sense of futurelessness that came to me at low points in my depression—feeling inappropriately relaxed during the takeoff of a small plane because I genuinely didn’t care whether it crashed and killed me or flew and delivered me to my destination. I took foolish risks when they presented themselves to me. I was game to eat poison; I was just not particularly inclined to find or brew it. One of my interviewees,
who has survived multiple suicide attempts, told me that if I’d never even slit my wrists, I’d never
really
been depressed. I chose not to enter that particular competition, but I have certainly met people who have suffered enormously but have never made attempts on themselves.

In the spring of 1997, I went skydiving for the first time, in Arizona. Skydiving is often discussed as a para-suicidal activity, and if I had in fact died while I was doing it, I imagine that it would have been tied in the imagination of my family and friends to my mood states. And yet—and I believe this is often the case for para-suicidal action—it felt not like a suicidal impulse but like a vital one. I did it because I felt so good that I was capable of it. At the same time, having entertained the idea of suicide, I had broken down certain barriers that had stood between me and self-obliteration. I did not want to die when I jumped out of an airplane, but I didn’t fear dying in the way I had feared it before my depression, and so I didn’t need so rigorously to avoid it. I’ve gone skydiving several times since then, and the pleasure I’ve had from my boldness, after so much time lived in reasonless fear, is incalculable. Every time at the door of the plane, I feel the adrenal rush of real fear, which, like real grief, is precious to me for its simple authenticity. It reminds me what those emotions are actually about. Then comes the free fall, and the view over virgin country, and the overwhelming powerlessness and beauty and speed. And then the glorious discovery that the parachute is there after all. When the canopy opens, the updrafts in the wind suddenly reverse the fall, and I rise up and up away from the earth, as though an angel has suddenly come to my rescue to carry me to the sun. And then when I start to sink again, I do it so slowly and live in a world of silence in multiple dimensions. It is wonderful to discover that the fate you have trusted has warranted that trust. What joy it has been to find that the world can support my most rash experiments, to feel, even while falling, that I am held tightly by the world itself.

I first became acutely aware of suicide when I was about nine years old. The father of a classmate of my brother’s killed himself, and the topic had to be addressed at home. The man in question had stood up in front of his family, made some extraordinary remark, and then leapt through the open window, leaving his wife and children to look down at a body condensed into lifelessness several stories below. “Some people just have problems they can’t solve and they get to the point at which they can’t stand to live anymore,” my mother explained. “You’ve got to be strong to get through life. You’ve got to be one of the survivors.” Somehow I didn’t understand the horror of what had happened; it had an exotic and fascinating, almost pornographic quality.

When I was a sophomore in high school, one of my favorite teachers
shot himself in the head. He was found in his car, with a Bible open beside him. The police shut the Bible without noting the page. I remember discussing that at the dinner table. I had not yet lost anyone who was really close to me, so the fact that his death was a
suicide
did not stand out as much as it does in retrospect; I was confronting for the first time the fact of death. We talked about how no one would ever know to which page that Bible was open, and something literary in me suffered more about that foiled closure of the life than about the loss of it.

My freshman year of college, the ex-girlfriend of my girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend jumped off a building at school. I didn’t know her, but I knew that I was implicated in a chain of rejection that included her, and I felt guilty about the death of this stranger.

A few years after college, an acquaintance killed himself. He drank a bottle of vodka; slit his wrists; and apparently discontent with the slow progress of his blood, went to the roof of his New York apartment building and jumped off. This time I was shocked. He was a sweet-natured, intelligent, good-looking man, someone of whom I had occasionally been jealous. I wrote at that time for the local paper. He used to pick up his copy early from an all-night newsagent, and every time I published something he would be the first one to call and congratulate me. We were not close, but I will always remember those calls, and the tone of slightly inappropriate awe he brought to his praise. He would reflect a bit sadly on how he was not sure about his career and how he perceived me to know what I was doing. That was the only melancholic thing I ever observed in him. Otherwise, I think of him still as a cheerful person. He had fun at parties; in fact, he gave good parties. He knew interesting people. Why would such a person slit his wrists and jump off the roof? His psychiatrist, who had seen him the day before, was not able to shed light on the question. Was there a why to answer? When it happened, I still thought that suicide had a logic, albeit a defective one.

But suicide is not logical. “Why,” wrote Laura Anderson, who has battled such acute depression, “do they always have to come up with a ‘reason’?” The reason given is seldom sufficient to the event; it is the task of analysts and kind friends to search for clues, causes, and categories. I have since learned that from the catalogs of suicide I have read. The lists are as long and painful as those on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (and more young men committed suicide during the Vietnam War than died in action). Everyone had some acute trauma proximate to his suicide: a husband insulted one, a lover abandoned another, someone hurt himself badly, someone lost his true love to illness, someone went bankrupt, someone totaled her car. Someone simply woke up one day and didn’t want to be awake. Someone hated Friday nights. If they killed themselves,
they did it because they were suicidal, and not because it was the obvious outcome of such reasoning. While the medical establishment insists that there is always a connection between mental illness and suicide, a sensationalist media often suggests that mental illness plays no real part in suicides. It makes us feel safe to locate causes for suicide. This is a more extreme version of the logic according to which acute depression is the consequence of whatever triggers it. There are no clean lines here. How suicidal do you have to feel to
attempt
suicide, and then how suicidal do you have to feel to
commit
suicide, and where does one intention become the other? Suicide may indeed be (as per the WHO) a “suicidal act with a fatal outcome,” but what are the conscious and unconscious motives underlying that outcome? High-risk actions—from deliberately exposing oneself to HIV to provoking someone to homicidal rage to staying outside in an ice storm—are frequently para-suicidal. Suicide attempts range from the conscious, focused, utterly deliberate, and purely objective-oriented to the most slightly self-destructive action. “Ambivalence,” Kay Jamison writes, “saturates the suicidal act.” A. Alvarez writes, “A suicide’s excuses are mostly by the way. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded, and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. They are like a trivial border incident which triggers a major war. The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.” “Newspapers often speak of the ‘personal sorrows’ or ‘incurable illnesses,’ ” Camus wrote. “These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.” And the critical theorist Julia Kristeva describes the profound randomness of timing: “A betrayal, a fatal illness, some accident or handicap that abruptly wrests me away from what seemed to me the normal category of normal people or else falls on a loved one with the same radical effect, or yet . . . What more could I mention? An infinite number of misfortunes weigh us down every day.”

In 1952, Edwin Shneidman opened the first suicide-prevention center, in Los Angeles, and tried to come up with useful (rather than theoretical) structures for thought about suicide. He proposed that suicide is the result of thwarted love, shattered control, assaulted self-image, grief, and rage. “It is almost as though the suicidal drama were autonomously writing itself, as though the play had a mind of its own. It has to sober us to realize that as long as people, consciously or unconsciously, can successfully
dissemble, no suicide prevention program can be a hundred percent successful.” Kay Jamison refers to this dissembling when she laments that “the privacy of the mind is an impermeable barrier.”

A few years ago, another of my college classmates killed himself. This one had always been peculiar, and in some ways his suicide was easier to explain away. I’d had a message from him some weeks before he died and had been meaning to call back and make a plan for lunch. I was out with mutual friends when I heard. “Anyone speak to so-and-so lately?” I asked when a topic reminded me of him. “Haven’t you heard?” answered one of my friends. “He hanged himself a month ago.” For some reason, that image is the worst for me. I can imagine the friend with the slit wrists in the air, and I can imagine his body disintegrated after a jump. The image of this friend swaying from a beam like a pendulum: well, I never got my mind around it. I know that my phone call and lunch invitation would not have saved him from himself, but suicide inspires guilt all around it, and I cannot shake from my mind the idea that I would have received a clue if I’d seen him, and that I would have done something with that clue.

Then the son of a business associate of my father’s killed himself. And then the son of a friend of my father’s killed himself. Then two other people I knew killed themselves. And friends of friends killed themselves too, and since I was writing this book, I heard from people who had lost their brothers, children, lovers, parents. It is possible to understand the paths that have led someone toward suicide, but the mentality of that actual moment, of the leap required to undertake the final action—that is incomprehensible and terrifying and so strange that it makes one feel as though one had never really known the person who did it.

While writing this book, I heard about many suicides, in part because of the worlds with which I had been thrown in contact and in part because people looked to me, with all my research, for some kind of wisdom or insight of which I was in fact entirely incapable. A nineteen-year-old friend, Chrissie Schmidt, called me in shock when one of her Andover classmates hanged himself in the stairwell behind his dorm room. The boy in question had been elected class president. After being caught drinking (aged seventeen), he had been removed from office. He had delivered a resignation speech that had received a standing ovation, then had taken his own life. Chrissie had known the boy only in passing, but he had seemed to occupy an enchanted world of popularity from which she sometimes felt excluded at Andover. “After fifteen minutes or so of disbelief,” Chrissie wrote in an E-mail, “I dissolved into tears. I think I felt many things at the same time—inexpressible sadness at the
life cut short, voluntarily, so soon; anger at the school, a place smothered by its own mediocrity, for making such a huge deal about drinking and being so hard on the boy; and perhaps above all fear that I, at some point, might have felt capable of hanging myself in the stairwell of my dorm. Why didn’t I know this boy when I was there? Why did I feel that I was the only one who was so out of sorts, so miserable, when the most popular boy in school might have been feeling so many of the same things? Why the hell didn’t someone notice that he was carrying such a burden around with him? All those times, lying in my dorm room sophomore year, feeling desperately sad and baffled by the world around me and the life I was living . . . well, here I am. And I know I wouldn’t have taken that final step. I really do. But I came pretty close to feeling it was at least in the realm of possibility. What is it—bravery? pathology? solitude?—that can push someone over that final, fatal edge, when life is something we’re willing to lose?” And the next day she added, “His death stirs up and throws into relief all these unanswered questions—that I must ask these questions and that I will never get my answer is unbearably sad to me right now.” That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect. There is no one to whom one so yearns to connect as a person who has committed suicide. “If we had only known” is the plea of the parents of a suicide, people who rack their minds trying to figure out what failing of their love could have allowed such a thing to come and surprise them, trying to think what they should have said.