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Suicide is less an act than a tale of the soul. Since far back into the recesses of time, women have washed their man's body, preparing him for the grave; they have lovingly and with crushing sorrow wiped the blood and dirt from him, felt the stillness in his silent chest, held his now-cool hands. They are always gentle, though he is past their ministrations. This last rite, this last bit of care feels like woman's work, even in this post-feminist age. So it was that I found myself in the middle of December 2004, cleaning the one-room Victorian apartment in which my love had lived and then ended his life. I came with his sister-friend, Debbie, to cleanse him from that space. We, his women, moved about, all wounded silence and competence somehow both reflective and bustling. His beautiful body, undiscovered for days after his death, was already gone, taken away, autopsied and cremated quickly: thus a task I would have thought I’d find unbearable became a needed ritual, a final farewell… the last act of tenderness I could ever offer him. I could not stroke his fine, soft skin again or kiss away the desolate horror of his solitary ending, but I could give him this. I could wipe each wall, each counter, each surface that had witnessed our happiness clean of him – of the molecules that had drifted from him as he moved about, falling from his skin, floating on his breath; of his beard-clippings and bathtub ring, products of his living, breathing self. Nothing was repulsive: all of it was him. It felt sacred. For anyone else but those who knew him that place is just an apartment; to me, to us, it was another world – and at the end it was his doorway out of this one. I think, too, that I had to gather up the ashes of hope and joy and love we had spent there together; I couldn’t trust anyone else to be gentle enough or to have the proper reverence. His family had come from far away, handsome somber brothers with Jeff's voice and mannerisms slightly warped, like funhouse mirror reflections of him, to claim his poor corpse and make the arrangements. Their similarities to him both comforted and stung. They had come back to a place they hadn't lived since they were children, to meet loved ones of their brother's from an existence entirely separate from theirs. We, those who surrounded him in his chosen daily life, were strangers to them, and they to us. They had come first, a couple of days after the horror began, to Jeff's friend Blondi's house, Sorrow Central in these awful times, to meet with those of us closest to him, so we could all get some idea of the sides of him we hadn't seen. We gave them parts of his recent life, and they offered us bits of his childhood - all of us hoping to fit our pieces of him together in some way that might give us clues into his final, terrible choice. We clung to those images and each other, drifting debris in a sea of grief. "Oh, he was excited about you," was the first thing his brother Joe had said in his deep, haunting almost-Jeff voice, gathering me warmly up into arms that should have been my lover's. I allowed myself to be enfolded, unable to speak. He told me Jeff had called him to tell him that I was in his life, but that he couldn't call me his girlfriend or I'd kill him. A couple of weeks later he had called back to say that it was official, I had used that term myself. His brother couldn't remember when he had heard him so happy. Yes, happy. Happier, we had told each other, than we had been in a long time, maybe ever. His friends saw it, too, saw him smiling for the first time in a couple of years, saw the vigor come back to him like color into an old television set warming up. He had seemed almost serene over the last year, a changed man. But then, what had happened? Something. Something had happened in the last month or so, some unraveling in which all that happiness became inaccessible, dreams of the future deemed unworkable and the present unbearable. Something had happened, and the little room that had been filled with such laughter and glorious passion became his final glimpse of the world, where he ended his last barbaric yawp "Good Bye" with an exclamation point and stepped into a tiny closet which held oblivion for him. He had thought to leave his pain behind, and indeed he had - in the hearts of all of us. It's funny. I had never thought of it exactly this way, but no matter how completely in your life you are, you can take one simple action - simple, though undoubtedly difficult to endure - and leave it all exactly where you put it last, for others to deal with later through their blinding fog of agony. Each trinket, each envelope, a half-roll of one-ply toilet paper; just like that. Rubber bands and coins, rope over the clothes bar, head through the loop: Good Bye! Such everyday things - a pen, a pad of paper, glasses off, smoke a cigarette, lamp glowing brightly, the closet, a rope; in you go, and minutes later the entire scene and all of the elements of it are transformed: now it is an awful place, the room of a suicide. Daylight waxes and spills in, cars are audible from the street, people walk by; the light wanes, the sun sets, darkness comes, the lamp never stops shining yellowly through the window… and then again, and again, while a dark and hideous thing hangs motionless in its shadowy nook, and the most innocuous surrounding objects are altered simply by their very proximity. And so his family arrived and we talked for a couple of hours, and cried together, and then went from Blondi's over and down a block to the apartment. As we drove over for the first time I lost control of my breath, which began to come in great heaving gasps, making my face and fingertips numb. We parked, and as I got out I realized that my legs were numb, too, and so then I was sprawled on the crisp, dry winter lawn, sobbing into the ground. It took 7 or 8 people less than 4 hours to compartmentalize a man's entire life, put it in boxes and big plastic trash bags, and move it out. I hadn't evaluated Jeff's existence that way before; this stuff was his. He would take care of it. I had no reason to think that he wouldn't be here to look after it himself and decide what should happen to it. I was helpless: I didn't know where each little bauble came from or why it was important. Whatever memory or connection they held was lost with him. Where had he gotten this medallion, the little silver boxing skeleton, the oblong piece of carved malachite? What face had they reminded him of, what event? I felt as if I were reading hieroglyphics, unable to discern the meaning behind the shapes. Now these things are imbued with new significance: I keep them because they were important to him, because they were the few things he chose to have nearby so that his eye could fall on them. Their origins are as lost to me as if I had found them in an Egyptian tomb, but somehow, oddly, I feel that as long as I have the things themselves their stories will remain intact, even if I don't know them. How sad, how stoically mute inanimate objects seem sometimes when they've lost their owners… but perhaps our possessions forget us as soon as we forget them. - ©Beth, December 17, 2004 Noblest of men, woo't die? There is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon. - Wm. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra |
