There are the suicides we understand. The terminally ill, the obvious addict, the flagrantly depressed, the murderer or criminal. Even the overdramatic teenager. But there are others that throw our whole perception of reality off axis. The singer Chris Cornell, comedian Robin Williams before him. Both enormously successful and widely adored. Why would Williams, who smiled so much and elicited even more smiles, guffaws, even deep belly laughs; who radiated good humor, who was universally admired around the world; why would he take his own life? What sense does that make?
And Cornell, despite coming from the Seattle grunge scene, despite a career singing about darkness and depression, injustice and general human misery–he never seemed like he’d succumb to the themes of his lyrics. Or not in the way that Kurt Cobain and others had. Cornell neither burned out nor faded away. On the contrary, he was on a comeback tour with his old band. He by all accounts was happily married, had two young kids, when, at 53 (and not 19 or that cursed age of 27), he killed himself. It was a destabilizing shock to his fans and friends. His family, particularly his wife, initially refused to believe it. He OD’d, she insisted at first; had taken too much medication, or, if not OD’d, the medication made him out of his mind, or not in his right mind. Because her husband, she claimed or exclaimed, loved her, loved her kids, their kids, his kids.
But he did kill himself. And though the medication or the mix of medications may have played a role, Cornell put the strap around his own neck. He chose to end his life.
Robin Williams struggled with addiction and depression throughout his career. Some of it publicly, but mostly in private. He was bipolar, and when he took his own life, he was in the early stages of suffering from a particularly harrowing and not well understood form of dementia. What seemed so senseless to the public at first revealed after a time its own logic.
Williams was a decade older than Cornell. His children were grown. His body had begun to fail him, and his career was in one its occasional lulls. He was losing control of both body and mind. There is an accounting that can be made for his action. For Cornell, to date, there is none. And that may change. For now his action, his choice, don’t balance.
Or it doesn’t balance for most.
What occurred to me in reading the news of the singer’s death is that there is another set of rules, another logic, that if applied, make Cornell’s suicide completely rational, a logic that sounds like nonsense, unless you yourself have been inside or passed by your own black hole.
Before the summer of 2016, I would have said that, sure, I’ve considered suicide. Nonchalantly, without shame. Hasn’t everybody? At least once? In the summer of 2016, I turned forty and my life was in shambles. I came closer than I ever would to thinking about ending it all.
It’s a cliché I suppose: to want to kill yourself at forty. And maybe all the feelings I had were themselves cliché, but it felt very real to me at the time that I had nothing in life to look forward to and that I had little but failure to look back on, and that I was a liability to everyone who knew me and most of all to myself and a strong case could be made, in my mind, that the world was better off without me.
I had no job, I couldn’t find a job, I had no money, I had no home. My lover had just left me (in part for being too broke and depressed), I had no friends nor family nearby. I was a failed husband, a failed businessman, a failed artist. I felt useless and hopeless and complete disappointment. And I didn’t see it getting better anytime soon. Or ever. This was the logic by which it felt wholly rational to want to die.
It was as far as my suicidal ideation ever got. I didn’t plan anything, I didn’t fetishize or even research any methodology. I just stood at the kitchen counter one night and felt with all of my being that I didn’t want to go on living. That my time on this earth was done.
I’d had glimmers before. Brief instances of wanting to drive the car off a cliff or into a tree. Crying once in traffic and wanting to turn the wheel right towards the grill of a semi truck. But those dark glimmers would leave as quickly as they’d come, in a brief flash. The emotional deficit was minor in relation to the full balance sheet. I had plenty of assets. Two children. Two amazing children who I loved and adored. Who loved me. And not even in that generic way that all parents and children say they loved each other. We were (are) very close. I was as active and engaged as a father could be from the very beginnings of their lives.
But in the logic of the black hole of the summer of 2016, that didn’t matter. Or, rather, it didn’t matter enough. It didn’t balance out. And it couldn’t because a black hole absorbs all light and increases the gravity of even the most minor matters a millionfold and even time doesn’t function the same in the black hole of depression.
The night I most clearly recall wanting to die, both of my children were upstairs, asleep in bed. I had tucked them in happily, kissing both of their foreheads. Ten minutes later I was standing in front of the dishwasher, sobbing. A few minutes later, the tears stopped and I felt something hollow out inside of me. The way I wrote about it in my journal at the time was that a small personal-sized pan pizza of a black hole opened up just below my diaphragm. The light drained from my eyes and the air left the room and gravity increased about a thousand fold, and I was being sucked right through the floorboards, or they through me, but painlessly, like the fundamental resistance of the floor was never there to begin with.
And for that very moment it all felt so inviting, the sinking, the black hole, the end. It felt like relief, to just be done with all the weight of living. The existential dread I felt only a moment before, the whole feeling of why even bother after days of dissatisfaction and weeks of self loathing morphed suddenly into the much more beatific “why resist,” and even a more hopeful, optimistic “why not?” Why not just end it all?
Obviously, there were plenty of reasons not to. Two of which I previously noted, and lots more. I’d had as many personal and professional successes as I’d had failures. Plenty of people loved me. Friends I thought I didn’t have but did. Family I tried on occasion to estrange myself from but never fully could. Lots of acquaintances who’d known me for years and wished me well and would have come to my aid if I’d asked. Close friends who lived farther away, but who when I told them months later how low I’d gotten were hurt that I didn’t call.
But I didn’t call. Because I was ashamed. Because of all the times before when I had called previously and just complained about how badly my life was going. And because I had grown as tired of my own life story as I assumed everyone else had. So rather than reach out, I self isolated. Rather than reach out, I burrowed deeper into an emotional hole. And the further I burrowed, the darker it got, and the more alone and trapped I felt.
It’s easy, from outside the hole, to ridicule how silly this behavior is. The solution is so simple: don’t cut yourself off, reach out, ask for help. But the logic of the hole is not the logic of the outside world. There is little light in the hole and the light outside the hole by contrast makes greater the darkness inside the hole. Light that falls into the hole disappears.
The self-awareness I had, even in the hole, the knowledge of how blessed I was in life only increased the shame and embarrassment I felt at being so depressed. Only made me want to hide more. I agreed with the people who thought it was ridiculous to get stuck in such a silly hole. It was ridiculous. I was being stupid, which only sent me further down. I was fully aware of all the privileges and lucky breaks I had in life. I’d read all the social justice texts or tweets. I too was ready for the age of straight white men to be over. I was willing to start with me.
But I didn’t. And as I said before, I never got to the stage where I started planning. I didn’t go to the garage and find some rope or dig in the bathroom cabinet drawers for pills, or under the kitchen sink for household poison. I may have been lucky that I wasn’t alone, that my kids were upstairs. Unlike Cornell far away from his family, on another endless tour, alone in a hotel room. I know that as depressed and screwed up as I was that summer, I wouldn’t have been able to burden my children with finding me, or my body. In part because the suicidal feelings I was having weren’t the attention seeking kind, nor the revenge kind. I wanted only to lay my burden down. I wanted to physically disappear. I wanted to relieve my kids of the weight of being dragged down by having a depressive loser for a father. Because that was who I saw myself at at that time, and I couldn’t see it changing.
I reappeared from the black hole standing in the same spot beside the open dishwasher, dumbly, mouth open, pondering the consequences of where my psyche had just travelled. Did I really want to die? Could I do that to my family? I couldn’t answer the questions that night, I could only finish loading the dishwasher and head up the stairs to the room across from my children and go to bed. I think I cried again, and probably even masturbated to help put myself to sleep. In the morning I finished the dishes.
-Brian Louis Allen Henderson
Things Men Carry 