I have just read Jessica Michael Hecht’s much talked-about entry forbidding suicide. It’s a good thing that I didn’t happen to read it in the middle of a funk when I was half as old as I am now, because it would have decided me to “be a man” and put an end to myself. The very possibility of staying alive in honor of Ms Hecht’s ultimatum would have been so humiliating that there would have been only one way to make sure that I wasn’t.

I’ve outgrown the impulse to kill myself that began to make itself felt during adolescence. That’s not to say that I can’t imagine killing myself now. But the deed would be a rational response to illness or poverty. (I would not permit myself to live in the world of Cormac McCarthy’s road — and I think that the man is despicable, really, for having permitted himself to imagine it, a genuine misanthrope whom we’d all be better off without.) I do not have the whole of my life ahead of me. But I would not kill myself because I could no longer bear to feel totally alone and misunderstood. My dear wife has made it hard for me to imagine being totally alone (even if she weren’t here), and, as for being misunderstood, I now grasp that this is a condition that invariably begins with not understanding oneself.

These are lessons of old age, however, and of long companionship. They are lessons that nobody can expect to have learned before the age of fifty.

I’m thinking of David Foster Wallace. Right now, it’s as though Shakespeare had killed himself in the mid 1590s. One imagines the things that Wallace would have written had he lived — or, to put it more correctly, one imagines one’s delight at his brilliant surprises. He was a Wernher von Braun of English syntax; there was nothing about our crabbed language that obstructed his ability to send it aloft. Had he lived, he would have taught us to speak English as grandly as Shakespeare taught us to speak an earlier version centuries ago, a version that, but for him, would have slipped into sheer unintellibility over a century ago.

But I never get mad at David Foster Wallace for taking his own life. I’ve lived with clinical depression, and with the dissatisfactions that anti-depressent splatter all over life, and I know that minds really can close down. Nobody has the right to tell David Foster Wallace that he can’t kill himself.

Ms Hecht writes:

Anyway, some part of you doesn’t want to end it all, and I’m talking to her or him, to that part of you.  I’m throwing you a rope, you don’t have to explain it to the monster in you, just tell the monster it can do whatever it wants, but not that.  Later we’ll get rid of the monster, for now just hang on to the rope.

To which I can only say that, for any potential suicide to whom she might address this injunction, she herself is the monster. Not for wanting to prevent a suicide, not for intervening, but for being too far away and yet too noisy, for being unjustifiably warm and loving. I don’t know the first thing about Rachel Wetzsteon or Sarah Hannah, Ms Hecht’s sometime fellow students at Columbia, and I don’t really know anything about the personal life of David Foster Wallace, but I’m willing to venture that they faced hard impossibilities that, however transitory, were as fatal as a momentary spike in blood pressure or a momentary drop in breathable air.

For all the entry’s well-meant appeal, I believe that Ms Hecht owes her late friends an apology.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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