Suicide is becoming a way of life in my family. My father put a fatal hole in himself with a savagely spoken bullet. And on April 8, 1999, our son emptied every pill bottle from his medicine chest into his mouth and washed them down with copious quantities of Smirnoff vodka.
Same end, different means. Two of the most important people in my life.
It's difficult to speak in an informed fashion unless one has been in the throes of paranoid schizophrenia with a .303 rifle beckoning, or a victim of multiple sclerosis with enough morphine to stop your heart and the pain. I think of other folk experiencing excruciating desperation. And yes, I do believe in euthanasia and self-deliverance. I've recently been thinking that a decent theology could be constructed around the idea that Christ committed suicide - all that talk about obedience even unto death.
My pain screams that I didn't deserve to lose two members of my family so soon. God counters, and propels me out of self-pity; maybe you didn't deserve them in the first place. I ponder that and recognize that my ethic of ambiguity and moral dilemma is meant to maintain doubt when it comes to issues of ultimate value. I can live with that as I focus on my lost son, Jeff, who shone so wildly and preciously and all too briefly.
Some churches have tried to endow suffering with some form of spiritual credibility that can help lead to redemption and character development. I feel that's theological garbage, a spiritual surtax paid in blood and justified through distorted atonement theories. There's no glorification for one in death valley, it's pure agonization.
Oh, I know about St. Paul singing in his chains, of jails and shipwrecks; but I've always questioned his mental state. I can deal with asceticism, but not mortification. I believe in organ donation, but not jumping in front of a bus for someone else. Maybe that's my "sense of sacrifice failure point."
Part of our son's suicide note reads:
"I love you Sally, mom. Dad, Rod, bro don't (expletive) blame you for going mad. I love you and mom and will see you down the road. Grandma, Florence, I love you dearly. I'll say 'Hi' to grandpa for you, let him know you're OK. I'm sure he knows anyway.
"That's it, Jeff"
His reference to madness comes from Nikos Kazantzakis, one of his favourite philosophers, whom he studied at university: "World is trouble, man needs a little madness or else he dare not cut the rope and be free."
His last words to me were, "You look good." I winked and the universe tilted as that gesture granted him all the permission in the world to do as he needed. That's when my heart cracked and my soul was gouged out of me. Jeff had spent a long time in Gethsemane, and after having made peace with his Maker, he climbed upon his cross.
Love might be measured as loving enough to "let go" or loving enough to consent the departure, while every fibre in your body is screaming "No!" Could be love is loving enough to risk going to hell for God. Life affirmation may be most kindly expressed by accompanying one out of their agony.
His diagnosis was like some sick joke, ultimately rendering our only child to a shell of a man, emaciated and tragically lacking much strength. His breathing became laboured and it took him hours to get out of bed and dressed. Jeff described his illness as "rust corroding my body from the inside out." I'm convinced Jeff knew he would have to live and absorb life twice as fast as most others, and so picked up that cross with his name on it and sagged under the weight. He knew, as the American philosopher and writer Elbert Hubbard did, "they live longest who live most."
Jeff was 29 years old and had shouldered MS (slang for "many scars") for 10 years. It attacks the protective coating on the spinal cord, and those afflicted start short-circuiting, in terms of sight, speech, feeling, gait and memory.
His illness graduated downward from the use of a cane to a manual wheelchair to an electric one. Since Christmas 1998 he was prescribed morphine for excessive pain. His ability to concentrate declined too.
He kept a sense of humour throughout, and with each new episode would utter, as did the author and poet Dorothy Parker every time her telephone or doorbell rang, "What fresh hell is this?"
My God he was heroic and handsome. In a class of his own. I watched him tackle challenge after challenge with grace and faith; anger and tears; but always without complaint. He taught me what fortitude means. He had a beautiful smile, a mile wide (one that could disarm a serial killer), a winning personality and gleaming eyes full of mischief, mystery, magic and mysticism.
At the sight of my son's dead body, I knew I'd been robbed blind. If time is a great healer, it's a mighty slow clock. My grief on bad days caves in with a thunderous cruelty. Having to bury your child defies any notion of natural justice. It disrupts a certain spiritual symmetry.
It rips tears out of your eyes to watch your child die slowly. We shared every feeling and thought, for we lived in each other's hearts. Dylan Thomas said it best: "That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine."
My mourning finds that at the bottom of my tears, when my eyes stop weeping, is when my heart begins to bleed. This movement from an external to an internal ripping is really where forsakenness begins. That's when, spiritually speaking, you're running on empty.
So instead of our plan to have Jeff play Bob Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," Joni Mitchell's "Come in From the Cold" and Rod Stewart's "Mandolin Wind" as he scattered my ashes at my sacred places (including a few bar room floors where I did a lot of praying face down), we played Neil Young's "Sleeps With Angels," Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms" and Joe Cocker's version of "I Shall be Released" as we scattered his.
Until 19, Jeff was an energetic, healthy and adventurous man. I stare at his sports crests and team pictures. He loved dirt biking, whitewater rafting, hockey and hiking. He skydived even after he was afflicted with MS. The MS clinic in Kingston, Ont., has a picture in the foyer of Jeff skydiving. Staffpeople there tell me they use it to inspire and motivate newly diagnosed persons. I can't celebrate that yet and I choke up and politely take my leave. For a time I think Jeff thought he could beat the devil, but that devil spat in his eye and grinned. He started to wither and his world began to shrink.
He was a word arranger; his published poetry includes these lines:
Out of this hell I've been dealt with
I've been granted the freedom
to continue dealing with it &
accept it as an unfaithful lover
who reads me like a book &
spends all her time with my best
friend...
Our curses won't last, our prayers
won't last
But there is a darkness inside us
that renews the rest of our lives.
Jeff and I did have life by the wrist for a time, even our hands around its throat. CFL games in Vancouver, Edmonton and Ottawa; Blue Jays games in Toronto; the Vancouver Canucks and the Edmonton Oilers. We favoured the CFL over the NFL; call us outmoded. We became discouraged at the direction of the NHL and preferred Junior A. Neither of us liked basketball, but we adored boxing (probably lived our violence through it vicariously).
We watched every episode of Northern Exposure, our favourite television show, two or three times and sobbed together at the final episode. He loved the actors Johnny Depp and River Phoenix, and we saw every film they played in. We loved black-and-white films and slammed the introduction of colour. One of our favourite underground films was The River's Edge. We watched it over and over, unbelieving of the moral abyss it portrays.
We parsed every song Bob Dylan ever wrote and culled nuances that Dylan couldn't have considered, no matter how many chemicals were flowing through his system. We dissected every poem of Al Purdy, Charles Bukowski, Milton Acorn and Raymond Carver. We lifted William Blake imagery from the Rhodes scholar/musician Kris Kristofferson's lyrics. We attended concerts of Steve Earle, John Prine, George Thorogood and the Tragically Hip. He named his cat Little Bones after a Hip song. He saw them in concert at least a dozen times.
He smoked Players Classics, drank Labatt Blue (to his doctor's chagrin) and Cointreau when we were together. We smoked cigars and rolled ones. We'd play John Prine's "Illegal Smile" and laugh like idiots. And on those nights we'd argue and debate and yell and holler until we were faint. We'd place Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young on the CD rack, turn up the volume and make enemies with our neighbours.
His philosophy studies found him leafing through pages of Thoreau, Emerson, Neitzche, and de Beauvoir and Sartre. He was a basic existentialist Marxist. Our favourite literature was from the minds of St. Luke, Kerouac, Kafka, Hesse and Jung. One of our pleasurable experiences was to turn the television to wrestling or roller derby, place it on mute and play Mozart or Wagner on the CD. It was a little hard on the head and eyes; it drove us deeper into the paradoxes of life.
As the night wandered on we'd discuss philosophy (he could talk me in circles), theology (I generally had him there), politics, poetry, literature, film and music. On occasion we drank and smoked too much as we prayed late into the night. He would remind me that moderation was made for monks, and by 4 a.m. I always agreed readily and enthusiastically. We'd continue until sunup with Leonard Cohen's "Johnny Walker Wisdom Running High" as we chased elusive spiritualities. We were theological vagabonds mining life's little lessons to make it through the days. I wish I could do that with Jeff tonight.
Jeff's friend Jason Heroux has had the best return dream.
He wrote a poem about it called "Dark Jars":
There is a place
where doctors
remove people's shadows
from their bodies for free.
A friend of mine went there.
I never saw him again.
But he told me about it
last night in a dream.
"The shadows are kept
in jars," he said.
"The jars are so dark.
They all look the same.
And no one knows whose
is whose." *
The doctrine of the communion of saints is running around in my head tonight. I don't understand it very well but perhaps I need to know of its importance in terms of our spiritual unions. It arose in my thoughts as I'm especially hurting this evening.
I've worn Jeff's watch since he died and I will until it's my time.
Rev. Rod Carter directs the restorative justice program at Queen's Theological College in Kingston, Ont.
* "Dark Jars" is taken from Memoirs of an Alias (Mansfield Press) and is reprinted by permission of Jason Heroux.
