Because this is the way it works. For me. I'm sure it's very different for other people, but I rarely ever have the conclusion already hammered out. Usually I just regale a story and via writing reflect on the answer. Usually writing the experience or story down is a good way to organize my thoughts and from organized thoughts, opinions are born. This is not new, any high school student who has had similar language arts assignments could tell you this, but my reason for telling you is that suicide, I've discovered, is an entirely different animal.
"Suicide is a hard line subject" "suicide is difficult to write about because..." "my first experience with suicide". These are my first three attempts at writing about the subject. Each individual premise when looked at as an introductory sentence seems far too juvenile to breach anything complex or lead me to anything profound, but conversely each premise is not necessarily a bad thing to write about. Suicide is a hard line subject because you have the ability to speak so juvenile about it that you could cross any number of lines that might speak to you as a person without you even knowing it. Suicide is difficult to write about (beside the obvious) because those of us who have never been so close to it get lost in trying to capture and describe the feelings associated with it and ultimately just end up talking about ourselves.
My own first hand experience with suicide is when my uncle committed suicide when I was in the 7th grade, it is in fact so hazy of a memory that the only thing I remember concretely is coming home from the funeral and just pacing around my room looking for something. I was not sure what I was looking for even at the time, thinking back I might just have been looking for something to do to distract me from the awkward sadness that I seemed to so bluntly be feeling, regardless I never found anything and the memory just stopped like someone cut the film strip to it. I remember crying too, but mostly not knowing what to feel, so just feeling awkward, then guilty because I thought I wasn't supposed to feel that.
A lot of famous people who had an effect on my life also committed suicide. I made it through high school's crippling phase of self consciousness by listening to Kurt Cobain wail about teen apathy. I never really came to be an art lover, but there was something that always touched me about Van Gogh. I've never been able to read Hemingway without feeling a deep pang of relevance in my life, a feeling that is trumped only now by David Foster Wallace, who also killed himself. I actually don't know if this constitutes as a lot, but it seems like it is compared to the number of famous individuals that did not commit suicide.
Over the span of my life I've met so many feelings in the face of suicide. I've seen guilt that is so inconsolable that every attempt to do so seems too morbidly bad to work. I've seen indifference whether genuine or not didn't matter because I've seen indifference played as genuine, but coming off as not as well as the other way around. I've seen sadness too, but that goes without saying.
What I've never known, is how to feel about suicide. I don't think anyone sits down and decides how to feel, I understand that's not how it works. But then, I've only ever felt kind of awkward around it because it didn't make me sad. I even tried to feel sad. It's not like I didn't miss my uncle or feel bad for my step dad or feel a certain measure of pain at the loss, but the suicide itself was like something else, something that just hovered over everything. In other words I was sad my uncle died, but the fact that it was suicide did not make me any more or less sad. Try as I might I couldn't convert the sadness of the loss into the sadness over the suicide.
This is essentially why writing about suicide almost seems like a frivolous task now, simply because I can't think my way into feeling a certain way like I can about freedom of speech or life after college. I wish I could write to David Foster Wallace and tell him thanks for everything, I wish I could tell my uncle that I never stopped praying for him and I think if he were alive right now we would have known each other better. But for now, writing these things down is just organizing them, next time I think about suicide I'll probably reread this and just kind of feel better.
Thanks for Listening
Truly,
Kyle
No comments:
Post a Comment