When the Star Tribune published findings from the Minnesota Department of Health showing that suicides had risen 13 percent overall from 2010 to 2011, I paid little notice. When a friend exclaimed, “You’ll never believe this!” before showing me a story of a man found dead in France, eight years after his apparent suicide, I was equally dismissive. But when I decided to read the latest New Yorker article by humorist David Sedaris, my indifference faded. He begins:
In late May of this year, a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide.
This wasn’t the David Sedaris I knew. His essays, though at times infuriating, are always hysterically funny. They usually contain gems such as the following:
After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.
-or-
Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it’s funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even make it to bed. I’d squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I’m now told that this is not called “going to sleep” but rather “passing out,” a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.
Sedaris has always tripped over darkness in his works. In an essay on smoking, he describes in careful detail a corpse in a coroner’s office. The coroner, knowing that both Sedaris and the man on the table were fans of cigarettes, hands the man’s blackened lung over, in the hope of creating a “moment.” Sedaris, rather than being inspired to change his smoking habit simply thought: “Damn, this lung is heavy.”
If he could get away with an easy laugh about death before, he doesn’t manage it in ‘Now We Are Five‘, the essay here in question. He notes that there will be some awkwardness in trying to explain the make up of his family to strangers;
Now, though, there weren’t six, only five. “And you can’t really say, ‘There used to be six,’ ” I told my sister Lisa. “It just makes people uncomfortable.” I recalled a father and son I’d met in California a few years back. “So are there other children?” I asked. “There are,” the man said. “Three who are living and a daughter, Chloe, who died before she was born, eighteen years ago.” That’s not fair, I remember thinking. Because, I mean, what’s a person supposed to do with that?
But even this only deserves a grin. What comes through repeatedly as he and his family go on their usual vacation is that his sister’s suicide has fundamentally changed not only how he thinks of his family, but of himself;
A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I’d lost the identity I’d enjoyed since 1968, when my younger brother was born.
The dysfunction of the Sedaris family, in David’s previous essays, served as the source of humor. Here, though the same relationships are being examined, Sedaris strikes a more somber tone:
We didn’t really know our sister very well. Each of us had pulled away from the family at some point in our lives—we’d had to in order to forge our own identities, to go from being a Sedaris to being our own specific Sedaris. Tiffany, though, stayed away. She might promise to come home for Christmas, but at the last minute there’d always be some excuse: she missed her plane, she had to work. The same would happen with our summer vacations. “The rest of us managed to make it,” I’d say, aware of how old and guilt-trippy I sounded.
Whether or not he intended this, I began to wonder at the family politics I’ve experienced in my life. What would those little snide comments or broken promises have looked like if a member of my family had killed themselves? I have no reason to think they would, but the hypothetical raises certain questions. Surely, since my family is Catholic and the Sedaris’s aren’t, we would have the spiritual resources to cope. But would we? As I wondered to myself, I was reminded about a dinner discussion I had a few months ago. For almost no reason at all, the question of suicide and God’s mercy came up.
“It is perfectly possible for God to act in the time it takes for a bullet to travel down a barrel.” I said to Dan (not his real name).
“Maybe, but let’s ask what suicide actually is. It is a rejection of God’s plan for your life. That’s a mortal sin.” he replied.
“Perhaps, but mortal sin needs full knowledge, plus full consent and a grave matter. Suicide is certainly a grave matter, but given what we know about various psychological problems, it seems unlikely that there would be full consent of the will.”
“Yes, but John, you’re claiming that you know the whole story about what is going on here. It’s not good to give people, even the friends of people who have committed suicide, false hope. The plain fact is we don’t know what happens to their souls. All we know is God gave them life and they refused the gift.”
I don’t know what Dan’s motivations were in our conversation. I certainly hoped I was after the true nature of God’s mercy, but I couldn’t be sure. In a sense Dan was right, I was claiming to know the whole story. What I knew, and what Dan didn’t, was that one of our mutual friends at the table had attempted suicide a few years previously. With every word Dan spoke, our friend sank a little lower in his chair. I’d like to think I was accurately describing God’s mercy, but I was also trying to ease my friend’s pain as much as possible. I suspected, and later learned, that he was very close to losing it if the discussion had continued much longer.
My questions remain poignant. For his part, Sedaris has his own questions.
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough, and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one that I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?
“I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?
The question of suicide, then, is really a bunch of questions bundled together. What is the value of human life? Who is ultimately responsible for it? What does justice demand? What about mercy? Who is responsible? Who isn’t? What could we have done? What are we to do now?
These are questions I cannot answer. They surpass all the wit I can summon and the learning I can recall. Judging by the tone of his essay, they must be weighing heavily on Sedaris as well. But when faced with the insurmountable questions raised by suicide, I end up in a place Sedaris doesn’t. Because the nature of these problems demands an answer, and because neither I nor anyone I’ve found has been able to provide one, I look elsewhere. Thus, David’s essay leads me right back to a place which he himself has (in other writings) rejected, namely, to the truth and necessity of the Christian faith.
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