Death & words, solid & delicate

The waves of sadness, familiar now, have changed in length and frequency in the last few weeks.

Flowers: Poppies and Daisies, Odilon Redon, 1867

My best friend killed herself last month.

On the phone with another friend last night, she told me this is a sacred time in my life, this moment where the veil has been peeled back to expose the unbearable pain of reality.

The waves of sadness, familiar now, have changed in length and frequency in the last few weeks. I’ve been writing a lot and reading even more, and I’ve been collecting other people’s words in order to feel grounded.

• “I was not the only one who made the mistake of thinking that, because it was something you talked about a lot, it was something you wouldn’t do. And after all, you were not the unhappiest person we know. You were not the most depressed. You were not even—strange as it now sounds to say—the most suicidal.” Sigrid Nunez, The Friend¹

• “Human beings are solid things made out of delicate materials. Perhaps that is why we like jewelry as much as we do, because jewelry is our inverse—delicate things made out of solid materials.” Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People²

• “A long way to go doesn’t tell you up or down, does it? It’s just a long way to go. I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Last Interview³

• “This concern for death, this awakening that keeps vigil over death, this conscience that looks death in the face is another name for freedom.” Derrida, The Gift of Death⁴

• “Often I think that writing is a futile effort; so is reading; so is living.” Yiyun Li, To Speak is To Blunder⁵

• “Many people believe that there exists in the world’s coordinate system a perfect point where time and space reach an agreement. This may even be why these people travel, leaving their homes behind, hoping that even by moving around in a chaotic fashion they will increase their likelihood of happening upon this point. Landing at the right time in the right place—seizing the opportunity, grabbing the moment and not letting go—would mean the code to the safe had been cracked, the combination revealed, the truth exposed. No more being passed by, no more surfing coincidence, accidents, and turns of fate. You don’t have to do anything—you just have to show up, sign in at that one single configuration of time and place.” Olga Tokarczuk, Flights⁶

• “How can there be a ‘life worth living,’ as Ennius puts it, unless it rest upon the mutual love of friends? What could be finer than to have someone to whom you may speak as freely as to yourself? How could you derive true joy from good fortune, if you did not have someone who would rejoice in your happiness as much as you yourself? And it would be very hard to bear misfortune in the absence of anyone who would take your suffering even harder than you.” Cicero, De Amicitia⁷

• “Upon our suffering we try to build a personality that excludes ordinary joys, the pursuit of happiness, and that is purely conceptual. We have become incarnated concepts. This means we do not live in the present. Besides, we have no days that we can call the present… We exist as a result of the justification of our conscience, and for its sake alone. Thus there is no such thing as time for us.” Georgios Mangakis⁸

• “The limits of my language means the limits of my world… Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly.” Wittgeinstein, Tractatus⁹

• “And what does it mean—dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.” Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard¹⁰

• “I continue to marvel every day not only at being alive while others succumb to disease, war, violence, drowning, starvation, imprisonment or muder, but also at the possibility of being a conscious body, a vulnerable self-writing carbon machine, living out what may be the most beautiful (or devastating) collective adventure we have ever embarked on.” Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi

Some poems, because those are useful in death and grief, too:

• Death is Nothing at All (All is Well), Henry Scott Holland

• Kindness, Naomi Shihab Nye¹¹

• Farther, Ursula K. Le Guin¹²

• On Death, without Exaggeration, Wisława Szymborska¹³

• Meditation at Lagunitas, Robert Hass¹⁴

I read far less poetry than I read prose, and I am amenable to suggestions for words you turn to when nothing makes sense.

1. This was the first book that I read, several years ago, in which the writer was processing the death of a friend, rather than that of a spouse, a parent, or a child. This sentence captures the feeling I had when I lost my friend. After it happened, I started ranking all of my friends, most likely to least likely to kill themselves, throughout the day in my head. She was low on the list.

2. I was listening to this audiobook right before my friend’s death. I finished the other half after. This sentence feels fitting because my friend, D, in addition to being an organizer and therapist was also an incredible artist and jewelry maker.

3. She said this about aging in an interview with David Streitfeld, I found it in a book on D’s bookshelf when we went through her stuff. Several years ago, she had gifted me The Left Hand of Darkness, in which she writes “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”

4. Forgive me for including Derrida here; the other passage I considered was later in the book, “I can give the other everything except immortality, except this dying for her to the extent of dying in place of her and so freeing her from her own death.”

5. Yiyun Li has been a phenomenal parasocial guide for me at this moment. In another book, she tells an anecdote how in one of the writing classes she teaches students complain that writing is hard. She responds telling them that writing is easy, it’s just that living is hard.

6. I’ve been slowly reading this book for many months and it keeps giving me gifts like this passage.

7. Several years ago, I underlined this passage in my copy of Other Selves: Philosophers on Friendship in my research for another writing project, and I return to this book often.

8. This is an excerpt from his “Greece Today: Letter to Europeans” that he wrote while in prison in the 70s. I read the letter in the anthology They Shoot Writers Don’t They? edited by George Theiner in a copy that I found at Goodwill two weeks ago. I bought it, alongside half a dozen books from the personal collection of a man named Eric Walter, according to the inscription inside each of his books. I assumed he was dead, because that’s the assumption I make readily these days, and looked him up when I got home. It turns out he is alive, though his wife is dead, and he is a local actor, director, producer, writer, poet, musician. I’m not sure why he donated so much of his book collection, but I’m slowly making my way through it.

9. In all honesty, I’m struggling with believing this at this moment, but it must be true. I must believe it to be true.

10. Chekhov is my among my favorite short story writers, but this is from one of his plays.

11. These first two poems showed up printed out and laminated at the memorial in front of my friend’s house after her death with a note that read “D shared these poems with me when I lost another friend. She said they helped her when her dad passed. I hope they can help us now.”

12. I can’t find this poem on the internet, but it is included in her book So Far So Good: Final Poems: 2014-2018

13. Wisława Szymborska has another poem about how dying is something you don’t do to your cat, and despite it being cheeky, it makes me think if D would have made a different decision if her dog had still been alive.

14. Another friend, a poet herself, sent me this one the other day. This sentence breaks me, “There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.”