In the fall of 1968, when I was in junior high school, a classmate, while her mother was still at work, left the apartment they shared, made her way down through the spot-lit parking lots and scrub of sumac, chain-link fencing, and tree of paradise to Route I-287, lay down on the asphalt of the dark New Jersey highway, and was killed by a passing tractor-trailer truck.
For weeks afterward, in the hallways, at our lockers, in health class, we puzzled over what had happened. What would drive a 13-year-old girl to such a desperate and at the same time eerily premeditated self-demise? Why had we not guessed the depths of her despair? Could we have prevented her suicide? Our wild, bewildered, and entranced concern, of course, was nothing compared to the unspeakable and unappeasable misery we heard in the halting testimonies of the truck driver and the girl’s mother. Suicide, we were learning, involved a nexus of pain, guilt, anger, shame, denial, and staggering remorse that traveled into and out of the person taking his or her own life, across a wide spectrum of intimates, strangers, generations, times, and places.
It is the rare person who has not been touched, however distantly, by suicide—its inheritances and legacies. Suicide (from sui, “of oneself,” and cidium, “a killing”) is a mysterious, unsettling phenomenon that is probably as old as self-consciousness. Ritualized suicide has existed across cultures since antiquity, and in the early Western tradition has been the object of philosophical musings by the likes of Plato and Aristotle. St. Augustine, Thomas More, Michel de Montaigne, John Calvin, and John Locke also wrote about suicide—as, in more modern times, have David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and 20th-century existentialists like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. A recent e-mail from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention tells me that “more than 36,000 people died by suicide in 2009, making it the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. With the suicide rate in this country trending upward,” the cyber-message admonishes, “there is a greater urgency to do more.” In particular, as we move into the month of October, and summer’s mass of green transforms into an almost hallucinatory spectacle of uniquely distinct trees and shrubs, as though each dying thing were vying at the end to be seen, I am reminded that, in the United States, October is LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) History Month. As I consider the tragic spate of deaths by preteen and teenaged homosexuals driven to suicide by bullying and confusion, most recently the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer in upstate New York last month, I confront anew that suicide is especially disconcerting in the young.
Leaving aside the question about whether or not poets are more likely than others to commit suicide (perhaps they are just more likely to communicate their anguish), poems about suicide and suicidal tendencies have certainly brought me to a deeper understanding of the dark allure and terror of suicide’s possibility. As the priest and poet John Donne once wrote in empathy, “Whenever any affliction assails me, I have the keys of my prison in mine own hand, and no remedy presents it selfe so soone to my heart, as mine own sword. Often meditation of this hath wonne me to a charitable interpretation of their action, who dy so.” Among the many poets who have helped me better to comprehend (and to plumb the limits of my ability completely to fathom) the anguish of those afflicted, however fleetingly, with the desire to die—Sylvia Plath, Al Alvarez, Emily Dickinson, Deborah Digges, John Berryman, Rachel Wetzsteon, Debra Nystrom, Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; / Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man / In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; / Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be”), to name but a few—is the New York poet, novelist, and book editor Jill Bialosky, whose work I have admired for years and whose grapplings with a younger sister’s suicide have been the subject of several of her poems. Bialosky’s experience with her sister’s death receives fuller attention in her recently released memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life (Atria Books, 2011).
Bialosky’s memoir, which she at one point calls a “psychological autopsy,” is a contrapuntal exploration of her younger sister’s “suicidal map"—a threnody of excavated journal entries, poems, expert and familial testimonies, recollections, descriptions of suicide survivor group meetings, and plundered psychological and literary texts (most particularly and luminously Moby Dick, whose opening passage includes a phrase—the “damp, drizzly November of the soul"—that Edwin Shneidman, a psychologist whose counsel Bialosky seeks during the writing of her book, equates with suicide). Bialosky brings these elements into juxtaposition in an attempt to understand why her sister Kim, a young adult struggling with substance abuse and a recent romantic break-up, made the choice to end her life. With a child of her own on the cusp of the crucible of puberty (“more concerned with the mysteries that dwell inside himself, the possibilities” than he is with the opinion and worry of his parents), Bialosky writes that she felt compelled by an urgent need, after many years of denial and grief in the wake of her sister’s death, to wrestle with it full-on.
As she puts it: “These pages narrate the story of what happened to Kim and my voyage to come to grips with her suicide. Since I cannot bring her back, I have struggled to make her lapse into darkness and the devastation of suicide understandable. Suicide should never happen to anyone. I want you to know as much as I know. That is the reason I am writing this book.”
This book, among the many fine books written about depression and suicide, feels fresh and fundamental. It makes essential reading, and not just for those struggling intimately with suicidal thoughts of their own or of an intimate, but also for bereavement groups, college students, health-care professionals, educators, guidance counselors, authors, parents, friends, and siblings. It has tremendous potential to reach—with its questions, its intertextuality, its personal urgency, its generosity—a wide spectrum of readers, perhaps most especially high-school and college students, readers who are the age that Kim was when she took her own life.
It is also a book I’d like to put into everyone’s hands. In clear, accessible, amply researched and articulated prose, animated throughout with examples from poems (her own and others), Bialosky acknowledges that each of us, overtly troubled or not, possesses the power to cease to be and also, as Hopkins puts it (in syntax so convoluted that we feel the struggle), to “not choose not to be.” What is our responsibility, if we can muster it, for that volition, that possibility, in ourselves and those we love? Perhaps it is her poet’s lens that lends Bialosky’s exploration of young Kim’s death a forthright, vivid, and resonant mix of remorse, anger, shame, empathy, and hope. “How would Kim feel about having her private life probed and reinvented through my words?” Bialosky asks. “Am I doing justice and honor to her experience? Would she be pleased? ... Am I able to make her story universal? Avoid self-pity and blame? I tell myself that, if I can portray her inner world, it may offer a window for other readers to understand the fragility of the suicidal mind. ... The great tragedy is that knowledge—even incomplete—comes late. I can never bring Kim back. And yet, irrationally, through writing, a part of me believes I can.”
While Bialosky was writing her memoir, her son was 13. I want to close with one of her new poems, in which the speaker is teaching her son, a 16-year-old, to drive.
Teaching My Son to Drive
My sixteen year old is listening to Beach 104
on the radio dial,
singing along with the rapper.
He’s been waiting
for this day for a long time.
He turns up the music.
I turn it down. We drive along the road.
Horse farm on the side of the street
where we encounter a field
of young English riders with crops
preparing to mount the hurdles.
It won’t be easy.
On the other side the day camp
he returned to every summer; the children
playing manhunt in the garden.
The clouds in the sky are moving too fast.
The trees berth too wide. I look at the speedometer.
I want him to slow down.
The thrashers in the branches are frantic.
There must be more to teach him.
Eyes on the road,
ready to accelerate
he glances into the rear view mirror
to see what’s behind,
changes lanes and careens
gracefully into his manhood.
When I turn to look
I see the pensive boy in the back seat
strapped in his seat belt
watching two red squirrels run up a tree
and back down.
© Jill Bialosky. Printed by permission of the author.
Among the many gestures to admire in this poem are the ways in which Bialosky gives the antic world agency and displaces onto the careening trees, racing squirrels, and wild thrashers all of the mother’s anxiety about her son’s rite of passage. Though not overtly about suicide, this poem concerns the precarious balance of living. Laura McGinnis, a spokesperson for the Trevor Project, whose mission, in part, is to operate as a kind of support network for suicidal people under the age of 24, says that “suicide never has one cause, [which] is something important to recognize. ... Parents should pay attention to what’s going on in their kids’ lives and what is important to them ... [and] establish trust, listening, accepting everything they say and not judging them. Let them share their story.”
In the journey that is her memoir, Bialosky allows Kim, posthumously, to tell her story. In History of a Suicide, and in the thrall of this new poem (image, enjambment, symbol, music), the reader shares the vertigo and symbolic grace of risk, of the lanes, safely changed for now—daringly, and with a full awareness of what the rearview holds even as parent and child move ahead.
