On Those Who Took the Hemlock Root, or Morbid Post of the Year (seriously, I promise I won't write anything this depressing for a long, long time)
I Like a Look of Agony, By Emily DickinsonI like a look of agony,
Because I know it ’s true;
Men do not sham convulsion,
Nor simulate a throe.
The eyes glaze once, and that is death.
Impossible to feign
The beads upon the forehead
By homely anguish strung.
Resume, By Dorothy Parker
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
"Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ''the rat race'' is not yet final."
----Hunter S. Thompson
(Other good Thompson quotes can be found here.)
Okay, as promised, here is my post on suicide, inspired by the death of Hunter S. Thompson. I said I would dedicate a post to it this week, and now I feel obligated to do so, even though I don't really feel like it anymore. It isn't an easy thing to talk about.
So, Hunter blew his brains out. He went out the same way that Hemingway did. Perhaps there is a connection there, something about great writers and depression. I've heard people make the argument that he was too big of a man to sit by and watch himself deteriorate. I always respected Hunter for taking on authority with a voice that no one else could. His gonzo writing style inspired me when I was a rebellious teenager. The way he died changes my opinion of him, and I wish it weren't so.
Suicide leaves such a feeling of emptiness. All death does, but it is different when someone dies at their own hands. It's a murder for which there can be no justice. No one is held to account, as the killer is also the victim. It is an angry sort of mourning, and it is hard to reconcile under any circumstances.
I don't believe in attempted suicide. If you're serious about it, you make damn sure you get it right the first time. A man who puts a gun to his head leaves little room for error (though I've heard horror stories of people surviving even those attempts.)
My first memory of it was when my neighbor, Mrs. Mac, killed herself when I was about 10 years old. I used to deliver newspapers to her. She liked her paper placed inside her storm door, so it wouldn't get wet or blown away in the wind. If I failed to do so, there were inevitably be a complaint lodged with the route manager. She ran her car in her garage with the door and windows closed, until she asphyxiated and expired.
I remember being a child, terrified of what I knew of death, trying to understand why someone would want to die. Being raised Roman Catholic, I wondered if she would go to heaven. I asked my mother, and she didn't seem to want to answer. This led to many other questions, like whether or not I would go to heaven, or if my dead kitty cat Katie went to heaven. It was something no one would talk about, but which wouldn't go away. Here it is, almost twenty years later, and still I can't look at her house without thinking about that day.
My next memory of suicide came soon afterwards, when I was still a child. Tom W. , one of my older brother's best friends had been doing a lot of drugs--cocaine if I remember correctly. He and my brother must have been sixteen or seventeen years old. Tom was from a wealthy, well-known family in town, and one would have thought that Tom would have gone to an Ivy League school and would have been wealthy and successful himself. His father was chief of the fire department.
Tom must have had many problems with his family, because one day he parked his car on the banks of the Connecticut River. He sat there with a can of gasoline and set himself on fire, until he burned to death. I heard that his father, chief of the fire department, was one of the first people to show up. I can't even imagine the horror of showing up to put out a fire and discovering your own car with the charred remains of your son in it. Seeing what his death did do his family, as well as my brother, had a big effect on me.
There have been others in my life who have ended it all, but I will only relate one more story. Anthony P. was a friend of mine in my early childhood. We were on the swim team together, as well as baseball, soccer, and probably other teams that I'm not thinking of. His father was a justice of the peace who performed the marriage ceremony for one of my older brothers. He was always very intelligent, and did well in school. One day when I was seventeen years old he had sex with my girlfriend at the time, and I resented him ever after for that (I never blamed him so much as her though, for she was a psychotic, slutty whore).
After high school I lost touch with most of my childhood friends, including Anthony and the crowd that he hung out with. I heard after he died that he got into a really bad car accident and was left with a brain injury which made it hard for him to function on his own. I've known a couple of other people who suffered brain injuries, and the effects can be very strange. For example, I worked with someone whose son had a brain injury, and he couldn't drive because when he would take turns he couldn't figure out how to straighten out the car, so he would just keep turning until the car drove off the road. But in other ways the kid would be totally normal, so it was very strange indeed.
Anthony's inability to function must have been very hard for him. One day he filled a suitcase up with bricks, and he rented an expensive suite on the 80th floor of the casino hotel. He used most of the bricks to barricade the door shut, and he used the remaining ones to smash out the window. I heard that he was on the phone with his father as he defenestrated himself. That hurts me more than anything, because his dad is just about the nicest guy you'd ever meet. Still, after he died I couldn't stop thinking about how my girlfriend had cheated on me with him. I felt bad that I was still thinking of that in light of the tragedy, but I couldn't help it.
I guess I'll leave it there. What else could I say? Who am I to judge someone for being driven to such ends?
posted by Skrambled Egghead Reborn @ 11:05 AM
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