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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
Two gripping memoirs explore the guilt and confusion left behind when a relative kills himself.
By Laura Miller
Read more: Books, Death, Laura Miller, Memoirs, Suicide, Reviews, Book reviews
Oct. 7, 2008 | Suicide tends to run in families, which is another way of saying it runs through families, chalking up victims in one generation after another like a plague. Is it hereditary or communicable? Christopher Lukas, author of "Blue Genes: A Memoir of Loss and Survival" and brother to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist J. Anthony Lukas (who killed himself in 1997), believes that his brother succumbed to a "legacy of self-destruction" composed of equal parts genetic propensity and formative trauma. The ur-tragedy of their shared childhood, however, was the suicide of their mother at the age of 33. She suffered from depressions so severe, and in an era so bereft of viable treatments, that her husband and mother considered having her lobotomized in the hope that it might save her life. Even Lukas' mother herself knew that she was "ill" rather than sad, that the cause of her despair was more organic than rational.
Joan Wickersham, the author of "The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order," can find plenty of reasons for her father's suicide in 1991. A series of business failures had put him in the humiliating position of passing on a sizable loss to an investor who also happened to be Joan's father-in-law. He knew he could expect little understanding from his ambitious wife, who was carrying on an absurd flirtation with a neighbor whose homosexuality was obvious to everyone but herself. He had never assimilated his own past, the bone-shattering beatings delivered by his father when he was a boy and the emotional inaccessibility of his mother, a dancer preoccupied with her work. Above all, he seemed unable to talk to anybody about any of this, stranding himself in an isolation that finally became unbearable. So, yes, he had his reasons. Yet Wickersham's father also told her that his grandfather had killed himself, and perhaps it was in the blood for him, too.
At her father's memorial service, Wickersham realized that "the question that would accompany my father from now on, asked by people who had known him and by people who hadn't, was going to be 'why'?" She had no satisfactory answer. She could tick off all those plausible explanations, "and add them all up, but I still wouldn't get the same answer my father had gotten when he'd done the same piece of math." When Tony Lukas' book "Big Trouble" was released after his death, some reviewers speculated that he'd been tormented by his inability to live up to his own impossibly high standards, and then marveled that a book so good -- and a career so celebrated -- had disappointed the man responsible for both. The recent news of David Foster Wallace's suicide similarly prompted Internet commenters to wonder how anyone that brilliant, talented and successful could find no reason to live. Might he have been driven to it, they speculated, by the bruising that the world inflicts on the exceptionally sensitive and creative? By the inanity of American culture? By the current presidential campaign?
Some of these explanations are sentimental, others are tendentious and all of them are nonsensical, but there, Wickersham finds as she gnaws her way down to the core of the matter, is the rub: Even the real reasons aren't really reasons, because they are simply unreasonable. The psychologist Richard A. Heckler, in his remarkable book "Waking Up Alive," writes of a "suicidal trance" that gradually takes over the mind of the sufferer. "Waking Up Alive" is based on intensive interviews with people who survived in-earnest suicide attempts, and who eventually recovered their desire to live. Even they have difficulty describing why they did it, though they were able to tell Heckler how they came to the point of no return. In a suicidal trance, the sufferer reaches "a state of mind and body that receives only the kind of input that reinforces the pain and corroborates the person's conviction that the only way out is through death. The trance marks the moment at which the world becomes devoid of all possibilities except one."
Wallace's suicide also brought out the ranters and the gauntlet flingers, hardly scarce in Web discussions to begin with, but even more bizarrely inappropriate than usual in proclaiming their anger and contempt for a dead stranger. Chances are, their venom is the overflow from lives that have been scarred by other suicides. It's surprisingly common; people who murder themselves outnumber those who murder other people by 2 to 1. Wickersham remembers confiding to a friend (whose father also shot himself) that she didn't want to tell her son how his grandfather died because she was afraid that he might "just take for granted that it's part of the normal range of human actions." "It is," her friend replies. And so is judging it. Wickersham's own father denounced suicide as wrong, explaining to her that "you can't throw away your life no matter how hard it gets."
The pervasive subtext, what could almost be called the aroma of these two very different memoirs, is rage. "Suicide," Wickersham writes, "isn't just a death, it's an accusation. It's a violent, public declaration of loneliness. It's a repudiation of connection. It says, 'You weren't enough to keep me here.' It sets up unresolvable dilemmas of culpability and fault: Were we to blame for being insufficient, or was he to blame for finding us so? Someone had been weighed and found wanting, but who?"
Wickersham, the top-drawer writer in the pair, expresses little anger toward her father; she feels that she's the only one left who's on his side. But she is terrible in her loyalty to him; as she recounts the various instances in which his fragile dignity was wounded during his life, you cringe, in turn, for her mother, her in-laws, her father's business partner, her father's parents, and so on, when she trains her pitiless eye on one after the other.
Next page: Whatever went wrong was perceived as a deliberate slap in the face by an ungenerous world
Fighting to die
My father's legacy