Bird on a Wire: A Meditation on a Mother’s Suicide

Elisabeth Brink

On or around May 17, 1982, my mother committed suicide at her home in Boston. She had her hair done and put on one of her best dresses. She filled a pitcher with water, took a fancy tumbler from the dining room, and climbed the stairs to the attic, where she laid a blanket and pillow behind a wall of boxes. She had about three hundred pills—a high blood pressure medication—in her possession, and she swallowed roughly half of them. She left no note.
    At the time of her death, I was living a thousand miles away in a rented farmhouse outside Urbana, Illinois. I was twenty-five, married, a graduate student in literature. I had recently returned from a trip to Boston, where I spent almost two weeks visiting my mother daily—first at the general hospital she had been brought to in an ambulance after her second suicide attempt, and then at the psychiatric hospital she had been committed to because she expressed no guilt or remorse for her act. I was aware that the brief course of treatment had done nothing to lessen her desire to die. It was as strong on the day of her release from the hospital as it had ever been. She went to stay with one of my two brothers and was by all accounts “fine” for a couple of weeks. When I talked to her on the phone, she told me her accomplishments: she took a walk, she cooked a lobster dinner, she called some of her friends.
    On the probable night of her death (her body wasn’t found for several days and the exact time of death was never established), I called her at my brother’s only to find that she had gone off on what purported to be a four- day trip to visit friends on Cape Cod. I suspected that the trip was a ruse and she had actually gone to her own house where she would be alone and unsupervised, with a full four days in which to die. The tension in the family was so great that I felt uncomfortable sharing this fear with my brother, who I imagine suspected the same thing.
    I remember that as a night of anguish. I considered taking a plane to Boston immediately. I thought about calling the police and asking them to drive by the house or knock on the door. I considered calling a neighbor or calling my brother back and asking him to drive out to the house. But I didn’t do any of those things. She was sixty-seven years old and had been struggling with depression for ten years. Her suffering—mostly silent, mostly hidden—had been severe and heartbreaking. I couldn’t stand the thought of her being pulled back from the brink again and undergoing, yet again, the humiliation of forced hospitalization and forced therapy. I guess some part of me believed she had a right to her choice. Still, it was not a choice I could endorse. I needed to do something to let her know how I felt. So I dialed her number, listened to the phone ring twenty or thirty times, then let the receiver lie for the rest of the evening on my desk. All that night, the ringing made a tiny, recurring noise, barely audible in the room.
    Her death was quickly shrouded in silence and lies. At the funeral, one of my brothers took me aside and said, “Remember, if anyone asks, Mom died of heart disease.” But no one, neither friends nor family, asked about the cause of death or remarked on its apparent suddenness. I am not sure who knew what. Back in Illinois, my husband advised me not to “dwell” on the subject. I should just put it behind me, he said.
    I had been raised to be stoic, goal-oriented, industrious, and self-reliant. Ours was a family of doers, not talkers. While I could easily sympathize with other people’s feelings, any discussion of my own felt uncontrolled and exhibitionist. Though I resented my brother’s attempt to control my speech and chafed against the hypocrisy of the funeral, my husband’s advice made sense. There was, I believed, no reason to dwell on my mother’s illness and death. For the ten years that elapsed since her first suicide attempt, I had been waiting for the phone call in the middle of the night, the one that would tell me that my worst fear had come true, and now that the phone call had come, I was relieved. It seemed that the issue of my mother and her illness was at last blessedly closed and that, if nothing else, I would now be freer than ever to live my own life.
    I knew about the long, arduous workings of grief. At fifteen I lost my father, whom I dearly loved. While the loss was painful, it taught me that I was “strong” and capable of carrying on. I acquired a degree of faith in the simple process of time, which, like water dropping on rock, takes raw, jagged emotions and smooths them into dull, familiar, and more bearable patterns. I expected the same levelling that had happened after my father’s death would happen after my mother’s as well.
    But it didn’t. As the months went by, I became more brooding and withdrawn. I was the youngest of my mother’s four children, her closest confidante and biggest critic. I loved her fiercely and possessively, at times disgustedly, and when she died I was angry. Privately, in my brooding hours, I railed against her. I catalogued her numerous flaws and inadequacies and condemned the selfishness and deplorable cowardice of her act. Sometimes my anger would abate and I could view her wearily as an incorrigibly wayward child for whom I had done my best. The pain of losing her was one thing; that I could have borne. It was the manner of her death—by suicide—that galled. No matter how much time went by, it seemed always in front of me, never behind.
    And it was all veiled in hypocrisy—not just the funeral, but the life as well. There had been lies, secrets, and silence as far back as I could remember; there had been pleas for help that had not been answered and moments that could have been turning points, when nothing had changed. Through it all there had been the facade, thin as any paper mask, of cheer, of normalcy, of purposefulness, of anything that would hide the underlying despair of my mother’s life. Brooding on all this, I felt increasingly cut loose from all I ever believed or trusted in. I could not escape the recognition that we had all been living a lie. I was haunted by questions I could barely pose, let alone answer. In any sort of company I was conscious of being a fraud. T. S. Eliot’s line reverberated in my mind: “And who is the third who walks always with you?” In my case it was not a third but a second person, my mother, her ghost, who walked invisibly with me, sometimes beautiful or pitiful or menacing or merely annoying, but always there: my mother, always turning to me, always asking for something, asking me. My grief and anger were small burdens compared to the daunting question, why?

I avoided this question for as long as I could. I had little faith in any of the answers I could imagine. It was the eighties, a time when psychobabble saturated the airwaves, when self-help books outnumbered detective novels, when there were more theories of personality than styles of bathing suit. It seemed that many people spent much of their time pretending to know all their own motivations and those of others. I flicked on the television and heard a trained psychologist blaming everything on birth order; I attended a party at which an articulate woman touted the benefits of astrology. I didn’t blame them for trying, but I was never convinced. I was leery of answers that could be formulated between station breaks and theories that reduced human destiny to the level of roulette. Yet still my question haunted me. Even after the first few years of emotional turbulence passed, a part of my brain was working on it all the time. I would be driving down the street or picking through the tomatoes in the grocery store and recognize that I was mulling over stories my mother had told me about her life. I would find myself putting these stories together in various logical sequences under different headings, as though I were writing a critical paper for a class. Among my favorites were such topics as “Troubled Waters: The Mother/Daughter Relationship” or “The Livelong Day: Work In and Outside the Home.” But my readings of my mother’s life were obviously inadequate. They identified themes, not motivations. They didn’t come close to explaining why she swallowed 150 pills.
    Clearly I needed stronger stuff. Everyone in graduate school was reading in the loose collection of disciplines known as critical theory. I began to do the same, enticed by the notion of understanding hidden structures, of getting behind the facade. Soon I was wielding a small arsenal of sharp, impressive hermeneutic tools. But they weren’t useful when applied to my mother’s biography. There was the feminist reading, which pictured her as a victim; the class or Marxist reading, which pictured her as a victim; the psychoanalytic reading, which pictured her as a victim; the Foucauldian reading, which pictured her as a mindless artifact of culture; the Derridean reading, which pictured her subjectivity as a meaningless fiction; and the reader-response reading, which pictured me picturing her. The more I tried to work one of these theoretical girdles around my mother’s life, the more perverse I felt. I was turning a human being into a cipher, a text to be explicated, an intellectual problem to be analyzed and solved.
    And so I turned to the medical viewpoint. Serotonin, dopamine: these had to be the culprits. At first the simplicity of this view was gratifying. Since we now live in the age of the psychiatric wonder drug, there has been plenty of cultural support to convince me that my mother’s problem was a chemical imbalance that might have been corrected by a different combination of manmade chemicals. Unfortunately, this reading lowered my mother’s status from that of a victim to an organism. I was still a humanist, if a slightly chastened one, and I couldn’t help being bothered by how blithely and complacently the “disease model” dispensed with every possible humanistic issue: temperament, conflict, sorrow, environment, choice. I found myself wondering how Hamlet would have been helped by Prozac: would he have felt more upbeat about his inability to slay Claudius? And would Agamemnon, pumped full of Desyrel and required by fate to sacrifice either his daughter or his troops, have been able to toss away poor Iphigenia with more ease? If literature tells us one thing, it is that life is hard; its challenges are complex and sometimes overwhelming. This is as true in a middle-class suburb as it was in fifteenthcentury Denmark or on the plains of Troy. In short, it isn’t for lack of serotonin that we suffer. On some basic level, I think we all know that.
    Despite my misgivings, I struggled to adopt the medical viewpoint because it has so many obvious advantages. It is simple, clear, and happily removes the moral stigma usually associated with psychological disorders. I knew that if I could just manage to convince myself that my mother had a common disease for which she bore no personal responsibility, I would be able to lay the whole matter of her suicide to rest. Only one thing stood in my way: I knew her. I do not mean to say only that I knew her struggle, but that I knew her—her thoughts, feelings, and capabilities. I knew there was nothing fundamentally wrong with her. She had all her marbles. Even in the worst of her blue moods, she was still in there, battered but intact, her mind and heart both ticking, making choices and interpretations, sifting through experience. Yes, toward the end she had a self-destructive momentum, like a train barrelling down a mountain track. But even trains have switches: they change course all the time. I don’t know what mechanism could have switched my mother from one track to another, but I never doubted it was there— hidden from view perhaps, but never out of reach. Perhaps that was why I was so angry when she died. I had always believed—and still do—that at any particular moment of her decline, even up to the minute she started swallowing those pills, she was just as capable of living well as she was of dying badly.

She grew up in Mattapan, an urban neighborhood of Boston. She adored her father, a letter carrier, and was uneasy around her mother, who at some point in her childhood became a secret drinker. She went to Girls’ Latin School, the best public high school in the city, where in her senior year she starred in the school play and graduated as valedictorian. She wanted to go to Radcliffe and become an actress, but she ended up at Teacher’s College, where the poor girls went. She was independent throughout her twenties, teaching English in Puerto Rico; Portland, Maine; and Boston’s Italian North End. At thirty, she married a fellow teacher who went off to the war in the Pacific and was killed within the year. Still wearing her widow’s black, she fell in love with my father, a Navy pilot. Their letters are ardent and beautiful. They married the week he was discharged and had four children in ten years. As a housewife in the fifties, she experienced several depressions that went untreated. When I was three, she returned to teaching, then went to night school for a master’s degree in counseling, and for the next seventeen years she worked as a guidance counselor at an inner-city junior high. In my fifteenth summer, my father died of a sudden stroke: she attempted suicide for the first time the following spring. From then on she struggled to manage a growing hopelessness. She worked, golfed, drank to excess at times, had a busy social life, and took Valium, among other drugs. Eventually she entered psychotherapy, which seemed to make her worse. Either the severity of her depression or the potency of the drugs she had been prescribed—I am not sure which—flattened her personality during the last few years. Her second suicide attempt was a failure; her third a success.
    I have often listened to people talk about the suicide of a friend or relative and have always been curious to hear what they say; everyone seems to want to look back at the life and character to find the harbingers of disaster that must be there. But in my mother’s case there were no clear signals. She was simply not the kind of person you would think of as a potential suicide. She was not even a stereotypical depressive. If anything, she was the opposite: exuberant, outgoing, charming, full of wit. Her major relationships, if not always smooth, were firm and enduring. She was a caring daughter, a loyal wife, a warm, sensible mother. She was competent and conscientious at work; in her dealings with inner-city kids, she was sensitive, humorous, and tough. She was liked by almost everyone and was easily elected to an office of her professional association the only time she ran. Both before and after my father died, she had a steady group of women friends with whom she travelled and played bridge. She read widely and loved the beach, the theater, and the symphony.
    Still, if there were no obvious signals, there were subtle ones, some characteristics (not necessarily bad or ominous) that made suicide, if not a plausible outcome, at least a possible one. She was restless, easily bored. Ordinary life was mundane; ordinary people tended to be dull. One of her favorite sayings came from the Broadway musical The Fantasticks: “Please, God, please, don’t ever make me normal!” She was always looking for something different, interesting, or unusual. She went to new restaurants, saw new plays, drove around neighborhoods looking for new streets. Her happiest moments came when she was travelling: she thrived on the variety and excitement. The anticipation was as good as the actual trip—the planning, the setting out, the lovely expectation of pleasure and surprise. It didn’t seem to matter what she went to see or whether all her expectations were met. She admitted no disappointment, gave little shrift to setbacks, ignored petty complaints. The doing was the important thing—the influx of stimuli, her own body in motion, the muscular contact with the diversity of life. She needed to travel, simply to go. A friend of hers once told me that travelling with my mother was exhausting, because wherever my mother was she was getting ready to be someplace else.
    On a good day her restlessness was vibrancy, a kind of ultra-aliveness, a love of life so keen and simple you wouldn’t want to be with anyone else. But suburban life didn’t always offer enough stimulation to keep her interested, and her vibrancy soured to despondency with little provocation. Where to go? What to do? There had to be something novel to look forward to. If there wasn’t. . . well, then, what was any of life for? In some ways she was like a child, her happiness dependent on event and stimulus. It seems only natural that such a personality would swerve at times into the blues.
    Her moods often followed the course of the sun. Morning was a time of energy and optimism, when she could relish the possibilities, the day’s wide- open horizon. She was often funny in the morning; she would have me in stitches over breakfast, putting on impromptu skits, playing all the parts herself. Nights were harder. The less said, the better. There were no smiles. She retired early with big books she seemed never to finish, historical novels, biographies. After my father died, when only she and I were left at home, she would turn on the lights in every room at the first sign of dusk. The house would be blazing with light. If she could she would have banished darkness. She was afraid of it.
    It seems to me now that my mother’s main objective was to live her life in italics, so great were her vibrancy, her spirit, her restless misanthropy, her desire for escape. Living was always a big idea, a great adventure; it was never comprised of the stuff that actually fills our days. When I ask myself whether she was happy, I have to say that I don’t know. Sometimes I think she would have been more satisfied with an entirely different life, but then I think not. There is no real evidence for any conjecture I might make. I loved her deeply, as children do, because she was my mother. But even as a child I sensed her struggle and learned to guard my love. Smart, perceptive, and subtly disappointed, she was not the kind of person a child could completely trust. It seems to me now that I spent a lot of time watching her from a slight distance, wanting her to win. I was as skeptical of her as I was lonely for her. I condemned and defended her with the same breath. If she had foibles, I reasoned, they came from an excess of heart and mind, never from pettiness. It seems to me, even now, that she had admirably romantic flaws.

What accounts for my mother’s discontent? Part of the answer may lie in the past, in the fact that as a child my mother was wounded by one of the most bizarre and incomprehensible of life’s tragedies—a parent’s attempt at self-destruction through alcohol. My grandmother almost died giving birth to my mother and was bedridden for the next fifteen months. The doctors strictly forbade her to have any more children. My grandparents were Catholics who would not have practiced birth control even if it had been available in 1913, so they had no choice but to live together celibately for the rest of their lives. I have no firsthand knowledge of how this situation affected them, but I do know two things: that everyone who knew him considered my grand-father some kind of saint, and that, at some point in my mother’s early childhood, my beautiful grandmother became a dipsomaniac, a secret drinker, an alcoholic. Somehow my mother learned to blame herself for causing her mother’s suffering and sickness. She once confessed to me in some distress that she had been fat at birth, and I realized only much later what that must have meant to her. At some point in her adult life, certainly by the time she became a school counselor, she must have realized that she had been an innocent babe, guiltless in the whole affair. But the rivers of emotion that form in childhood are deep and primitive, not easily routed by reason or common sense. Many times as a girl she helped her father lift her unconscious mother off the floor.
    Nevertheless, as a youth and young adult, my mother did not seem crippled by the events of her childhood. If she had tasted tragedy, she had also seen success. Her father stuck by her mother, counseling prayer and compassion, and her mother recovered miraculously one day about ten years after her dipsomania began. My mother entered adulthood with energy and optimism, a wonderful intellect, and a passionate love of life. She had her bogeymen, her fear of the dark; loneliness crept up on her perhaps faster than it did on others. But by her own admission, she did not experience anything like depression until her childbearing years, when she had a few depressive episodes that she treated almost as de riguer. Her first suicide attempt came out of the blue eight months after my father’s death. Clearly, his death was a trigger, but again the issue is not simple.
    The few years before my father died were a time of transition for the family. One of my brothers was on his own, another was about to finish college; my sister was entering college, and I was in high school. My parents had more freedom, if not more money, and were looking forward to starting the next phase of their lives. They joined a country club and went there a couple of times a week. My mother started to drink. She had drunk alcohol before, but never with such frequency or regularity. The liquor comletely changed her personality: usually gracious in social situations, she became hard to please and argumentative. Her wit, always pointed, turned razor sharp. There was no telling what might happen on the nights she drank too much. I remember waking up to late-night arguments during which my mother’s performance rivalled Elizabeth Taylor’s in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Only my father was no Richard Burton, staggering after her, trading jab for thrust. He was sober, loyal, baffled, and hurt.
    We all have our pain, some more than others. Most of us manage to live with it as we would live with an uncouth boarder in our homes. We see that its basic needs are met, treat it as cordially as possible, and otherwise give it a wide berth. My mother had been no different in this respect: though she had carried a core of pain since childhood, she kept it locked in a room of its own while she performed the rituals of her mostly happy, mostly productive life. Alcohol seems to have opened that locked door. I used to think of alcohol as a kind of truth serum, an elixir that brought out what was in people, making them more honest, if less likeable. Now I realize that the pattern of our defenses is as much a part of us as the pool of pain it masks, and that alcohol, by stripping away behavioral checks, not only frees pain but also distorts and exaggerates it. In short, my mother’s drunken acting Out had no therapeutic value. It led neither to insight, to healing, nor to any kind of honest communication. It led only to more shame and self-loathing, this time well- deserved.
    It was bad luck that my father died suddenly in the middle of all this. Certainly she had hurt him; she made him doubt himself and the life they had struggled to make together for twenty-live years. Against his will and inclination, she put the marriage in doubt. I remember how easily I blamed my mother for my father’s death. In my melodramatic, adolescent way, I thought of her as a murderess.
    She continued to drink on occasion—at home now, quietly, alone. Dramatic scenes were replaced by solitary reveries that seemed to last all night. Certainly she bore no responsibility for my father’s stroke, but she must have known she was responsible for disrupting the years that neither of them knew would be his last. Perhaps she also felt a resemblance to her relationship with her mother, whose body she had almost killed and whose life she believed she had ruined. During the ten years between my father’s death and hers, while her depression deepened into a slow, choking despair, she didn’t speak of him at all. I don’t recall her ever mentioning his name. That alone may be the best indicator of the depth and chaos of her feelings: grief, loneliness, guilt, and shame.
    In writing this incomplete but plausible reconstruction of my mother’s emotional life, I believe I am doing something that children of suicides do constantly, perhaps obsessively—conjuring a likely narrative to describe the etiology of their parent’s despair. I do it not because I think the story I am creating is especially true or because I have implicit faith in whatever psychological theory it assumes, but because of my own needs—because, for my own peace, I would like to find a way to redeem my mother with my love. Failing that, I would at least like to be able to say that I understand her choice.
    But my story does not and cannot really explain why my mother killed herself. For one thing, emotional pain is not the only prerequisite for suicide; if it were, the world would be a lot less populated than it is. Most people hurt, and many of them have more to weigh them down than my mother ever did, but they don’t all kill themselves. Indeed, many badly wounded people manage to stay beautifully and meaningfully alive. I am also aware that the pathos (I hope not bathos) of my story falsifies my mother’s character by making her more sentimental, more pathetic, than she was in real life. She was decisive, she made choices, she took matters into her own hands. The way she died perfectly proves her nature: suicide is not an indecisive act.
    Thus, empathizing with my mother’s pain doesn’t help me understand her death. Just as the disease model explains her brain chemistry without accounting for her character, so the psychological model explains her emotions but ignores her choice. In the end, if I really want to “deal” with her suicide, her legacy to me, I have to acknowledge where she took her pain and what she did with it. I have to consider the nature of her act or, as some would say, the nature of her crime.

Society condemns suicide. I am not talking about the self-administered euthanasias of terminally ill patients; these deaths can be viewed as both rational and altruistic. When an otherwise healthy person chooses, for obscure personal reasons, to die, the act seems to subvert our every civilized value, our every cherished ideal. Suicides despair of rational solutions, disbelieve the myth of the individual’s unlimited potential, and reject the precious gift of life. The prevalence of suicide in an idealistic, can-do country such as America proclaims a series of despicable heresies: that life is not always good; that we are not all strong and capable of solving our dilemmas; that fate, circumstance, and history can and do conspire to overwhelm us; that at times God turns his back. In effect, people who kill themselves break a tacit social contract, and we respond with condemnation. We treat them as outcasts, pariahs; in the act of dying, the suicide becomes a dangerous, heretical figure. We feel her laughing at our pieties, at every article of faith we try to hold close.
    Though we want to hold the suicide at arm’s length, can we really do it? Have we never listened to the music that the suicidal person hears? Freud posited thanatos as well as eros, a basic instinct for death and destruction as well as the more celebrated desire for union, pleasure, and love. Therefore, our reaction to suicide is more complicated than we ordinarily think. We reject the suicidal person because we know her only too well, because her impulses are also ours, and because we fear that to admit our commonality would deepen our own impulse to death, the way picking a scab makes the wound bleed again. We couch our rejection in tones of righteous indignation, but our revulsion really stems from an unconscious identification, from a deep knowledge that the potential for suicide resides in all of us, from a primitive fear that getting too close to another person’s despair could incite our own, and depression would spread contagiously, like the flu.
    Why are we so threatened? Isn’t it because most of us have never admitted to what the existence of suicide proves—the tenuousness of our connection to life? We have been told since childhood that we ought to be happy, that we have no reason for worry, doubt, or fear; we live in a wealthy country, a promised land, where, with a little work, every reasonable need can be satisfied. But who hasn’t experienced a lapse in this will to pursue happiness? When we doubt what we are doing or why we are doing it, we feel like social failures and go off somewhere to “work things out.” Very few of us are willing to admit that we sometimes wonder how or whether to carry on. Fewer still have questioned what carrying on really means. What are we carrying? In what direction? For what purpose? In whose name? These are questions whose answers can become the foundation for a true commitment to life. But they are not easy. Even people with the courage to ask soon learn that, as their lives change, they must ask and answer again and again. Who wants to do this work? Who does it consistently? Suicide threatens us because it reminds us of our own half-finished or barely begun spiritual work. It raises the central question—why do we live?—and shows us what we risk by not trying to answer it. Ironically then, it is our own spiritual confusion that accounts for the stigma of self-murder. If we weren’t so afraid of admitting to it, we might go lighter on the person who commits suicide.
    But condemnation is not the only response. For every church not willing to bury the suicide in consecrated ground there is a literature professor or rebellious adolescent waiting to glamorize her. The tendency to romanticize suicide springs from the same source as the tendency to condemn it, only in this case the suicide is admired because of her iconoclasm. She becomes a sort of spiritual Jesse James, a martyr in a vaguely defined but heartfelt cause (something about freedom and individualism). She assumes the prophetic dignity of the artist, whose strange, inward-turning trade parallels the mental distortions and lonely isolation of the depressive.
    Imbedded in the romanticization of suicide are assumptions about the suicide’s personal uniqueness, heightened senses, and special insights, assumptions that draw their weight from the Romantic poets’ self-serving definition of the artist as rarefied genius. This notion, which started as nothing more than a savvy bit of selfpromotion on the parts of Wordsworth and Coleridge, gained a vogue that still persists and seems never so apt as when applied to an artist who has killed herself. How often have we heard it said that Sylvia Plath was “a martyr for her art,” that Ann Sexton “explored” insanity. In this view, Hemingway’s blowing his brains out is as much a subtle confirmation of his genius as an indication of his emotional bankruptcy. As Don Maclean gushed in his popular song about Van Gogh, “I could have told you, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.”

My mother was no artsy radical. She was no Kurt Cobain riding his death wish triumphantly into a glorified abyss. She was not a Sylvia Plath, who moved from poetry to the grittier stage of a gas oven, quipping for the world to read, “Dying is an art. . . . / I do it exceptionally well.” But there was something expressive in her death, something even (dare I say it?) artistic in its technique. Note the details: her care in dress and grooming, the Water- ford pitcher, the preparation of a comfortable bed. I think she did all this on purpose, in lieu of a note, to show us that her death was an event she had considered carefully and whose symbolic value she understood. If people who shoot themselves in the heart are expressing their grief, and people who hang themselves are expressing their hopelessness, and people who slit their wrists are expressing their self-loathing, then what my mother’s death expressed was her desire for dignity and rest. As she staged it, her death seems to have been as much about longing as about pain; she was not just moving away from life but toward something else. Perhaps that is why I have always had the feeling that my mother was more authentic on the day of her death than she had been in many of the days preceding it. In death, she gave voice to parts of herself that had not found expression in her standardized, middle-class life. So why not romanticize? Doesn’t the statement of a truth—whatever truth, however stated—demand respect? And doesn’t a representation of the ineffable belong squarely in the province of art?
    No. Because Plath was wrong. Dying is not an art. It is dying. A physician friend of mine offers her own mordant quip on the subject: “Dying sucks.” It is lonely, it is frightening, and it hurts. Because we are human and don’t like the image of ourselves that this biological process presents, we try to change it. We try to make it beautiful and meaningful and, with the help of rituals and painkillers, we sometimes succeed. We are all grateful and uplifted when a dying person retains his dignity, but our concern with dignity only proves that dignity is usually the first thing to go. I think if we need to compare death to something it ought to be shitting. Like shitting, death is a biological process that the human imagination would never have dreamed up for itself. However we choose to dress it up, we die much as we shit—without desire, reflection, or choice. And we talk as little as possible about it because we do not like to think of how we must go through it. When Tolstoy wanted to begin redeeming the pompous Ivan Ilych, he placed his dying body on the commode. God bless hospice workers and nurses who empty bedpans; their mercy to us is often more profound than any other we shall receive.
    Suicides try to make an end run around the unpalatable facts of suffering and death. They seek to escape suffering by ending it; they try to take control; they wish to say, as Plath so obviously tried to do, that their dying is not an act of God but a gesture of their own invention. Frankly, I don’t think anyone (outside a small portion of the literati) is much convinced. Sylvia Plath is irrevocably dead; the last sound she heard was the hiss of gas, not the sound of applause ringing in her ears. Yes, her suicide has some symbolic value, as all suicides do. It demonstrated beyond any denial the fact of her until-then- invisible psychic pain. Perhaps she was even expressing our human longing for something higher, better, and different from what we have. But it also revealed her hubris, the grave and foolish distortion of her thought, and it added nothing to her actual art, which exists as words on paper. So, while a part of me can be seduced by the romance of the suicidal death—while at times I become teary-eyed at the thought of my mother’s beautiful suicide tableau—the realist in me remains unmoved. Though I may occasionally believe that my mother performed a symbolic act that was “true for her,” I know that hers was a failed, deluded art, sophomorically thin on content, something along the lines of sticking a crucifix in a glass of piss.
    An old Chinese riddle asks: In the yard there is the dog of evil and the dog of good. Which one grows larger? Answer: The one you feed. The hardest thing for me to accept is the knowledge that at some point my mother began feeding her ordinary human pain to the dog of evil. She crossed the line from innocent passive suffering—the yoke that humanity has labored under since Adam and Eve—to something active and destructive. Even if she killed only herself, she still committed murder. No matter how I try to humanize or rationalize or romanticize her death, there is no getting around that fact. If there were, I wouldn’t be writing this essay; I wouldn’t feel so challenged by her death or feel my blood run cold when I think about it; I wouldn’t stammer when someone asks me how my mother died. I could sit in a doctor’s office and calmly explain that my father had a stroke and my mother took an overdose and be able to act as though these deaths belong in the same class. But they don’t. Suicide is different, scarier. If not intentionally evil, it at least contains the germ of something evil. The best word I can think of to describe it is perverse.

How does the shift from run-of-the-mill suffering to self-destruction come about? Is the suicidal person responsible? Courts of law recognize different degrees of culpability in the crime of murder. How should the self-murderer be judged?
    In my late twenties I was incapacitated by depression. I couldn’t work; my marriage fell apart. Every night I dreamt of a noose hanging from a tree; I would awake terrified by my acute longing to step into it. I was suicidal for about two years. Therapy seemed only to make things worse. I gobbled the prescribed drugs hopefully, but without noticeable effect.
    Depression for me was a feeling of being closed inside the self with no means of escaping, no door or window to the reality beyond; the self had no bounds; it was endless. But instead of being exhilarating, such a feeling is oppressive. Staying alive when you are suicidal is like plodding through a desert you know you cannot escape. Is it cowardice finally to lie down in the sand? Or is it a wise surrendering to fate? I remember a well-meaning therapist urging me to “reach out”; how idiotic the suggestion sounded! The desert of depression destroys any out one might reach to.
    D. H. Lawrence, in “New Heaven and Earth,” described this hell perfectly:

I shall never forget the maniacal horror of it all in the end
when everything was me, I knew it all already, I
    anticipated it all in my soul.
because I was the author and the result
I was the God and the creation at once;
creator, I looked at my creation;
created, I looked at myself, the creator:
it was a maniacal horror in the end.

It is a world in which boundaries have been erased, in which there are no distinctions between self and God, self and nature, I and thou. It is a world of the relentlessly personal, of a gargantuan self, a world with a hundred entrances but only a few well-hidden exit doors.
    Yet Lawrence’s speaker manages to escape, as people in real life do also. His deliverance is sudden and unexplained: one night he puts out his hand and touches “that which was not I, / it verily was not I.” He reacts to his discovery with rapture and boundless energy:

Ha! I was a blaze leaping up!
I was a tiger bursting into sunlight. . . .

My God, but I can only say
I touch, I feel the unknown!

This is a conversion story, and the source and method of the conversion experience are typically left unexplained. Lawrence’s speaker does very little to change or resolve his condition; he is simply released from it by a mysterious insight into reality. Formerly unable to distinguish between “creator and created,” he suddenly perceives a vast and powerful presence that has nothing to do with him and does not resemble him in the least. Far from being threatened by the potent miracle of the “not I,” he is relieved. His new perception automatically does for him all the things that until then he couldn’t do: it bounds his unbounded self, it shrinks his world of pain, it gives him a realm of wonder and variety to “adventure” freely in.
    The reason that moments of grace or redemption are generally unexplained in literary works (though much dissected and analyzed in sermons and popular writing) is that they follow none of the accepted laws of narrative causation. They have no psychological base; they come from outside the character. Nor do they appear to be dependent on previous events, the way winning the lottery is a result of buying a lottery ticket. And yet there they are, in poem after poem and story after story, exuding their miraculous air. James Joyce, who ceded his Catholicism, nevertheless could not conceive of fiction without “epiphany”; the word originally meant the appearance of a god, but is used by Joyce to describe the sudden psychic shift that brings a troubled fictional character into relationship with truth.
    Most of us have experienced moments that enlarge our consciousness, our understanding of what we are and are not, of what does and does not belong to us. People who learn about human nature from reading the world’s best literature—instead of, say, psychology books—come away with a faith in these moments, a belief in the slow, organic growth of the spirit, and a deeper understanding of the role that suffering and conflict play in this vital process. One comes to see the growth of consciousness as one of the few true antidotes to psychic pain and despair—with consciousness, in its simplest manifestation, being nothing more than the ability to feel the living boundary between the “I” and the “not I.”
    Once a person gains consciousness, she realizes that consciousness had always been her goal. But can we blame others for remaining unconscious? Can we blame someone for being asleep? If a person is relegated to unconsciousness for many years and on some level knows it (as I believe my mother did), can we blame her for being angry at having been denied the simple light by which others grow and see? I believe that life gives everyone the opportunity to become conscious, but some get more opportunities than others. Thus suicide can be as much about what doesn’t happen for a person as what she does to herself.
    When I think of how long my mother lived without this kind of insight, I am amazed that she waited so long to take an overdose. The wonder is not that she lost faith but that, having lost it (or never having had it), she managed to put one foot in front of the other for so many years. How difficult it must have been to go day after day, month after month, year after year, without relief. Under these circumstances, her death may have been less a moral choice than an instinctive act. If suicide is a natural response to prolonged suffering; if the despairing person is, by definition, unconscious and therefore incapable of making an informed moral choice; if the grace that could relieve suffering cannot be generated from within: can we even talk about the suicide’s moral responsibility for her act?
    I find myself with a mixed response. I don’t blame my mother for her depression, no more than I blame myself for mine. Still, I can’t help recognizing that, while despair is not what anyone desires, it is also not an entirely passive process. If one can’t make insight happen, one can at least prepare the ground for it. Isn’t that what the spiritual life is all about? If we want to find, we must seek. That means a willingness to be touched and changed; it means agreeing to give up our pain and whatever marks of identity (martyr, artist, misfit, specially gifted one) we have attached to it. The seeker must already be pointed toward health, openness, and grace even before any process of growth begins. If we believe that grace is freely given, then we recognize the effort required to remain spiritually untouched. It takes obstinacy, a will to illness, an inner compass turned away from life. This effort may not be consciously willed, but it can, I think, be felt by others as a presence, a decisive and animating force.
    When I look back on my own depression, I realize there was a small part of me that was not innocent at all—the part that preferred my illness and was flattered by it, that though it was getting away with something, that believed it could con life out of its pain and mystery. I speak in hindsight, but my vision is twenty-twenty. Mingled with my bouts of depression, which started in childhood, there was a clear pattern of fear and arrogance. Fear said I couldn’t live the way other people did; arrogance said I didn’t have to. I was different, special. I didn’t need to risk failure or admit to having a broken heart. I thought I could get an exemption from all that stuff. Depression was my appeal.
    In the garden of Gethsemarie, just before he was arrested, a grieving Jesus asked Peter to stay awake with him while he prayed, but Peter and two other disciples promptly fell asleep. “Why couldn’t you stay awake with me?” Jesus asked. We know the paradoxical answer—Peter fell asleep because he was afraid, and because he couldn’t help it. Depression works the same way. I don’t believe my mother consciously chose her depression, but I do believe that, in the last ten years of her life, a subtle pattern of fear and arrogance, hardly noticeable before, hardened into a perverse attitude of rejection that became both its own punishment and its own reward. I don’t believe that this attitude was ever formulated as a philosophical position in her mind, but it was nevertheless what directed her, what she clung to, what she would not give up.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist.” Emerson was often frustrated with the masses and betrayed it in his patronizing tone. But it is easy to sympathize with his sarcasm. Many people like my mother and me resist the growth of consciousness because on some level we know exactly what it means—joining the human race and assuming responsibility for ourselves, for all our words and deeds. This is a daunting prospect. As a friend once said, “It’s terrifying to have a soul.” But what else do we think we are here for? Do we really believe we can avoid our humanity and the moral burden of our existence? Apparently some of us do. The question then becomes, what price are we willing to pay for the privilege of missing the point? Does ignorance excuse our failure? Or is ignorance the fundamental failure?

If my mother were alive today and I had the whole thing to do over again, I know that, beyond giving her my love, there isn’t much I could do. Her struggle was not with her mother, her husband, or me; it was mostly between herself and God. The dynamics of that relationship are mysterious, beyond any onlooker’s, even a daughter’s, power to control. When I reflect today on my mother’s life and death, I no longer worry about chemistry, pain, or blame. I think about that mystery and how we all participate in it every day—sometimes with more or less consciousness, sometimes with none. It is the same mystery that writers have been trying to get at for centuries—the mystery of who we are, why we are, and why things happen the way they do. Sometimes we have glimmers of understanding, but the picture is never static, never complete.
    In a certain mood I am apt to wonder why I seem to have recovered while my mother did not. But when I think this way, I recognize that my life is still in process and there are twists and turns waiting for me still. I tend to live in fear of catastrophe, both for its own sake and because I am not sure of my ability to cope. I know that there may come a time when I will again be clinically depressed; if I pick up this essay then, I will probably disagree with every word. Or maybe my next few decades will be just fine, full and rewarding, and then I will be widowed and retired and my children grown and gone. Perhaps I will fill a prescription, slip off somewhere alone, and learn that the self-inflicted death of an aging woman does not mean any of the things I have been talking about here. Maybe. I don’t know. The problem with learning is that it is never done.

Elisabeth Brink teaches writing and literature at Tufts University. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Manoa, Vermont Literary Review, and elsewhere.

“Bird on a Wire: A Meditation on a Mother’s Suicide” appears in our Winter 1997 issue.