What is to be done?

That's the title of a novel written by Nikolai Chernyshevsky in which the narrator displays a merciless ascetiscism and dedication to the ideals of revolution and, as I recall, nihilism. Lenin later used the title for an incendiary pamphlet.

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It felt a little bit wrong to get back to work. It felt, yesterday, back in the bookshop, wrong to be moving around competently and interacting with perfect strangers who knew nothing about what’d happened, and yet it felt right to feel healthy and of sound mind and as good as I could possibly be with an honest mode of engaging with the world and the people in it. I saw old friends—well, relatively old ones, ones I’ve had for 4+ months or so—and felt strengthened by their expressions of care and sympathy, and by their sometimes unexpected embraces. I even got one friend who’s marginally hug-challenged to hug me for 5 whole seconds. She did a bang-up job with it too. That was all wonderful. But it felt a little off. Felt wrong.

This is a paradox.

Because on the one hand, I was operating with a good amt of competence and even cheer. There might be a phenomenon of overcompensation at work here. As in, in order to make everyone else feel comfortable with my return and their implicit obligation to be welcoming and to offer condolences, I strove to put a smiling face to all of them and make them more at ease. But then, there’s compensation and then there’s overcompensation. One person watched me interacting with I think Brian about some new band that I loved, and the former person said that I looked elated. Which took me aback, because I have no business being elated. Wait. It isn’t quite as simple as that. I do have business being elated. Anyone would defend that. (See the Kim Addonizio poem below, and the Wordsworth poem Em. C added to the Comments.) Still though, I’m also feeling a) guilt for that elation, if elation it is, and b) a desire to not feel that elation, and c) a meta- or supra-guilt in which I feel bad about wanting to feel guilt. Et cetera ad nauseum. What it comes down to really is that I don’t want to be as competent as I seem to be. But at the same time and oppositely, there’s little point and even some danger in wallowing in the sorrow.

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Which is the basic Moving On with the Current Reality / Lingering with the Old Reality dichotomy.

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Joan Didion has a fine 1 1/2 pages toward the end of The Year of Magical Thinking. Here it is:

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to use could die, but we do not look beyond the few days of weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nautre of the even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool. customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be ‘healing.’ A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the fungeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to ‘get through it,’ rise to the occasion, exhibit the ‘strength’ that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that his will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be the anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of memoments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.”

- The Year of Magical Thinking, 188-89.

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I.e. nihilism. A belief, or a newfound and unsolicited understanding of the world-as-nothing. What do they call that in Buddhist thought? When then veil's been removed from the world and you understand that all's suffering? And transcendence results?

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I didn’t know Jon very well.

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This is why the prospect of Moving on, the initial step toward Dealing, feels like a deep betrayal of him.

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Joan Didion’s book, which I still plan on reviewing in a more official capacity when time allows, is a wonderful document primarily because it represents the purest emotional reaction possible. I think that Kate’s right when she says that the book is just pure catharsis for Didion; I had been criticizing the book’s general inability to synthesize its incredible intimacy and representations of memory and the titular “magical thinking” with its latent ideas about what these personal experiences mean in the larger context of a) universally human grief and b) grief as modeled and lived in the contemporary U.S. of A.

Nevertheless, her book has been helpful for me to read and reflect upon in part because her situation of losing her companion, lover, and best friend of 40+ years is so very different than my own.

I feel a need to master all of the things that made him up, that informed him, because I have only the slightest implications of what he was like. We weren’t close, as siblings go. “Night and day” is the standard description my parents would give when asked for an account of their two sons. I want to know the brands, varieties, RDA data, and physiological effects of the vitamin supplements he took. I want to know what he liked about the movies The Day After and The Notebook (the latter being one he apparently teared up at) such that he wanted to own them and watch them again. I’ve written about this before, but it seems more true and more vital and more crucial a step to take. I need to have a photograph of him in my wallet. I need to memorize photographs of him. I need to go home and sort through his things in a one-item-per-day way, putting the item on a countertop and looking at it from every angle, using the item, viewing or listening to the item. Wearing the sweat- or muscle-shirt. And I need to make these things and the use of them and the consideration of them affect me, because from where I’m sitting this morning, in gross Brooklyn, far indeed from home and anything Jon, only doing so seems to have any beneficial potential in helping me understand him.

This project on which I feel a need to embark upon is less in the name of establishing a cause for why Jon did what he did, because however much sleuthing we do I suspect that there will remain a gaping space in the facts and the scenarios we sketch. I think that most survivors of a suicide feel this way, or feel a need to believe that all the facts collected in the aftermath won’t add up to a clear, logical picture; if they did, one would then have to believe that the pieces could have been fit together prior to the Event, and the event could’ve been avoided. Which is destructive thinking in the extreme, because it leads to mondo guilt. We have had to deal with this in part, my family: one night Dad mentioned that he should’ve gotten rid of the gun(s?) Jon had, that he should’ve outlawed them in his house or inculcated in Jon more of an aversion to guns—who knows if that would’ve worked—but basically that he could have taken steps to remove the tools Jon would wind up using that Saturday morning. On hearing this, Mom and E- and I think even Melissa jumped on the statement by saying that he would have gone out and gotten another one. That Jon couldn’t be dissuaded from a course of action; indeed, that Jon would be persuaded into a course of action if you tried to dissuade him from it. When I heard this line of thinking I didn’t believe it straightaway: it sounded like we, and I really do mean we, were letting ourselves off the hook entirely and too quickly. For my part, I think back to those times when I was walking around Manhattan thinking about the people I should call—I tended back then to use my walking-around time in this way, rather than actually calling the person—and more than once I thought that I should call Jon. In fact, and I can see myself step up onto a curb while having this thought—that’s how vividly I’ve recorded and filed away this memory, as though I knew it would be important—that I should call Jon right away. That it couldn’t wait. I remember thinking that part of the thought in particular: that it couldn’t wait. I don’t remember if I called him right after that or not. I called him on Thanksgiving and got no response. I called him after that, letting him know how much I was looking forward to seeing him. I think I did. I didn’t call him more than twice, however, in the weeks after Thanksgiving. Which of course quite naturally leads into the “If only I had called him” sort of thinking which can sink a survivor of a suicide into profound and long-lasting pits of regret and self-reproach.

I’ve since thought about this issue a good deal. It seems pretty clear to me that part of the process for the survivors, part of the work the survivor needs to do, is to establish and maintain the belief that no action the survivor could’ve done would have altered the final outcome.

But still, even now, this thinking seems dangerous in the extreme. Here’s why: if you follow it to its logical conclusion, all reaching-out and intervention-type steps for the depressed would be doomed to failure. There wouldn’t be any point in calling, or visiting, or recommending time off or that the suffering person come home, or procuring some sort of service for the sufferer, because the sufferer would find another way, find other tools, would continue to suffer up to and through the end.

There is a potential solution, however, and that’s this: this type of thinking—which is to say the “Jon would have found another way” kind of thinking—might be endemic only to those situations when what’s done is done. Therefore, given the context, this type of thinking wouldn’t be used to justify a lack of helpful action toward a living person who was seeming to suffer; rather, it would be used solely to defend yourself from the implication that something you yourself could have done would have made the critical difference. It isn’t a kind of thinking that implies while the sufferer is suffering that no steps should be taken. Rather it’s an after-the-fact mechanism of coping for those left behind.

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I have to get a move-on. I’m concerned—back to the world of the insufferably inane, it would seem—that I haven’t written much in the novel. It is organized into a Master File, and I know what work remains to be done. Finding the time and the jones to write my way into that work has been difficult, however. For obvious reasons. Besides, I’ve been pouring myself into this site. Which seems like the more important activity. Maybe even the most important.

“And from then on, wherever I was going, I was running.” Forrest Gump said this. It always goes through my mind before I hit the pavement.