IF NOT THE RIVER
The following poems and essays are for & with Jam Hale. They were my closest friend for several years during a glimmering and formative part of our 20s. Our love was boundless and boundaryless, and they died of suicide when we were 29. Parts of these documents have been lightly edited; otherwise they remain very near to the forms they took when they were written. Far as they may be at times from how I would write them now, from how I have come to think since their writing, it feels necessary to preserve their original language, to allow them to be snapshots of feeling & reckoning in time, rooms opened inside a grief event that continues to take place. Please note that suicide & suicidality are prominent themes in this work.
Thou Mayest
spring 2018your life blew past as a shirt off a line
but then turned and turned again
O Archangel of the Mirror
what would you have done
C.D. Wright
On April 17, 2017, the day after Easter, my friend took a gun from their parents’ home and went for a walk on the beach in Yachats, Oregon. Friend isn’t the right word. My sibling, my animus, my twin took a gun to the beach, pointed it toward their body, and fell onto the sand.
The week before, they’d sent me a letter—the first in a long time—describing their life and recent sobriety: “i don’t like it more than being a drunk—i’m still trapped in this ol’ brain. but it is better, i suppose … how is your writing?” The end of the letter read, “i miss you, bfud. i think of you every time i walk barefoot on the banks of the willamette river. timshel, jam.”
On April 18th, I went home between classes in the afternoon, felt restless, ate something, responded to the letter, put a white page in a blue envelope, and, on my walk back to campus for poetry workshop, deposited it in the blue USPS mailbox on the corner of College and Locust.
When workshop was over, I had eight missed calls and three voicemails.
_
I grew up thinking of suicide as something my uncle had done. My mother was seven months pregnant with my middle older sister. My oldest sister was almost three. I wouldn’t come along for another 12 years. It was 1975 and my grandpa had been dead for eight years (though it took me longer to realize his death as its own version of suicide). In that eight years, my uncle had managed to spend nearly all of his money and the family’s, too, and people were beginning to find out about it. He was depressed, in bed at my grandmother’s house for weeks. My mother and my oldest sister went to visit him. My sister sat on the bed wearing her new red snowsuit. A week or two later on a Friday in November he died inside of his Rolls Royce while it ran in the closed garage of his house. This suicide a suicide of shame. Of the anxiety that one’s self or actions have become so repulsive to those nearby, there is no hope love might still be given. Shame mixed also with alcoholism, mental illness, and the flawed perception of reality that sometimes accompanies extreme privilege.
When I got a little older, added to my understanding of suicide was that it was something my father hadn’t done. Manic break, gun safe. At the time, he was in his first few years working as an attorney for a large corporation in Idaho. He made a mistake on a case that cost the company time and money. The mistake was forgivable from the company’s perspective, but my father could not let it go. He isn’t the kind of person who makes mistakes. He is the kind of person who gets very disappointed in other people for making mistakes. He became obsessed with reviewing the mechanics of what had happened, of poring over every detail trying to understand how his infallible mind could have failed.
I was three years old. It wasn’t the first time he’d gone to the hospital, but it was the first time since I’d been alive and having a child changed things for him. He took the doctors’ recommendations seriously—eating, exercising, sleeping regularly—and started taking a heavy dose of Lithium. If he had killed himself, I think it would have been a suicide not so far away from my uncle’s. Shame was there. Though, I imagine my father’s shame to be concerned less with the perception of others; rather, a simple inability to live inside a mind he could no longer trust.
Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I also experienced suicide via events in my middle older sister’s life. Having half-sisters who are 12 and 15 years older has brought a great deal of prematurity to my life—from watching movies a kid really shouldn’t watch, to bearing witness to realities and difficulties beyond my age bracket, the world I saw through them was a different kind of world than most of my peers seemed to be living in.
When she was in college, an old friend of hers died of a drug overdose. It’s a coincidence that he grew up in the house where my uncle lived—the kind of coincidence that happens in Boise. I understand overdose to be a kind of suicide. And while some instances of this seem more intentional than others, most substance use is a form of controlled suicidal behavior. Our death drives are expressed in small acts of negligence. What was supposed to be fun becomes a well. Sometimes it gets out of control, small acts become large, we fall in. Several years after my sister’s friend died, one of his sisters hanged herself in a different room of the house.
Her senior year of college, another of her high school friends killed himself after a breakup. Suicide of heartbreak. Then, while she was in graduate school to become a therapist, one of her classmates killed himself. He lived in the basement of the house where she lived. After not seeing him for several days, my sister and her housemate found the body. This occurrence—a mental health professional in their own profound struggle with pain and depression—much more pervasive than its logic suggests. People choose to become therapists for a variety of reasons, but one skill that most of them seem to share is the ability and willingness to hold the pain of others. To do this in a way that is healthy requires a great deal of work and practice. Even the most seasoned and well-boundaried professionals get tired; the work becomes too much some days. Then add in other external pressures and any amount of internal struggle.
While my sister was still in the thick of her PhD program, I went to college to study philosophy. In my mind, suicide became a question. It became something any reasonable person must consider each day before leaving the house. Instead of being troubled by this, I felt freed—I must choose to live just as acutely as I could choose to die. If this is true, an act as minor as getting out of bed turns into an affirmation of my existence, of my own self-worth.
_
When I meet Jam we feel like twins. They are six months older than I am. They are gentle and soft to me and listen to me like I have something to say. They never try to kiss me or make me their girlfriend. One night, we have the same dream. They believe in the question too. The choose every day to live or die question. Jam is the first person who sees I am a poet. Our recognition is in our shared understanding of the world as a choice and it is in each other’s writing. It is between the blues of our eyes. That we are often mistaken for siblings because of how we look and because of the tender language between our bodies.
BFUD is an acronym we made up during the first year of our friendship as a rejection of the more common acronym used for a similar purpose. We were 20, then we were 21. Best Friends Until Death. At the time of the acronym’s conception, I still had the privilege of not believing in forever. Both of us did. Jam rejected the concept of the eternal fiercely, having been brought up in the home of a pastor and having in their late teens done as so many children of intensely religious parents do—running at warp speed in the opposite direction of god. I was at the tail end of my philosophy degree, which is its own kind of running. For a year we spent most days together. When we weren’t working at the coffee shop, we were walking by the river, reading poems, drinking and talking, letting our young time pass.
In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, each character has a dæmon—a creature, usually in the form of an animal, that is an external representation of the character’s inner self. When all is as it should be, a person and their dæmon stay in close physical proximity to each another—any distance more than a few yards between them and discomfort ensues, excruciating pain. Death can occur.
At the end of our year, I leave Boise to spend my last year of college in France. The night before I go, we walk around until near dawn. We name stars. We cry and I fall asleep in the crook of their shoulder. I drive away from them with eyes full of tears, watch their cheeks get shiny in my rearview mirror.
On the plane I open my carry on and find the first of dozens of letters I will receive over the next year. The letter is a poem. When I find it again after they die, it will feel like what I want to say to them. This is how all of our letters will feel—everyI miss you, every I love you, every come back soon. The end of the poem reads:
Because I know when you’re gone
I’ll still be seeing you
in my periphery. And when I’m looking
for someone to share my cigarette,
you’ll catch up to me. And every wish
on an eyelash or star you heard me
quickly resign was that your flight would
be delayed to give us more time.
The rest of the plane ride is the sensation of moving an ocean away from my dæmon.
After that I get one letter a week at least, usually along with my favorite horoscope cut out from the newspaper. It is 2009 then it is 2010. Phones and apps don’t yet make it possible to remain in constant contact across countries and oceans. Sometimes we Skype. Mostly, I check the mail obsessively, read over and over the pages they’ve already written to me. In their presence I understood for the first time what it meant to be seen and loved with a devotion that transcends desire. In their letters I watch this become unconditional.
_
In the hall outside of the English Department office, I returned one of the missed calls and was gently, gradually told of the death my best friend, my person, my dæmon. Something happened to Jam, B said. What, I said. Well I think they’re dead, she said. What makes you think that, I said. Then five more minutes of questions before she will really tell me they are gone and my body is on the floor and I am watching it from somewhere else.
The greatest punishment possible in the world of the Pullman books is to be permanently severed from your dæmon without dying. This causes a person to become a shell of themselves, as though they have lost access to that which gives them life. They become less creative and less intelligent, then disconnected, hardly there.
_
Over time, countless rituals have come into being as means of honoring the dead and helping those left to live continue to do so. Many of these take a physical form—burials are performed, gravestones and other markers are created. Others begin in the mind and move out into the air or onto a page—memory, story, history, elegy. I’ve heard people say that elegy functions as an attempt to bring the dead back to life. I’ve heard that grieving can only begin once the elegy has been written, that the writing is not a point of closure but an opening out onto all the ground that must now be covered.
After the semester was over, I drove from Colorado to Idaho. I said a poem into my phone. Coming into Boise after 11 hours in the car, the first place I went wasn’t home but the river. I wanted to see this place that was ours—to touch it—knowing if I followed it long enough, I would pour out into the same ocean they saw right before they died. I parked my car, got out and walked to the edge of the water. It was a gray day and the river was gray and everything else was green in the brief way it is in southern Idaho before spring turns fast and hot into summer. I put my hands in, did not notice how high and quick it was moving.
Once home, I was informed by my father (horrified that I’d managed to put myself in the only certified danger available to me in the limited time since my arrival) that the snowpack had been abnormally high this year and, now melting, had caused the river to rise significantly. As the weeks continued, the water got higher and higher, flooding pathways and bridges, speeding like traffic under an overpass. For the next two months no one was allowed to go near it. There were signs everywhere that read: “DANGEROUS RIVER CONDITIONS! If you enter and have to be rescued, you will be charged for all efforts to rescue you.” All I had wanted from my time in Boise was to spend hours there, to stand in it, to submerge my body. I wanted to walk along the paths I had walked with Jam, sit under our trees, send offerings into the water and bury them in its shore. Nearly all of those places were under several feet of water. I tried to go anyway, got as close as I could, wrote several bad poems about the irony of being unable to swim the one year Jam chose to die.
Thinking it might result in the catharsis that I was not getting from the river, I planned a trip to the Oregon coast. Before leaving Boise, I went to see a healer. I told her about my dead friend and my plans to go to the beach where they died. With her hands around my ankles and her eyes closed, she told me Jam was never at home here. It was like they were at the bottom of the ocean, she said; millions of cubic feet of sea above pressing hard into their skull. When she says this, I know she is right. The air around me turns to water and I can feel it pressing into every square inch of my body. Everywhere is dark and thick. I feel how much effort it would take even to die.
After that, I drove to Seattle and stayed for a few weeks. I don’t remember doing anything but walking. River traded for I-5 teeming by under my feet. I made a reservation at a motel in Yachats, took the long way from Seattle to Portland. Said poems into my phone about bones and windblown trees. I drove down the 101, through Astoria and Seaside, resolved to read every letter, make a fire out of driftwood and paper, cry, feel better, feel something. I wanted to go to the edge of those two worlds and understand wholly and finally that they were gone and that it was okay for me not to be.
The healer told me to only make the fire if it could be a gesture of thanks, if it could be a renewal of my own contract with living. In the weeks just after Jam died, most of my attempts to make this kind of sense slipped quickly into memories of conversations and letters—all the paragraphs declaring our fearlessness at the prospect of our mortality, the hours spent sitting by our river talking about suicide. Now that the theoretical had become actual—now that they had been brave enough to actually do it—I couldn’t find my right mind. Or, what was I doing all those years saying things I didn’t know if I meant.
In Seaside, I got out of the car and walked onto the beach, put my feet in the water. The sun was high and bright. I took a picture of it with a disposable camera. I picked up a wet sand dollar and put it in my back pocket. I tried to burn a piece of paper. The wind and the wet would not let it burn. I buried it in the sand, got back in the car, turned the car towards Portland, and canceled my reservation at the motel in Yachats. When I arrived in Portland, I remembered the shell. I put my hand in my pocket to take it out and found it crushed. Sand between my fingers.
_
I first started thinking about the suicide question in an existentialism class in college after reading Camus’ An Absurd Reasoning. Though the text ultimately rejects suicide’s viability, it begins by asserting that the only truly necessary philosophical question is whether or not life is worth living. That is, should I or should I not kill myself. It concludes that in the face of the absurd—our state of ever-reaching for connection and meaning only to be met by the silence of the world—the only answer is to continue to live. I mostly bought what Camus was saying. That even in the desert of our condition, the low warm tone created by dailiness and its inertia make existing worthwhile.
The more I read, the more it became apparent that most philosophical texts dealing with suicide assert it as a sort of cowardice or giving up, a foolishness. And if they do not, they tend to divide suicide into categories of cause and legitimacy. The latter is the case with the Stoics who considered suicide a wise option as long as it was a measure taken in response to an imbalance of non-preferable circumstances (illness, poverty, etc.), in order to maintain dignity and loyalty, or to avoid shame. A handful of early Stoics killed themselves, as did Seneca who was forced to cut his own veins. Seneca came along a bit later and though his views on suicide mostly aligned with the early Stoics, he allowed into his thought the idea of suicide as a means to freedom. That a wise man could (and should) kill himself not to escape pain and suffering, but when his time has come to leave the world. For Seneca, the quality of being wise held a lot more gravity and specificity than it does now. A wise person is in complete control and has come to this control through a deep understanding of the world. A wise person does not suffer. A wise person does not fear death or pain. A wise person is free. So, while a person who is not wise might kill themself as an attempt toward freedom, it is only a wise person who can truly invoke suicide as an honorable and appropriate exit from the world—to choose to die without escape from suffering being the central motivation.
I could understand many of the instances of suicide I’d encountered as being instances of cowardice or acts in response to an imbalance of difficulty. They were consequences of misfortune or illness or foolishness or shame. I started to wonder, though, about the possibility of a different kind of suicide. Something a little like what Seneca added to Stoic philosophy. Not cowardice, but transcendence.
In his essay, “On Suicide,” Arthur Schopenhauer works to dismiss the determination of some monotheistic religions that suicide is a crime. He refutes this assertion more or less easily, putting human agency over body and mind at the forefront. For the majority of the essay, Schopenhauer approaches the option of suicide as the early Stoics did—as a response to a life that has become inundated with undesirable factors. However, in its final paragraph the essay opens.
Schopenhauer writes, “Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment—a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to an answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man’s existence and in his insight into the nature of things?” This was the kind of question I wanted to ask. What if it is possible that suicide is the greatest experiment available to humankind. What if those who choose to undertake it are not cowards at all, but pioneers of a species. In the next and final sentence, the writer dismisses his question, saying, “It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very consciousness which puts the question and awaits the answer.” Logic points to his being correct, but I imagined this final sentence away and considered instead the challenge laid out in the lines preceding it.
_
On the outside of their right foot, Jam had the word “timshel” tattooed in my handwriting. Jam became obsessed with timshel because of East of Eden. I have not read East of Edenand I don’t plan to, but the way I understand it, timshel is the directive used in the Ten Commandments when they are written in Hebrew. When translated, instead of “thou shalt,” timshel means “thou mayest.” Timshel makes every action a choice, an opportunity for creation. Such that even to kill oneself might be a radically open and generative act. Thou mayest live, thou mayest not. We understood this together, first without any external confirmation. Later, through the evidence of our experience.
After France, I move to Seattle and watch daily a friend endure the difficulties of severe hypomania. Suicide becomes less of an idea then, less romantic, more lavender hand soap swallowed to get the pills out of the stomach. Then Michael falls or jumps from a train. A few months later, Katy is killed and then the man who shoots her kills himself. I move back to Boise.
At first, Jam and I become even closer through our suffering. After our friends die and my Katy dies, Jam’s nephew is born with a heart condition and dies two weeks old. We get used to sharing our pain with each other. We write. We cry. We name this time The Very Bad Year.
As years add up between the present and The Very Bad Year, though, the people who were close to all of it either surface from the pain it caused, or they don’t. Some of us move to different cities. Some get married. Some have affairs and almost get divorced. Some stay in exactly the same place, occupying the same chairs at the same bars. Some stop going to bars and stay home to drink where the whiskey is cheaper. A friend of Michael’s shoots himself in the chest. To keep from being pulled under, I leave Boise again and move to Portland.
_
Empedocles flung himself into a volcano either to prove he was immortal or to make other people think he was immortal. A month into living in Portland, I wake up at three a.m. and don’t go back to sleep. My mind seethes. For 13 days I write and barely sleep. I begin to understand more directly a different kind of suicide; I imagine the experiment. Similar episodes follow. Each time they come, I become a genius and everything is clear. Bright unbearable reality[1]is everywhere around me. I am not afraid of death; death is the only reasonable act. If I jump into the volcano, what do I become.
_
Jam and I start to deal with pain differently. In Portland I get a job as a copywriter and fling myself into the poetry community. I take workshops and go to readings, make friends who have written books. I write dozens of poems and start to take my work more seriously. I apply to MFA programs for poetry. Jam stays in Boise and this time we do not write letters. In the months before I leave, they start drinking whiskey all day and spending time with people who are younger and younger. They fall in love with a 20-year-old, and they do other drugs. I go to Boise for Christmas and we hardly see each other. One morning we have breakfast. I eat and they drink.
I get into an MFA program in Colorado and come home for the summer before moving there. I see Jam a few times. One afternoon we sit on a patio and drink tall beers. As they bring the glass to their lips, they say they are going to start drinking less. We talk about poems and it feels different than it used to. Choosing to go to this program feels like choosing to be serious, like choosing to devote my life to the thing we first loved together. They say they are writing poems and in my head I dismiss this, too. I want poetry to be for Jam what it has become for me. I want them to take it seriously in the same way I am. To throw themself so far into the writing it becomes a choice to live. I want poetry to save them like it has saved me.
I go to Colorado and the poems that have been healing me start doing other things. In order to write, I am forced to open. I start feeling my dead all around me. I start believing in the permeable layer that exists between this world and that one. In forever. I talk to the graduate student therapist at the counseling center about how little energy I have for Jam and how sad it makes me. I tell him about all the other times in my life I have tried to pull people out of the water and that I am tired. He tells me my boundaries are getting better.
The summer after my first year of grad school, I am in Boise. C calls me at five in the morning because Jam has put something on their Facebook that seems suicidal. This has happened before, but it feels more urgent this time. We call and call. We leave worried messages and send texts that say call me back call me back. At five pm, Jam texts me and says, “I’m working tonight but wanna hang out after?” After being terrified all day, I am livid. I send them a list of numbers to call when they feel suicidal. It is the last time I talk to them all summer.
I spend the entire fall feeling sad and guilty. I try to tell myself I can’t do any more. They text me about a new record in October and we agree that it is perfect. I text them after the election to tell them I love them. Over winter break, I am leaving a restaurant after having lunch with my mom and my dead friend’s mom. Jam is sitting at the end of the bar. I say hello and my mom says hello. We hug and tell each other we love each other. Their eyes have no shine in them. Like they have been painted over with a layer of clear matte paint.
Two months after I see them, they move to Oregon and get sober. Five weeks later they are dead.
_
After I get off the phone with B, we walk down the stairs of the English building and keep walking until we get home. C puts a record on. I lie on the floor then start screaming and slamming my body around. D sits nearby on the floor; C sits in his chair in the corner.
A week after Jam dies, I suck on a weed lozenge for a couple of minutes then go for a walk. As the candy starts to kick in, I put my phone on airplane mode so that the dead people can have more space in the air around me. This kind of thought is part of the reason I rarely get high. Whatever channels in me that are already open are further widened and I become so overwhelmed I can hardly function. I walk 11 miles by the river. Jam gives me a poem and I text it to myself, a few lines at a time.
SAND ELEGIES
atlas needed something
good order
after destroy
morning half window
is a mountain out of you
a collar around my neck
not sex but walking
porch spider never died
all day salt and kale
fast haircut by the boats
no rain
good action in the penny fountain
too many people
calling me a genius
like I walk up the hill
snapping all the dragons
the sun burned down my eyes
I heard someone say
you were impatient
use an aubade signal
eggs in the mail
does this read like a divorce
we love forever
no we really do
roses on the porch
no day off
I liked when you said yes
more sunscreen
thirteen thousand steps
hold the phone low to the ground
until you are upstairs
evening will come
no calm down
can you see that
Los Angeles in front of the donut store
where am I now
red
my tongue between your shoulders
yes that salt
I guess this is where
my voice lives
yes this one
very pretty
sweaty dollar
poetry
could be a ligament
or god
a kind of special dog for my mother
I don’t want a radio
one side of my face in Idaho
one in Colorado
my cold feet in your hands
under the table in Seattle
as a material result
I walked faster
and that was fine
an animal
rain on the bus
I can make a poem out of anything
I move east
not like water finally
a little rock in the shoe
people in the backpack
is this grief or just watching
does it feel like a rock song
oh ghost in my shoulder
I have no flowers to die in
_
I come back to Colorado at the end of the summer. D and I go to a party in Denver in a poet’s backyard. On the drive home it is dark. Mascara runs down my face and drips onto my shirt. We get to Fort Collins and I ask to keep driving. We drive east into the prairie and the windows are down and what comes into the windows is not rain or grass but ash from a fire burning on the other side of the mountains.
When April comes again, I take every one of their letters out of its envelope. I open them and spread them out in order on the living room floor. I lay on top of them, become a mountain.
A few days shy of a year after they died, the four of us who live in the house read new poems to each other in the backyard. In K’s poem a line says, “I too am a gravesite.” I look up at the tree above me while I listen to him and remember looking up at the tree a year ago. By myself, reading the suicide notes Jam left. Some of the dead leaves won’t fall until the spring ones come in. I remember being drunk. I am drunk now. It is the first day of the year that has been warm into the evening. We finish reading poems and make more drinks. David, Rachel, and I lie in the grass and listen to music. We hold hands or they put their hands on my shoulder or knee as my body begins to shake. Tears move over my temples and through my hair, into the grass. Cole stands nearby, watching over the three of us.
I have a dream that Jam is inside my body. Alive but not alive exactly. I am going to a wedding. Jam comes too. They watch the wedding from inside of my body and our friends who are getting married and our friends who are at the wedding all know Jam is there watching. It feels good to have them inside of me, though in the dream I know they won’t stay.
In The Very Bad Year I was 22 then I was 23. All I could ever imagine feeling or wanting to feel was devastated. Remaining frozen in a well of sadness seemed to me the only way to honor the no longer living. When Jam dies, I am convinced this will happen again—that I will fall back into that well that is both made of and filled with grief, that I will be always only sad.
After the initial shock passes, I am not fine, but find I am able to hold onto the awareness of my own joy and accomplishment and fulfillment alongside the knowledge that this big part of my heart is no longer in the world. Episodes of sadness and devastation and anger and regret and guilt and of feeling torn from my dæmon are just that—episodes.
I learn that I need to make space for these episodes, to periodically invite them in so that they don’t take over. Sometimes this happens without me—in dreams. Sometimes I go against all advice that would ever be given by a therapist or other reasonable human being and I alter my consciousness with substances. Mostly I try to do something beautiful and weird. A ritual performance to lure my dead back to me. I try not to watch myself. Sometimes the poets who are still alive cover my eyes; I am learning still to cover my own.
_
The fall before Jam died and just before the 2016 election, I set out to write every day for a month. I asked 30 people to give me tasks that would become poems. This was a way to get myself to write but it was also a way to disorient myself, to upset my normal writing process so that something new might come out of me. The prompts I was given varied widely but as I made my way through the month, the poems that surfaced consistently leaned into suicidal ideation. They imagined drowning, jumping off things, losing blood until the world goes blurry. As I wrote them, I did not feel acutely suicidal, but somewhere beneath my readily available consciousness the idea was right there, always possible. I allowed myself to keep writing, thinking that the exploration might act as a stand-in for the action itself. That if I could imagine far enough into suicide, I wouldn’t have to do it.
I have never tried to kill myself. The times I have thought seriously about suicide as more than theoretical, I have been stable enough and have had coping strategies, support enough not to leave the world.
I am on a plane at night during The Very Bad Year and I think of my parents. How my father would blame himself, my mind that is part his mind. How it would kill him, too. I think of all the loss my mother has endured. How it expresses itself in her body. How I love her more than any living thing. That to hurt her in such a way would keep my ghost between here and there forever.
The times I have not thought, the times I have walked toward moving trains or over bridges and have imagined jumping, I have not been brave enough.
The fall after Jam died, I took a class from Dan Beachy-Quick on Homer’s Iliad. It seemed logical then to study a book that could be easily said to hold only death. My way of moving through trauma has always been to throw myself into the eye of it. Being inside The Iliad allowed me to return to my understanding of the normalcy of death like breathing, though its very existence as a text still posits death as a crime against living. I fell back and forth between these senses, but mostly, all the ancient loss was a comfort to me. It proved more difficult, though, in the final weeks of class, to sit through discussions about Achilles and his friend Patroklos.
Part of what makes me a writer is my inability to compartmentalize—my inability to separate myself from symbol (sema, soma; sign, body). The symbols I read and the symbols I produce, the symbols that come out of our mouths to float in the air between us. The names. They are not theoretical. They do not simply point, they are. In any given iteration, a symbol exists as it is meant in a present context, while standing also behind it is every other use of that symbol back and back and back as far as the eye can see; and in front of it, every future use. Two mirrors face each other. I stand between them, see back and back and back until my eyes give out, forward and forward until I fall in. My reflection, the language that makes up my mind. Every word, every name an echo of another instance of its twin being breathed. Some events are echoes, too. Some are rhymes.
Patroklos and Achilles are friends beyond friendship. They are one thing separated only by bodies. Achilles finds in Patroklos a way to love that he does not normally allow himself—Patroklos is the grace of domestic love, of home. Near the end of the book, Patroklos puts on Achilles’s armor, wears it into battle, and is killed. In this, a part of Achilles is killed, both in the sense that the part of Achilles that was his best friend (the gentle part, the part capable of quiet, familial love for another person) is now gone, but also in the sense that in the moment of death, Patroklos might have been mistaken for Achilles. When Hektor then puts on the armor his victim was wearing, he is dressed as Achilles and Achilles is forced, in a manner, to hunt himself. Achilles must imagine simultaneously himself killing himself and acting as Patroklos’s killer. It is a sort of living suicide.
I don’t know what kind of suicide Jam’s was. It was not like my uncle’s or the consideration of my father. It was not shame. It was not an overdose, and though there was a long weakening of their spirit by alcohol in the years before they died, I can’t say it was a result only of that. It might have been a suicide of sadness and depression, of fatigue with the world, of feeling given up on and of wanting to give up. It might have been a suicide of a heart broken too many times. It might have been a suicide of logic, an end to suffering, a freedom. Likely, it was a suicide of all of these combined. What I want to call it, though, is a suicide of grace. This is not meant to make anything all right. It is not meant to paint whiteout over the many people who have been hurt by the loss of them, who are angry and confused, who will be for the rest of their lives missing a part. It is not meant to cast a glow over this choice or to make it in any way beautiful or romantic. But what do they know now that I don’t. What were the results of our great experiment. Which of us is brave.
_
For me, Jam died about two years before they actually did. In order to continue living, I had to try to forget them. The guilt and complication and regret of this was and is larger than I am capable of communicating. When someone is leaving the world, they push away from them the things and people that most ground them. They become difficult to be around. They make people who love them wish for an ending.
When their body died, they came back to me. The good came back. Memories of bright afternoons gone on forever, of letters and emails and songs, of the way their hug felt and how their eyes looked when they were still sparkling. It felt like a waking dream, my twin standing next to me again. In the ancient Greek understanding of the word, a dæmon is a being that is not quite god and not quite human. It is a sort of quasi-divinity. A ghost, a divine spirit.
A few months later, their poems came. The poems I tried to deny because I knew they would not be enough to keep them here. And yet, they do. I should have known. Years ago, Jam told me:
cly
we’ve made it through
bottles of wine and Bulleit rye
we’ve talked in poems
and slow danced to fast songs
you held my hand
until Oliver was really dead
you put line breaks in my poems
until he was alive again
_
After Patroklos dies, the only desire that remains in Achilles is that one day their remains be put together—that the mistake which made them two might be righted.
Standing waist-deep in the still high water, I watched as Jam’s ashes settled into the bed of the Boise River. I wanted to go under with them. Just as I wanted to be there standing next to Jam on the beach, holding their left hand in my right hand while their right hand lifted the gun. When Jam got the tattoo on their foot, we were both in love with the idea that I’d be with their body always, even in death.
When they did die, it erased in me any question that I might want to leave this world. It made me certain in a way I have never been that I want to live until I am very old, that I want to live well and to be well.
The part of them that was me and the part inside me that is them did what we talked so many times about doing. The part of them that was made of me is dead with them; the space in my body that was made of them has bled into the Pacific Ocean. I do not need to kill myself. My hand is ash next to the rocks in the river.
[1] Alice Oswald’s translation of the Greek word “enargeia,” used to describe Homer’s Illiad in her book, Memorial. She says, “It’s the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.”
POEMS AFTER
spring/summer 2017POEM AFTER
more data makes the picture less clear
I draw an arrow
lay it across my body
WATCHING THE MOVIE
I want to only be crying
my traits continue
to weave together
after years in front
of the VCR
I don’t press pause
soon enough
the carpet pattern
a ghost in my knees
POEM OF THE PAINTING
one navy smudge
cut down the center
drowning up
to a corner of light
POEM AS THE WATER
guilt soaked the riverbed
you dug your toes in
when you waded
POEM AS BIRDS
a whole daydream spent
on your bad thoughts
an evergreen vaguely shaking
would it have been better
if I’d called
in the morning
there is no you here
clouds keep moving
a cat you won’t meet
waits on the step
how could this be more evident
BEST FRIENDS UNTIL DEATH
here is my password
we said
destroy everything
PASSWORD (yours)
promise not to leave first
PASSWORD (mine)
I promise
POEM WITH PHONE ON AIRPLANE MODE
I turn them off so I can hear you better
the sea a moth in my head
POEM NOT MAKING IT TO THE PARTY
you crawl behind the chip in your front tooth
die face into the river*
I am not patient but am willing at least a few more times
to rework the song
high voices singing behind you
all I want is to watch your body
fill in with itself
how once the jukebox
made us dance
I walk along the water
looking for your feet in the sand*
*these inaccuracies
POEM WITHOUT SEEING THE OCEAN
I do not drive
to the town
where you were born
to tell you
when you died
roses
lined the highway
all it made me do
put air between their petals
was live
tenses complicate
the mistakes I have not yet made
I do not regret
all of them at once
ANIMAL ANIMAL
I make others feel small
late birthday present in the mailbox
while the house collapses
really it is adding
marks and scratches
the pages I dog ear
how I can barely tell
when most people
have read a book
I go boring again
see you in car windshields
see you in stripes of light
across the pavement
I wonder if the sun
folded into your neck
trying to return you to me
I write the address wrong
POEM MOVING NORTH ON HIGHWAY 287
I can’t pretend Colorado doesn’t exist
pulled clouds falling up from a field
cows everywhere and antelope
I stop in the middle of the song
in the middle of the road
multiple horses of the same color
don’t respond
I didn’t finish reading
you are dead and
I don’t know what to call you
I think some cows are wild
the way I want this to go
is nourish me
next to water
burn something on a beach
Colorado is not the ocean
multiple geologic formations
billions of years apart
I am told their names over and again
I do not learn
in this way I am my father
losing a book under the driver’s seat
I told myself I would stay in the right lane
I said I would not be jarred by a wind created
by anything else
the truth is the car is heavy
and I am alone
how was I supposed make this
into something you
your death finally in place
of a question
when I ask other people
what they remember
they say how your body
would turn
with everything
still in its hands
I thought I’d think of you as free
an affirmation
of our lack of belief
no geologic time
my handwriting already ash from your skin
a hit horse on a highway
leaves the pavement
with a stain so large it’s hard to see
how much blood did you have
what slid into the ocean
and how much was a shape in the sand
Addendum
fall 2018
A week after Anthony Bourdain died, I turned 30. Now, I love my birthday. I do my best to wake up each year on that day knowing no matter what I do, it will feel like mine—bright and full of as much joy as I can find. I didn’t used to. On my 30th birthday, I woke up thinking about the people I love who didn’t make it to 30. The day was overcast. I took a long walk and cried for a person whose cells are separate now. I tried to picture all the times they said they could not imagine being old. I thought about the sentence “They didn’t make it to 30” and how it paints them as a failure.
Once a teacher told me that every poet must work not to make themselves the hero of their own poems. Another said that every trauma has beneath it a network of other traumas. They said you cannot claim to love until you have attempted to be honest.
When Robin Williams killed himself, I inhaled the news for weeks. It was August 2014. The air in Boise was thick with heat and smoke from nearby wildfires. I remember walking down the hill to a bookstore to listen to a reading. I remember the discomfort of being outside, the smoke trapped in the valley. A poet read a poem about her recently dead father. In it, happiness was a mask. I walked home thinking about comedy. About how much effort it takes to be in the world when the air is difficult to breathe.
When Kate Spade died in June of 2018 and three days later Anthony Bourdain, I did not read the news. I did not look at Twitter or Facebook. I had, months before, turned off the news notifications on my phone, resorting instead to listening to podcasts days after their relevance had expired. My use of social media was limited to Instagram, a platform I was once able to stand because it took users years to make text the center of their posts. After the moment of being informed of these deaths, I tried not to give them any attention at all. Not because I didn’t care. From what I can gather, these two individuals made contributions to culture that have affected millions of lives. Their deaths are tragedies. What I didn’t want was the onslaught of one-dimensional prevention rhetoric that comes along after celebrity suicide or the erasure it makes of so many other suicides and of more complicated aspects of the conversation around suicide.
What happens in the world outside of me sometimes takes on a quality so counter to that which I feel capable of understanding, it becomes an irritant. Like the beginning of a pearl, my body curls around it. I attempt to make a space where it could fit. I carve out. It takes me weeks to form the vexation into something I can live with, sometimes months. So, sometimes I avoid reading. I didn’t want the response to these particular suicides to enter my line of vision because I was already in the middle of the pearling. The day before Kate Spade died, I read an essay written by a poet. The essay was about how the poet had found a way to live that kept them from suicide. Near the end of the piece, the text took a turn outside. It made an assertion that suicide should never be the answer—that it is a choice that should never be made, an action to be avoided at all costs. Not just by this particular poet, but by anyone. And just like that, the poet’s assertion became an irritant.
A month before that I was also writing an essay, the essay that came to form the pages that precede these pages. It was about how the poet (me) had found a way to live that kept them from suicide. It makes an assertion that this action (to live) might actually be the cowardly one. It echoes the idea that the question of whether or not to live is the only continuous question humans face and that the choice to kill oneself might—in some cases—be thought of as a courageous one, might even be the bravest response to the human experiment.
I feel uneasy about words like belief, truth, certainty.I hope nothing I ever say or write is taken as any of these. All I am is reaching. All I am is interested in treating suicide in a more complicated manner than social media and headline skimming allow. I want to think about suicide not as a failure, but as a choice; not as something categorically bad or shameful, but as an action like any other action. An action full of all the nuance of human experience.
_
I deleted Facebook for the first time in 2012. By then, I had been using it for about six years. I can’t recall now how it felt in its earliest days. What it was like before everything imaginable had its own page, before I could see what news stories were trending, and before the timeline provided reminders of who I was with a year ago or five years ago or ten. I can’t remember each evolution of pokes and reactions and hashtags and I have lost track now of where these have ended up. I do seem to remember it taking a few years before Facebook became aware of human mortality, though. And a few more before the platform became, for me, a sort of animate cemetery.
When I deleted my account in 2012, it was a response to the loss of three friends who died one after the other over a span of six months. I didn’t want social media to be the place I went to figure out who died today or the place where I watched other people write on my dead friends’ walls about how much they missed them. It felt like a performance. Hardly for the dead or even for the griever, and instead for the audience of the internet. I wanted people to do it some other way. To write Katy a letter and burn it, or to lay in the grass in of Loren’s grave. I wanted them to tell hyperbolic stories about Michael around a fire with a bottle of whiskey.
While the dying was happening, my best living friend and I took to sending each other emails every time we changed our Facebook passwords, vowing to take down the other’s page if something should happen. This was 2011, a few years before Facebook made the measures that can be taken in response to user death easily accessible. It’s possible there were no such actions available then—the history of the internet is difficult to verify. Now, when I Google “how do I turn off a dead person’s Facebook” this is the first result that comes up, from an article written in 2013:
1. First click the flower or star in the right hand corner of the page,
2. Then click “help,”
3. Then "visit the help center,"
4. Next, type in the search box "deceased user delete,"
5. Then choose memorialize or remove account.
This process is not as simple as it sounds. When I visit the Facebook help page, "Report a deceased person,” the questions I have the option of asking are: “How do I report a deceased person or an account on Facebook that needs to be memorialized?,” “What will happen to my Facebook account if I pass away?,” and “Why can’t I log in to a memorialized account on Facebook?” There are two options here. The first is Facebook’s clear preference: memorialize the account. According to Facebook, “Memorialized accounts are a place for friends and family to gather and share memories after a person has passed away.” Some of the features of these accounts are:
· The word Remembering will be shown next to the person's name on their profile.
· Depending on the privacy settings of the account, friends can share memories on the memorialized timeline.
· Content the person shared (example: photos, posts) stays on Facebook and is visible to the audience it was shared with.
The other option is to delete the account. Unless the user has established a “legacy contact,” only an immediate family member has the authority to delete a deceased person’s account. This person must then fill out a request and provide documentation of the user’s death, as well as their relationship to the deceased.
_
When I Google “notable suicides,” one of the first results that comes up is Wikipedia’s “List of suicides.” At the top of the page where disambiguation options are normally found, one note states: “This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.” The article’s introductory paragraph goes on:
The following are lists of notable people who died of suicide. Suicides committed under duress are included. Deaths by accident or misadventure are excluded. People who might or might not have died by their own hand, or whose intention to die is in dispute, but who are widely believed to have deliberately killed themselves, may be listed under "possible suicides."
See also List of suicides in the 21st century, List of political self-immolations and List of suicides which have been attributed to bullying.
I can also click on Category: Suicides by method, and I do. In order for a death to be called a “suicide” on the internet, the primary condition that must be met is the intention to die. When there is an influx of high-profile suicides in the United States, however, the crisis becomes one of mental health awareness. It becomes a crisis of prevention. An effort to fix what is broken or sick. Rarely is this crisis paused for consideration of desire, agency, will.
A fluffy magazine does a brief interview with David Spade. Alongside questions about gratitude, the interviewer asks, “You donated $100,000 to the National Alliance on Mental Health following the tragic death of your sister-in-law Kate Spade. Why was that important?” Spade responds: “More people suffer from mental health issues than we may realize. No one should ever feel ashamed to reach out for support.” My mother is a therapist. So is my sister. Most members of my family have had one or more mental health diagnosis at some point in their lives. Openness about mental health and the use of therapy were not taboo but a central part of my upbringing. I believe in mental health care and awareness and research. Ultimately, I agree with what Spade said. Why, then, when I read this, do I feel something like an allergic reaction of the soul. Like a bright light is being shined in only one direction, leaving a shadow across the rest.
_
A few days after I turned 30, I took a workshop with the poet Margaret Randall at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics’ Summer Writing Program. She has written over a hundred books of poems, translation, and criticism, but her activism is much of what has brought her attention over the years, and it was what drew me to her. The description of her workshop was as follows:
“This Machine [of Words] Kills Fascists”
Nothing combats fascism like art! Where is the other side of the dark forest, and how do we get there in these dangerous times? What paths, actions, and strategies signal our way, and nurture our greatest creative power for holistic healing? We’ll study some extraordinary voices of resistance—Adrienne Rich, Richard Vargas, Mary Oishi, Janice Gould, V.B. Price, Daniel Borzutzky, and others––to gain insight into how writing can be a form of political insight and action. Through the workshop we’ll explore our own pathways for writing and activism, build our own impenetrable barricades.
I have long been reluctant to call my work political or to set out to write something that could be easily categorized as such. I could make an analysis of why this is. It would likely be a clumsy one, with explanations ranging from a general mistrust of work that is didactic, one-sided, or ideologically coercive; to the fact that growing up in Idaho I was taught not to alienate anyone’s viewpoint even as mine was constantly being alienated by others; to the likelihood that privilege and my capacity to overthink frequently sends me into an intellectual holding pattern; to that most probable answer, that I am afraid.
I was also afraid of Randall’s workshop, so I took it. Instead of entering immediately into a traditional workshop model, we spent our first day together watching most of the 9/11 documentary, The Falling Man. In it, filmmakers follow the search for the identity of the person whose image from that day became as quickly iconic as it did controversial. It is a picture I swear I remember seeing on the front page of the newspaper even as I know it was printed only once or twice before being cast away as unpalatable for consumption. Perhaps I feel this way because I remember footage of people jumpingfalling from the towers that day. Did they play that footage. I was in eighth grade. It’s likely this memory works in the same way most of my memories work—it is a story I create, sourced from whatever remains, from what pictures and details I find important, unforgettable enough to string together into a narrative. Maybe I remember it in hindsight because the image of The Falling Man is that question—that choice of whether to live or not—captured midair. The problem is what if it is not. And if it is not, why. My notes from watching the film say: “We don’t say that they jumped. Nobody jumped that day.” They say: ASK ALWAYS: What is being erased? What are we not willing to look at?
In a Chicago Tribune article written around the same time I took Randall’s workshop, journalist Cindy Dampier makes an effort to broaden an understanding of the act of suicide and the risk factors that lead to it. Entitled “In the wake of the deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, looking at suicide differently,” the article works to humanize the act such that the reader might be able to imagine their own potential to consider it. In its argument that no one is exempt or far from suicidal thoughts, it heavily quotes Eric Besson, a faculty member in Northwestern’s counseling department. At one point, Besson looks back to 9/11 and the jumpersfallers become a vehicle for a shift in perspective around the conditions that often lead a person to suicide:
[…] think back to the events of 9/11 and how you felt about the people who chose to jump from the Twin Towers before the burning buildings collapsed. “That analogy is not too different from someone who has a depressive disorder,” says Besson. “It’s not true flames, but it’s the flames of something.
It’s easier for us to look at the 9/11 example and say, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to judge that person,’ but what if it’s flipped around and these are not real flames, but it’s something that’s very real to that person?” Given any of these circumstances — the burning building, the terminal cancer or the extreme, persistent mood disorder — Besson points out, none of us really know what we would choose to do.
The assertion is that duress coming from within the body (and the mind which is made out of body) is as real and valid a reason to end one’s life as duress coming from outside. Though it works to widen the definition of what suffering makes suicide justifiable or understandable, more interesting is the overarching view of suicide Besson seems to be responding to—a view that paints the action of killing oneself as inconceivable and mysterious, shameful and worthy of judgment.
_
In 2013 I started over with Facebook. I made a new account under a different version of my name and slowly accumulated friends who were alive. Periodically, Facebook suggested that I become friends with my dead friends. Aside from that, things went okay for a while. Then my best living friend started using their account late at night when they were drunk and alone. It was not uncommon for them to become suicidal after hours of drinking and not going to sleep, and social media was a cave they could call into for reassurance and affirmation. One morning in the summer of 2016 after a particularly upsetting three-in-the-morning post, I called them again and again. I left multiple voicemails. When they finally responded 12 hours later in a text message, it was as if nothing had happened. I sent them a list of resources for people in crisis and just like that, I gave up. They died of suicide six months later.
Near the bottom of the help page entitled “How do I request the removal of a deceased family member's Facebook account?” is a note stating that “the information on the documentation you provide must match the information on your loved one's account.” By the time they died, the name and gender on their Facebook account would not have matched those provided on any documentation of their death. And by the time they died, we no longer shared passwords. My resources for them having dried up into a list of suicide hotlines.
I would like to present an argument here defending myself, but I am not the hero of this poem. This is the person I didn’t save. Whose trauma was inextricably linked to other, much older traumas, some of which were my traumas, too. And whose death and unraveling created new traumas, traumas that continue to walk around the world inside my body and inside other human bodies I love. Anyone who has been close with a person in crisis knows these cycle, this web. The push and pull of fatigue and love and responsibility and frustration. Of care for the self and care for the other. That secret, horrific sensation of relief when it is all finally over. For the other and with them.
The pages before this made my friend the hero. They made their suicide one of lucidity and courage—a death I could admire. I have no way of knowing what felt true for them or what is actually true. The only way I could find to be honest then was to make a pearl.
_
The Chicago Tribune article was emailed to me by my mother months after Randall’s workshop. After reading it, I noticed the email was forwarded—that the article was originally sent to my mother by her niece (my cousin) whose father killed himself in 1975 when she was 14, my mother was 26, and I was 13 years from being born. Cleaning out her office a few weeks later, my mother found her 1983 graduate thesis and sent me a picture of the title page:
YOUNG ADULT SUICIDE
IN THE COLLEGE AND GRADUATE STUDENT POPULATION:
AN EXPLORATORY STUDY
A project based upon an investigation at a university affiliated outpatient clinic in a western state, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work.
IN THE COLLEGE AND GRADUATE STUDENT POPULATION:
AN EXPLORATORY STUDY
A project based upon an investigation at a university affiliated outpatient clinic in a western state, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work.
Trauma leaves a space in the DNA that is passed through time from one family member to the next. A question necessarily leaves a space that is meant to be filled in by an answer. In front of another poet I call this space a hole. I want to know what happens if I fill it in right. The poet calls the hole a window.
According to the CDC, Idaho had the seventh highest suicide rate in the United States in 2016 (preceded by Montana, Alaska, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada), 50% higher than the national average. This has been attributed to a range of factors: altitude, lack of access to resources around mental health education and treatment, the economy, western stoicism, guns. The lower oxygen levels of higher altitudes have been linked to depression. From 2006-2012 Idaho’s suicide hotline was shut down for lack of funding. Rural areas in Idaho have an extreme shortage of mental health professionals and many of their residents continue to approach difficulty and misfortune in a quiet and self-isolating manner. After my 30th birthday, I came home to find the local news unapologetically covering World Suicide Prevention Day from a gun store (in 2017 60% of Idaho suicides involved a firearm, says the Suicide Prevention Action Network of Idaho). A month later, an article in the Idaho Statesman followed a grassroots effort to curb suicide, which involves tying Livestrong-esque bracelets that say “love yourself” to the railing of the Perrine Bridge (a popular site for BASE jumping and suicide) in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Despite Wikipedia’s clear criteria, a conversation about intention is nowhere to be found in these or any other media I have encountered. That it might be possible for another person to soberly choose to leave the living—too great a shadow to turn towards. Thinking about Jam’s suicide, it is difficult not to also think about when it happened. April 17, 2017 was almost exactly three months into the 45th president’s first term. Thinking about all the chaos and darkness and threats to human thriving that occurred in those three months, it is difficult to not also think of how much my friend hated capitalism and the patriarchy and the gender binary. Of course they did, you say. I, too, hate capitalism and the patriarchy and the gender binary. But their hatred of these things was different from mine, at least at the time. Deeper, more all-consuming. For lack of a more accurate way to describe it, these things maddened them.
In a time marked by ecological armageddon, human rights emergencies, and continuous political absurdity, what is suicide but a decision made in response to extreme duress. Or what is it but a sensible action. If I was wrong to think of it as a brave entry into the unknown, would it be more accurate to understand it as an act not just of resistance but of intelligence.
_
After our discussion in workshop of what counts as suicide, our homework was to write something in response to the feelings the film evoked or the feelings this moment in our culture evokes. In my notes I asked myself new questions:
· What would it look like in a poem to show something as it has not quite happened (this person hasn’t hit the ground yet)?
· Is it possible to extend the fall, to extend the moment they are still alive?
This is what I wrote:
The Falling
I looked at you first as suspended between the seam of two pages / that if I could just / keep writing it might hold you / enough to get a meaning out / or let you inhabit a little longer / somewhere uninhabitable //this is the moment in the classroom in which I can / speak about suicide / no panic attack// last night while going to sleep I made a list of what else I’m allowed to hold / the list goes / gun control / my body / my mind / the information / that is your mind before it leaves / your picture / reminds me what lines I crossed out / disorientation / the moment before hitting the ground //human potential realized includes not only my death but the possibility of false language / the possibility of my control taken / and also of taking my control / to the fullest extent of its possibility// I heard there’s no wilderness / I heard I am meant to make a book in which my friends live / to carve the future into a space where our bodies fit
Reading another poet’s manuscript not long after Randall’s workshop, I find all throughout it evidence of the other question I keep asking. I remember liking this poet immediately and not knowing quite why. Soon after we met, I asked him to give a reading with a few other poets at my house. Poems about his father’s suicide. In those poems, the presence not just of loss and its inverse capacity for joy, but of a particular awareness of choice. From “New Definition of Blues” by Rushi Vyas:
Does a stone gifted movement give a damn
about anything meaning anything. Would a sparrow, tired of singing
the same song day after day, bark if given the choice. Like you,
these are not questions for no reason.
Vyas’s poem equates the reader with the question. Anyone’s reason for being here in the first place has to do with other people; the condition of existing at all, outside the control of the individual. The question was put here by someone else. The space that question leaves—the living—is what we are left to fill in. If these are the conditions of being alive, who wouldn’t want to make the reason to stay—and the choice whether or not to do so—one that is of their own agency. No matter the conditions within or without, being alive is the falling. Sometimes the ground comes sooner. Sometimes we ask it to.
_
In response to our homework, one of the participants in Margaret Randall’s workshop, a poet from London, wrote an essay about the June 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower. The essay followed the poet’s reaction to the tragedy—how first they felt nothing, then felt guilty for feeling nothing; and later felt angry and bereft, overcome by grief; and after that guilty and worried that they might be grief-jacking. Grenfell Tower was a primarily working-class residential building owned by affluent Londoners and surrounded by affluent neighborhoods. 72 people died. The fire wasn’t just a tragedy, but a symbol of enduring class divides in the UK. The poet hadn’t known anyone who died in the fire; their closest personal proximity to the event was having once met someone who was involved in the ownership and upkeep of the building.
The essay I was writing before Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain died was meant to be part of a book of essays considering the complexity of what I have termed middle-distance grief—grief after loss not of a partner or family member, but after losses of close friends and acquaintances, loss via horrific and violent events, and the chronic, collective grief that is the result of the 24-hour news cycle. It was an exploration of what happened when one of my friends died and then another and another. I said that my ultimate hope for the book was that it might undo the clinical treatment of death and loss and feeling that has become the overwhelming norm in the U.S. by giving the reader permission to grieve without judgment or limitation. Grief is confounding no matter who is doing the dying, but no one ever told me how to feel (or that I was allowed to feel) when the proximity of the relationship between myself and the dead was neither very close nor far away, but in that murky space between family and stranger. What I wanted was to write a manual. I wanted to write the thing I needed to read when I found myself again and again at the bottom of holes that appeared from nowhere, experiencing loss nobody told me to expect.
Before the London poet’s essay, I had never encountered the term grief-jacking. As it turns out, this is—in short—my biggest fear. That everything I have ever written and most of what I have felt is a form of this, which the poet described as an unreasonable emotional response to a tragedy that doesn’t belong to you. I think of it as the act of taking the excess of feeling that exists in the body, locating an instance of loss or horror or injustice that exists outside of the body, and using that instance as a container into which the excess of feeling is then emptied. In their essay, they were referring specifically to a news event, but I would assert that grief-jacking might extend to pretty much any situation of loss that has occurred outside of immediate proximity, i.e., outside of the blood or vows family. It follows, then, that my entire book fell into this category. It is a word for the frustration that has made me roll my eyes at a good handful of funerals. It is what made me turn off Facebook the first time and the second time. It might also be exactly what I want to give people permission to do, that is, to feel their feelings. Instead of ignoring or numbing or stuffing it into a corner of the body, what could it look like to actually try to process the information I encounter every day. What could it look like for everyone to grieve this world we seem always to know too much and too little about.
What if what could be called grief-jacking might instead be called sense-making and what does that look like. Maybe it is a form of what has been showing up with increasing frequency in my Instagram feed—amidst the idealized, one-dimensional content that tends to get shared on social media, I have noticed a growing trend of emotional openness. It might simply be that I follow a lot of poets on the internet, but when something big happens in the world or in a person’s life, something upsetting, social media seems to have become one place to process those things.
What is at the center of the news today allows an opportunity for collective anguish to connect to individual anguish. A story is told. A wound is reopened to invite greater healing. Most of the time, these are gestures that feel more vulnerable than performative, more attempts to contextualize events through the lens of the self than projections of the self onto those events. Or maybe now is a different time. A time in which so much life is lived on the internet. A time I’m told I have difficulty adjusting to because I fall into the segment of millennials who have a whole childhood’s worth of pre-digital memories. Yet, I understand it is unreasonable to expect parts of living to be excluded from this trend. I feel my feelings changing. I feel myself opening to the idea that the expression of grief on social media (versions of which have periodically disgusted me so much that I have deleted whole eras of my online identity) might be the very thing I want my writing to be for others: a call for vulnerability, a giving of permission.
That this use of the internet is a way to release precisely the pressure it creates might be too tidy a conclusion to make—one potential result being an over-validation of emotional crisis, a habit of performing or not moving through difficulty because the support and affirmation of vulnerability becomes its own addiction. I want to know what other forms this grief cycle could take, though—this movement from collective grief and individual grief and back again. Without language. Not forms of rationalizing or narrativizing but something more present, more somatic or psychic, more direct. What would it look like to let it move through the body until it has disappeared or until it has been alchemized into something else. Is that crying. Is it dancing. Maybe it’s simply being alone. And quiet. Maybe it’s privacy. And if there is no more privacy, maybe it’s inventing a new means of separation. A way to place time between the mind and the world, between the mind and the body it is made from.
Poems After
summer 2017SALT ELEGY
when there was nothing else
I left
held the mirror up
you behind my shoulder
TIMSHEL
I heard it was too much
the billion cubic feet of water pressing
into the ceiling of your skull
there are no oranges at the bottom of the ocean
no way to keep a peel’s residue from disappearing
between your fingers
I put my own cold hand on my knee
from Idaho to Oregon to the corner of Washington
is 500 miles
how could you have known
that when you choose to leave
they bring you right back
brutal
as I round past a semi
you seem to be breathing
crawling up the shore
but a body does not lose
the memory of water
your clothes still damp with sea
NOW NOW
so as much air as possible
not a person
sitting alone at a table
waiting for someone else
to arrive
but a person
remaining
at the table after
UNTIL AGAIN
I did not steal the flowers
they came out of my skin
with very little water
and no song
from the ground
instead of this
could I do something slow
on purpose
pick up a wet sand dollar
crush it back into desert
NOTES
“Thou Mayest” first appeared in Entropy & “Poem Moving North on Highway 287” in Grama.
“Timshel” was published in an anthology of the same name.