The New Yorker‘s Alec Wilkinson was on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show today talking about his February 15, 1999, piece on suicide notes, along with Thomas Joiner, the author of a new book called Why People Die By Suicide. While Joiner was researching the book, his father killed himself. [See comments for more detail on this point.] The show (now downloadable) was strange and grim. Excerpts from the NYer archive summary of Wilkinson’s piece:
“The writer describes how twenty years ago, while he was a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, he imagined what it would be like to kill himself. He was twenty-three at the time…. The writer became interested in suicide notes because he thought they might contain revelations about the end of life that couldn’t be found anywhere else…. Only 1 out of 5 suicides is likely to leave a note…. The writer describes the oldest suicide note–a letter written on papyrus by an Egyptian man in 2000 B.C. The letter is titled “The Dispute with His Soul of One Who Is Tired of Life.”… [T]here are 5 kinds of suicide notes: notes that blame someone, notes that deny an obvious reason is the cause, notes that blame & deny, notes that contain an insight, and notes that contain no explanation at all…. The writer excerpts 10 notes in the article. Some of the notes discuss how life is no longer worth living, some blame others for their death, some give instructions for the dispersal of their property, some claim to be possessed by demons, etc.”
I happen to have that Egyptian poem (maybe I copied it from the issue at the time?). Spacing is off but it’s late, so I’ll fix later.
To whom can I speak today?
One’s fellows are evil;
The friends of today do not love.
To whom can I speak today?
Faces have disappeared:
Every man has a downcast face toward his fellow.
To whom can I speak today?
A man should arouse wrath by his evil character,
But he stirs everyone to laughter, in spite of
the wickedness of his sin.
To whom can I speak today?
There is no righteous;
The land is left to those who do wrong.
To whom can I speak today?
The sin that afflicts the land,
It has no end.
All day this has woven into what I’ve been reading. I used to say that the saddest double feature in the world would be Breaking the Waves and The Sweet Hereafter. But if you survived the cruel screening and were still unsure whether life was all about suffering, reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking would finish you off. I stopped reading it in public—I can’t not cry, I can’t not move to the next chapter. It’s brutal. Knowing how many thousands of times more brutal it was and is for Didion herself is not comforting.
While we’re on this sunny subject, here’s that Tad Friend piece on the “fatal grandeur” of Golden Gate Bridge, which people still talk about often (and plagiarize—apologies to the tipster at the time whose email I didn’t follow up on). Did Lopate perhaps originally intend to book Friend rather than Wilkinson? That would seem to make more sense, since Friend’s piece came out more recently and Wilkinson was understandably reticent on the subject. The compelling oft-repeated and occasionally filched passage:
Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. “I wanted to disappear,†he said. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.†On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,†he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.â€
Later in Friend’s piece, there’s an interesting coincidence of phrase with Didion’s title:
Jumpers tend to idealize what will happen after the step off the bridge. “Suicidal people have transformation fantasies and are prone to magical thinking, like children and psychotics,†Dr. Lanny Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology says. “Jumpers are drawn to the Golden Gate because they believe it’s a gateway to another place. They think that life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they’ll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver.”
That is not the case.
In other very sad news, the unmatched tap dancer Fayard Nicholas died this week. If the history of race in America and, as a result, Hollywood had been different, you’d already know this, and television would devote a week or a month to showing his leading-man movies. Do a little soft-shoe in private for him, or if you’re brave, go to a tap jam; discover you can swing. It’s easy. True, doing what Nicholas and his brother, Harold, did is probably impossible, but you can still do something joyful for yourself that’ll also carry forward a meaningful piece of what he loved and perfected.
