Late last week I was at Daybreak on my regular Thursday walkaround. The place closes down at 11 to allow staff an hour lunch, so a number of people collect out back, smoking, napping in the sun, sitting and relaxing. This happens every weekday but I go there on Thursdays.
The volunteer coordinator calls it my "social day" because what I do is wander around in back and ask people how they are. Most times they answer in the affirmative and I might sit with them to catch up on stuff. But when they say "Not so good," I make a point of sitting or squatting with them to hear their story.
That's all I do, listen to their stories. I'm not a social worker or RN or therapist, I don't have access to any resources and my knowledge of what's available, even a year after moving here, is woefully inadequate. But I can listen and I'm aware from my own time on the road that this is often something not available to lonely people; someone who will uncritically and calmly sit with them and listen to what's going on. I can't solve any of their issues and they're aware of that, but I can make them a little less lonely.
In seminary, this ministry was emphasized to me by the story of Job and his friends. While it's true they try to explain away his mistreatment by God by placing the blame on him, what they do before that is
set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him.When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.
This is the critical part of ministry for me, that rather than immediately setting out to interpret his suffering, his friends sit with him and share his misery. For a week and silently. That is truly sharing in someone's grief.
I don't try to put myself in the shoes of Job's friends because they are convinced of their own righteousness and eventually give in to judgement. But I do accept the wisdom of their first actions, to sit on the ground and be with the one who is suffering.
So this past Thursday I noticed one of my regulars sitting on the curb away from the property and drinking a beer. She looked unhappy, so when I could I wandered over and sat down, said I was glad to see her and asked how she was.
Her issue was nothing new to her, it's a problem she's been trying to solve since January, and I'd heard it before at length. But I didn't say anything about that, I just listened. After she finished her beer she stood up to go inside and we walked over together. She said, "Thanks for sitting there with me." I said, "That's what I do, it's about all I'm good at."
That's when she said something that floored me. At first I was unsure I'd understood her and asked "What?" She turned around and looked me full in the face and said, enunciating every word, "You keep people from ending their lives."
I don't know if she meant overall people who do that or just me, although I'm certain in that moment she meant just me. It pierced me. That is, I believe, the closest I'll ever come to a personal divine message.
This is a horrible event, and the horror goes beyond the targeting of people on their way to worship. The horror is that a family, including a 9 year old child, are the ones responsible for the horror. For Americans, I suspect at least a part of the horror will be (perhaps should be) that the attack by an as-yet unnamed family on three Christian churches occurs on Mother's Day. While Indonesians celebrate Mother's Day in December, so the date isn't an intentional horror, Americans are wont to see every world event through our own lens. There may be several last-minute additions to church homilies mentioning the significance of the day in making their congregations more aware (read: afraid) of international terrorism. But let's keep this in Indonesia, where the horror is enough without the symbolism. A family consisting of parents, sons in their late teens, and daughters ages 9 and 12, divided into three groups targeting three different churches, one Catholic, one Pentecostal, and a third that sounds like a generic Protestant congregation. That the family was Muslim, or at least saw themselves as Muslim (because many Muslims would argue that by doing such a thing the family gave in to apostasy), is probable since the Islamic State claims responsibility. And the targeting of a populous public space by suicide bombing is a well-known IS tactic, while researchers have noted the rise of intolerance by majority Muslims against other religions. But the horror, as I've suggested, lies in this otherwise bland statement in the BBC's report: Women "have become increasingly active in terrorist cells in Indonesia but this would be the first time children have been used." Not discounting the mid-millenium Christian Children's Crusade, some of whose leaders may have been younger than their early teens, does the active use of children in violent anonymous attacks suggest a surety in the rightness of the groups' cause? Or a sense of desperation in the leadership encouraging them?
I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.
My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases. Today: We think of consolation as an activity for professionals, but most of us are capable out of simple humaneness.
There aren't many completers of suicide who get their pictures on People magazine, let alone getting them on it before they commit it. Brittany Maynard, who at least one commentator has referred to as giving "physician-assisted suicide a very public, and in her case, young (29) and attractive face," has achieved that, however. But we shouldn't hold against her either her attraction, her publicity savvy, nor even her lack of outward signs of the brain cancer that would kill her more slowly but as surely as whatever method she used to complete her decision.
As ever, I'm conflicted about this decision. As with all personal, life-changing ones made by others, it really isn't up to me to even have much of an opinion on it, but in my head there is more than enough death to go around. We don't need to add ourselves to the ever-growing heap.
But some of us feel like we do, and we make those decisions, I accept, without rancor, clear-headed, perhaps even without the expectation of the incredible vacuum our decision will make in the lives of our loved ones (and even those we are certain don't love us) left behind. Yes, some of us do this almost like life is an afterthought. But most don't. I don't believe for a moment Brittany Maynard's decision was either haphazard or born in anger. It struck her, and most of those around her, as rational and maybe inevitable.
I've said before that no matter how bad things have been in my life, I haven't thought of ending it (at least since my teens when, like everyone else, hormones raged through my body like the Russian Army advancing on Moscow). But just because it isn't an answer (or even a question) for me doesn't mean it shouldn't be either of those for others. I respect that most people who approach this decision do so with a clear and sober head and with an understanding of what effect their act will have on the community surrounding them. People may ask, "Where's god in all this?" as if the decision in question is made secretively, out of god's sight. My answer is that it's god making the decision, rightly and wrongly.
Perhaps that's the key: that, like Maynard, people don't make the decision in the quiet desperation of their own minds but in full view and with the feedback of their loving community. Their community may be composed of people (like me) whose job it is to dissuade them from the act, but that doesn't make our response to them any less loving. It's true what Donne writes, that no man is an island. But it's equally true that no one lives in a vacuum.
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2014/11/10/3530333/physician-assisted-suicide-debate.html?sp=/99/349/#storylink=cpy
I seem sometimes to know a lot of dead people. I suppose it's a result of knowing a lot of people. But this dead person wasn't, herself, a friend but the daughter of a friend. I attended her memorial, the way I think many people do, not from a sense of obligation to the deceased but out of love for the living.
I have, at best, a complicated relationship with suicide. I don't understand the overwhelming hopelessness I presume it results from. Overwhelming hopelessness, this I understand, but my own experience of it suggests that ending life only guarantees things never get better, and as depressed as I get, I never completely forget that everything, even hopelessness, changes.
But it isn't about my experience. It's the experience of someone for whom only the unknown brings some comfort, and who may ultimately be braver than the rest of us. There are experiences of life, I'm certain, that only ending it can soothe. And while we struggle to figure out what to make of such decisions, we are most honest when we admit we never will.
On my drive further out of the rim for the service I heard John Lennon singing "Imagine" which itself always fills me like a good hymn. The service was full of people I know but hadn't seen for long whiles and the family whose hurt I'd come to share. We spoke and hugged and chanted. But mostly we sang.
It was in that I felt most connected. I have a rough, uneven voice that is unpleasant to hear, I know, but I love nonetheless to sing and sing loud with others. The songs were deeply steeped in the generation most of us were a part of, some Lennon/McCartney, some Dylan, the almost obligatory soulful "I'll Fly Away."
And then one I didn't expect but fit the tenor and the mood of yearning to receive and give comfort: "Hallelujah." With his nicotine and whiskey rasp Leonard Cohen is the songwriter for the funerals of junkies and suicides, and I surprised myself by the lyrics I'd memorized by listening intently even when I didn't realize I had been. The mournful strains we attempt at hitting the right notes on the chorus, and the inability of most of us to do so, is as good a simile for our lives as any.
I keep coming back to my drive there when, in the snowsquall that had started and turning down the radio that was still playing "Imagine," I pulled over to a car stopped on the side of the road to ask if everything was all right. Everything was and in the world I imagine we take time and effort to ask that question, especially when we know the answer will not be "yes."
Yesterday morning one of the websites I normally visit published a photograph of Trayvon Martin's dead body that it had received from another person who happened to save it after it accidentally appeared on the MSNBC website and before it was taken down. If you do not want to see this photograph, don't advance any further below or click on the following link.Adam Weinstein, the reporter who recieved the picture and spoke with the reader who had saved it, put it on the main Gawker page where it has opened a massive can of worms. By the time I post this, a little over thirty hours later, 94 comments have appeared with another 671 waiting to be cleared by the administrator.
I want to take a moment to explain why I think it's important for Adam Weinstein and Gawker to publish the photo and for me (and I hope other bloggers and writers) to publish it too. I grew up as part of the generation that watched the Vietnam War play out on our television screens and about whom it was reported we had seen x amount of violent acts, real and fictional, on television by adulthood (I cannot locate the number, but it has been increased in recent years and in 2004 stood at 8ooo acts, mostly without remorse, by age 11), as well as real violence among our peers and our families, and so was argued that we had lost our sense of disgust at real instances of violence playing out before us or at least our shock at it. Somtimes, to an extent, I think that too, at least in my case. I have seen people die and I have grown up seeing dead bodies in photos and videos. I'm of the generation that fetishized the gore of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the squirm-inducing rape sequence of The Last House on the Left and topped those off with repeated watchings of The Faces of Death series. I can open a newsmagazine or a website to be faced with photos of dead people and continue to eat my cereal without blinking.
Does this suggest that I, and by extension many people of my generation who've had similar experiences, have become inured to horrible death? Perhaps. I think often I've lost my shockability, and that may not be a bad thing. Sometimes, when shock becomes the status quo, not to react may be the more transgressive act.
But it does not mean we are immune to reacting to the photo or the death behind it. I'm still profoundly affected by the filmed deaths of Nega Agha-Soltan and some unknown desparate jumper and, before them, the photos of Phan Thi Kim Phuc (who did not die) and Thich Quang Duc (who did). These four instances alone are enough to reduce me to a state of distrust of human capacity for goodness if not tears. The photograph of Trayvon Martin minutes after his death, while I did not bat an eyelash on seeing it, has worked my guts in such a way I can hardly explain. Except to say this.
We are anesthetized to death, especially to the deaths of strangers or people who become famous for their deaths. That doesn't mean we don't feel them but we often are placated by the implications they suggest of permanance. Lee Harvey Oswald in an eternal flinch. Saddam Hussein mouthing what may be prayers or deprecations with a noose around his throat. The almost beatific posed dead of Matthew Brady's Civil War. We act as if those deaths are closed or their acts don't continue beyond the moment recorded, as if they don't have loved ones who mourn them loudly. To do so is to open something uncomfortable in us because they take on a greater realism than the deaths of family or friends we aren't privy to might have. Once we recognize they have lives outside the frame we are in danger of feeling profound loss.
These images ought to affect us that way. They ought to make us angry or depressed or frustrated or any of a number of other things. What they should not make us is numb. This, finally, is the truth of the trial of George Zimmerman that we need to be reminded of. Whatever verdict is returned, whether he is found guilty of muder or manslaughter, whether it's believed Trayvon attacked him or Zimmerman incited him to attack, whether the "stand-your-ground" law is a mistake and whether the justice system in Florida is biased, this is what the trial is about. A 17 year old unarmed boy is dead by another person's gun. The looks on our faces when we say that ought to be as surprised, as disbelieving, as the look on Martin's.
I learned a new word yesterday: filicide. this is the act of a parent killing her child purposely. there are apparently several possible reasons for someone to do this, from listening to the voice of god explaining that the child will be better off to a sense that the child himself is evil to an intent to have revenge on a spouse through the murder.
it's been 3 weeks since a local father here on the rim killed his 3 daughters and called his exwife, saying, "you can come home. I've killed the kids," and we still aren't entirely sure why he did it. beyond that cryptic telephone call he has remained steadfastly quiet on his reasons and his trial has only begun. (I choose not to identify him, his children, or their mother; while their story is frontpage news here it's mercifully absent from most other news, and I'd like to continue that silence as much as possible, although it seems to say something unkind to me that such news happening anywhere shouldn't be frontpage everywhere. perhaps in an age of susan smith and andrea yates we have become inured to the horror of such an action.)
we do know this much: the father, who has lived for a while in another state, came back to the area after having lost his job, made arrangements with his exwife to spend time alone with the 3 girls aged 11, 8, and 5 at their mother's house, and sometime between the children's babysitter leaving at 1:30 and 3:30 he slit their throats, strangling the youngest 1st, apparently because she woke and began to fight back. then he called their mother and left the house, turning himself in without incident the next day at the local police station.
one week ago another set of killings took place. this one I'll identify by name as it has, through its oddity, broached yet again the questions about why automatic weapons are so easy to obtain in america. on july 20 24 year old denver grad school student james holmes, dressed in ballistics gear, including bulletproof armor and a gasmask, and carrying a rifle and handgun, entered a theater in aurora, colorado, hosting a midnight opening of the newest batman movie, flung a gas canister and began firing indiscriminately into the crowded audience. within minutes, a dozen people were dead or dying and another 50 were wounded. holmes escaped but was arrested in the parking lot less than a halfhour later. his youngest victim was 6 years old.
this situation has become a a touchstone for people on both sides of the debate about gun control; amazingly, some argue that had audience members been armed--colorado is a conceal/carry state--they would have made short work of the threat, ignoring holmes' bulletproof armor, the darkness of the theater, the smoke of the grenade, and the chaos of the situation. (even more incredibly, I'm aware of at least 1 person on facebook--a friend of a friend--who has argued that, had the mother in the local story above, had a weapon in her home, the 5 year old might have survived by shooting her father, as if a child woken by the sounds of her father killing her sisters and coming for her can easily shrug off her fear and waste the old man. this is proof of the fantasy life many of the people for whom the answer to public shootings is more public weapons indulge in.)
finally, most recently, an acquaintance of mine, lee, a good friend of a good friend, shot himself this week and died yesterday. while the other 2 incidents were horrible this hit me hardest. it isn't the proximity or that I know him. I've known many people who've died, of course--it seems sometimes I know almost no one except people who've died--and several who have committed suicide, but lee's suicide leaves my head spinning. I won't publish his last name because I think he deserves that much privacy, but I suspect this will be the only public acknowledgement of his life and I want it to count. lee was, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty fucked up by most criteria any of us would apply: he was a drunk and an abuser of drugs, a manipulater of other people, a person to whom life happened rather than someone who tried to make something of his life. for the past several years, he took advantage of a friend's property north of here to stay there rent-free, despite the building on the property having no electricity or running water.
but despite his many faults lee was not a bad man. he probably committed any number of petty sins like most of the people I know have but so far as I'm aware lee never intentionally hurt anyone except himself. if I had seen him more often we would have been friends. when my friend, the owner of that building and property, came to visit us sometimes he and I would pick up a 6-pack and head up north to spend some time with lee and with my friend's brother, who lived about a mile further down the road than the property and who saw lee on a semi-regular basis. lee was always sociable, in a friendly mood, and appreciated the beer and the company. he'd joke and tell us what he'd been doing and how he was getting on. he was a nice guy and I never heard him complain about what his life had become although he certainly had cause to (not all of it his own fault). my friend on occasion told lee he had to leave the property, get on with his life, find his own way, but he always let him come back. so far as I know, because we can't talk about it yet, lee killed himself on my friend's property.
when I was thinking about the writing of this post the 3 little birds I mention in the title referred to the 3 little girls killed by their father. but in the actual writing they have morphed into the 3 people who killed: the father, james holmes, and lee. like little birds their mental states were so frail they couldn't stand up to whatever it was that buffeted them, and instead of finding sanctuary on bob marley's doorstep and singing sweet songs of pure and true melodies, they released their craziness--because the actions of all 3 involve some sincere forms of crazy most of us can't even imagine--on the people nearest them: for the father, on his daughters; for james holmes, on strangers; for lee, on himself. and while the message we might be tempted to take away from these situations is "don't worry," because these situations are so removed from most of our experiences they can't ever touch us, the message we should take from them is we should worry, not for what people like these will do to us but for what we might be able to do for them and we simply aren't aware they're in need of it.
My friends Mandy and Mel have a daily dinner routine for their extended family and guests; each person must voice a concern and a joy from the day before the meal. This week I’ve had two concerns and one joy. I’ll tackle my concerns first.
I’m not at all in agreement with the statement reported in her verbatim by a fellow CPE-er. I’ve got serious reservations about a Sister-Mary-Sunshine theology which insists heaven is a wonderful place full of light where elderly women are capable of doing cartwheels once there. I’m certain my fellow intern is sincere in her belief. But I am equally certain that, at the very worst, telling a dying woman what is at best an educated guess is some form of pastoral malpractice and, at the very least, fails to take seriously the questions the woman has about her death and the impact it will have on her husband and family and friends. It also may suggest to the woman that having such qualms is anti-God, since who wouldn’t want to hurry up to join such a lovely eternity? How selfish and spiritually ugly must be the doctors and nurses and husband that have tried to keep her in this horrible condition for so long.
My other disturbing situation was with a woman I spoke with about the death of another resident. She started our conversation by asking if the person for whom we’d had last Friday’s memorial was really dead (and this says something about the way people appear and disappear and sometimes reappear without explanation as the people caught up in the healthcare system, especially its mentally ill members, must experience it). We discussed his death and then her parents’ deaths and her own experience of God and trust issues, and I ended our time together by asking if she’d like me to pray with her. It seemed what she expected. I asked her to do the praying but she said she’d rather that I did, and that’s what left me discomfited. I’m all right in communal prayers but as I don’t pray on my own I’m not at all comfortable with one-on-one prayer. I gave it my best shot, stammering out some phrases she’d said and adding my own takes on them, and she seemed sincere when she thanked me. A few days later I spoke with my Christian wife who is more at home with this sort of thing and she suggested that what someone really wants in that situation is the sense she’s been heard and her concerns noted. She also suggested that I try praying out loud on the drive in each day to get myself in the mindset of doing it for other people. I’ve tried that now and confess that I feel a little self-conscious doing it but she is right about my feeling more at ease the more I do it. I’m not about to become an advocate of intercessory prayer or of praying away the disease, but I am better understanding the peace people feel when they hear their fears or their wishes vocalized.
What I feel good about is a short interaction I had with one resident on my floor who, after he’d refused my invitation to join a 7th-Day Adventist service on Saturday, wanted to explain why he’s “pissed off with God.” He was pretty angry about the deaths of his parents and the suicide of his brother, going into detail about the extreme measures his brother had taken to kill himself, all in the space of one year. “Where was God in all that?” he demanded. I said, “I don’t know. And it sounds to me like you’ve got every right to be pissed.” He immediately calmed down and said, “I’m sorry to get so angry, but it still hurts, y’know.” I said I’d have been surprised if it didn’t hurt and that we could talk about it if he wanted. He said maybe later but he was in a much better mood as he left than he had been a few moments before. It seemed a good end to the week.
years ago, when I was writing poetry as part of my mfa studies, I mentioned to a classmate that my 1st wife was paranoid schizophrenic. she said, "wow, that's gotta be a dynamite source of writing!" and that's when I realized that I'd never written anything about that period. this poem grew out of that.
BREAD
When everything else fails you, you can still
believe in bread. She is anchored in lime jell-o
in the kitchen. His suits litter the pantry,
his books are their plates. Sex is sliding on ice,
only with her legs spread. When he pries
at her with meat-thick fingers, she feels too much,
too much. She always has wool on. She pounds
the dough. Her fist goes through the table
and clanks on the floor. The bread, why not,
can be a doughnut.
Did he ever love her?
Might as well ask if she was ever pregnant. Depends.
Or was it the slant of light? Well. The oven's on,
and bread is bread and not doughnuts. He reads,
oblivious to bread, to doughnuts. She grabs a knife
and a chair. She faces the chair backwards,
at the kitchen door. She kneels naked on it.
She balances the knife along the top of the chair,
its handle blunt against the door. She props the tip
just above her navel. Metal and skin are a finger
and water. This is the question:
Will he open the door first, or will I stand up?
Minutes pass. The blade
mirrors her: the tense lips, eyes hidden in her hair,
teeth monstrous and full.
He goes on reading. She has to pee.
The knife clatters. That sound
and the smell of burning bread bring him to the door.
I've been reading sharpe's porterhouse blue since thursday and I'm nearly done--about 80 pages left. it's not the worst example of a campus novel I've read--that would have to be prose's the blue angel--but it doesn't really have a lot to recommend it. it's a snapshot on a moment in british academic history when the old public (by which are meant private) schools shifted from the way they'd done things for centuries to reflect the changing tastes and mores of the younger generation of the late 20th century, if for no better reason than that that was where their future monies lay. it's a bit like watching an old bbc sitcom from that time, the good neighbors or fall and rise of reginald perrin or only fools and horses in which the older generation comes rubbing up against the new and neither comes off looking well.
but it's not a bad book and here is a section from almost midpoint that makes my point. zipser, as the only graduate student at the college, has discovered that he's developed a mad passion for the widowed mrs. biggs, his "bedder"--a term I've never come across before but who seems to be someone who cleans up his bedroom in the mornings. he's taken his problem to the chaplain who suggests that the solution to this unfortunate situation--seeing that mrs. biggs is older, fatter, more caustic and of a lower station than he is--is for zipser to find and have sex with a swedish girl. this being the early 70s, the chaplain of course is under the impression swedish girls are sitting around with their panties off and their legs up waiting for virginal graduates.
zipser goes off in search of a condom first because you can't reliably expect a girl to have sex with you without having the right accessory. his search through the town for a condom is kind of funny, and through a series of misunderstandings he ends up with two gross of condoms. on his return from town he has a run-in with the dean of the college, and afraid he'll be sent down for the combination of the run-in, having the condoms, and the certainty that he's committed some felony by appropriating them, zipser decides to destroy them. he first tries flushing them down the toilet, but prophylactics have a preternatural passivity against being disposed of this way.
"twenty minutes later he was still searching for some method of disposing of his incriminating evidence. he had visited six lavatories on neighbouring staircases and had found a method of getting the things to disappear by first filling them with water from a tap and tyng the ends. it was slow and cumbersome and above all noisy and when he had tried six at a time on j staircase he had to spent some time unblocking the u pipe...it was one o'clock and so far he had managed to rid himself of thirty-eight. at this rate he would still be flushing lavatories all over the college when mrs. biggs arrived in the morning...put [the remaining foil and plastic packets] behind the gas fire and burn them he thought and he was just wrestling with the gas fire and trying to make space behind it when the howling draught in the chimney gave him a better idea. he went to the window and looked out into the night. in the darkness outside snowflakes whirled and scattered while the wind battered at the window pane...a moment later he was kneeling beside the gas fire and undoing the hose of his gas ring and five minutes afterwards the first of 250 inflated contraceptives bounced bouyantly against the sooty sides of the medieval chimney and disappeared into the night sky above. zipser rushed to the window and gazed up for a glimpse of the winsome thing as it whirled away carrying its message of abstinence far away into the world, but the sky was too dark and there was nothing to see."
this goes on for another 3 pages of closely-written exposition involving much moving of a desk and minute description of the look ceilings get when sooty balloons waltz across them. the paragraph I've quoted from above begins near the top of page 94 and peters out near the top of 97. zipser reckons without the effects of ice on the condoms, so that they don't float much beyond his chimney before dropping to the ground where the dean and others find them. more importantly, he doesn't reckon with the effects of gas. many of the prophylactics become enbedded in the chimney and sharpe doesn't say it but a charitable reading of his adventure might be that zipser's decision to go to bed with the condoms still stuck in the chimney is a result of his having sat over a hissing gas ring for hours.
meanwhile, the dean and another enemy have discovered the bobbing condoms in the courtyard and are trying to collect them all without much luck until they begin poking at them with pins. mrs. biggs, far from being insensate to zipser's interest, has decided to act on it and comes to visit him in his room at 3:30, where she undresses and lights the fire before slipping into zipser's bed with him.
"'wants to spare me,' mrs. biggs thought tenderly and climbed into bed...grasping [zipser] in her arms she pressed him to her vast breasts. in the darkness zipser squeaked frantically and mrs. biggs's mouth found his. to zipser it seemed that he was in the grip of a great white whale. he fought desperately for air, suraced for a moment and was engulfed again."
we are led to assume that mrs. biggs is in the act of taking zipser's virginity when we're treated to this abrupt scene:
"[skullion the porter] had just run a small but agile [balloon] to earth in the rose garden when a dull rumbling noise at the top of the tower made he turn and look up. something was going on in the old chimney. the chimney pot at the top was shaking. the brickwork silhouetted against the morning sky appeared to be bulging. the rumbling stopped, to be succeeded by an almight roar as a ball of flame issued from the chimney and billowed out before ascending above the college. below it the chimney toppled sideways, crashed onto the roof of the tower and with a gradually increasing rumble of masonry the fourteenth-century building lost its entire facade. behind it the rooms were clearly visible, their floors tilted horribly and sagging...a bed on the first floor slid sideways and dropped onto the masonry below. desks and chairs followed suit. there were shours and screams. people poured out of doorways and windows opened all round the court."
in the next chapter we are told that zipser, whose book we have taken this to be or at least the book is partly about him since we have been following him about every other page and are privy to his confusions and concerns as if they were our own, and mrs. biggs have been killed in the explosion and that somehow the investigators have discerned they were caught in flagrante because we are treated to the discussions of the faculty about how more satisfying it might have been had zipser been committing suicide and been on drugs, but at least they can take comfort in the fact he had been a subversive since "anyone who could go to bed with mrs. biggs must have been either demented or mativated by a grossly distorted sense of social duty and to have launched two hundred and fifty lethal contraceptives on an unsuspecting world argues a fanatacism..."
to this point the novel has been a kind of early peter devries kind of thing, the humor being belabored and almost underlined by sharpe (the pages devoted to zipser's maneuvering of his desk back and forth in a vain attempt to get at the condoms that leave those sooty marks on his ceiling is indicative of this) as if we might not have got it. but this sudden explosion changes more than the fates of zipser and mrs. biggs, who we are to suppose were the only victims of the situation since no one else's injuries or deaths are remarked on, and after this both zipser's name and mrs. biggs are never spoken of again. it takes a dark turn here as if sharpe had decided he needed a sacrifice of some sort to make a point that may well have been understood by his peers, but the rest of the novel reverts to the slapstick of people whacking their heads against pipes and falling off of stools and the play on words and counterexpectations I ascribe to brit comedy. but it also serves to reinforce the presumption of classicism, that little tossaway line about mrs. biggs apparently being out of bounds to members of the campus, as if there hadn't been several centuries of people playing master-and-servent previously.
I have an issue with suicide and I also have issues with people who attempt suicide. I take it so seriously that I lost a friend years ago because I called 911 after she threatened to hurt herself, and she did not take kindly to cops showing up at her door to make certain she wasn't going to do it. I don't understand people for whom it's a joke, but more than that I don't understand people for whom it's an option, and I understand even less the people who try to make it happen.
that said, I'm also aware there are elements in other peoples' lives I don't understand, and if I lived with those situations I might also consider it. I do understand the catholic reaction against it, that killing yourself is a denial of god's goodness and maybe of god's existence. for myself, bad as things have been, I've always held onto the idea that so long as I'm alive, things can improve. I recognize not everyone believes that or that there could be an improvement to their lives. as with almost everything else, it is complicated.
all this is a roundabout way of broaching that I have spent time with friends whose eldest son attempted suicide 2 nights ago. this was not the first time and he has placed himself or been placed in psychiatric wards 4 times since may. his mother and brother found him unconscious in his apartment, lying on the remains of the coffeetable that broke his fall. he had taken an overdose of lorazepam and passed out. his mother told me after he regained consciousness enough to answer questions about what he'd taken and when that he intended to die.
I'm close with his family and was with them through the accidental death of a daughter 4 years ago, and since he's joined them here on the rim from california, I've nudged closer to him. he isn't aware I feel strongly about suicide and I don't intend to let him know that. (his family, having been present at sermons when I've talked about suicide, probably is.) how do I counsel someone who's attempted something that is the ultimate "fuck you" to everything I believe, that it is better to be alive than to be dead, and that so long as we breath there's hope? I suppose the same way I do on so many things: by keeping my mouth shut and listening, reminding him from time to time that he is not alone and not unloved.
his mother told me she had come to an epiphany in the last month, that she and her family chose to live the way they do because there are precious few others willing to live that way: taking in troubled kids, kids with addictions and mental illnesses, and providing them with the love of extended family. this is an important recognition. there are times when clergy like me have to admit, if only to ourselves, that we just can't understand the depth of how defeated some people feel and the best we can do is quietly be there.
