I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
–Mary Oliver
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
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All will come again into its strength: the fields undivided, the waters undammed, the trees towering and the walls built low. And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land. And no churches where God is imprisoned and lamented like a trapped and wounded animal. The houses welcoming all who knock and a sense of boundless offering in all relations, and in you and me. No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond, no belittling of death, but only longing for what belongs to us and serving earth, lest we remain unused. –Rainer Maria Rilke
When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish you must put aside and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed, her eyes moving from the clock to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before and now I can recognize her gait as she approaches the house. Some nights, when I know she’s coming, I unlock the door, lie down on my back, and count her steps from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper, tells me to write down everyone I have ever known and we separate them between the living and the dead so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album because she misses Texas but I don’t ask why. She hums a little, the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been, crying in the check-out line, refusing to eat, refusing to shower, all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy purple arms around me, leans her head against mine, and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic. So I tell her, things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time from the dead and turns to me in that way that parents do so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? She says, reading the name out loud, slowly so I am aware of each syllable wrapping around the bones like new muscle, the sound of that person’s body and how reckless it is, how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other. –Matthew Dickman
When your father dies, say the Irish, you lose your umbrella against bad weather. May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.
When your father dies, say the Welsh, you sink a foot deeper into the earth. May you inherit his light, say the Armenians. When your father dies, say the Canadians, you run out of excuses. May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians. When your father dies, say the French, you become your own father. May you stand up in his light, say the Armenians. When you father dies, say the Indians, he comes back as the thunder. May you inherit his light, say the Armenians. When your father dies, say the Russians, he takes your childhood with him. May you inherit his light, say the Armenians. When your father dies, say the English, you join the club you vowed you wouldn't. May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians. When your father dies, say the Armenians, your sun shifts forever. And you walk in his light.
"When you call a suicide helpline in Japan you may have to dial that
number 30 or 40 times, because the lines are so busy. A lot of people
have a lot of problems, but nobody to talk to, nobody to listen, and
they say “Please God, someone answer the phone.”
I dream of a
war, a war on suicide, but I don’t even know who is the enemy. Who is
it, what is it, that’s killing so many of us? One million people in the
world every year, 30,000 lives lost in Japan alone. I don’t know what
I’m doing, I just know I have to do something.
In Japan nobody dares to talk about the causes of suicide
or how to fight them, but manuals teaching you how to kill yourself
sell over a million copies. What if 10,000 lives could be saved in
Japan? Not by miracles but by ideas, by honesty. Would anybody dare to
listen? If death is darkness this is about life, this is about trying to
take back life from the jaws of death; this is about choosing hope over
despair, even when you’re desperately hanging on by your fingernails.
300,000
Japanese people have killed themselves in the last 10 years. That’s
around the population of Iceland. The Japanese suicide rate is twice
that of America, three times that of Thailand, nine times higher than
Greece, and twelve times higher than the Philippines. Is that something
acceptable, or is it time we start to fight back?
The suicide rate
is high in Japan because killing themselves is maybe always in the back
of their minds. When they face a serious problem they have to make some
certain choices, and one of the alternate choices that they make is
suicide.
One of the features of suicide in Japan
is the weakness of people to suggestion. Look at how often Japanese
people try to find others to die with, others who share the same
despair. So they will search online to find each other, and they make
plans to die together. There are lots of Japanese who do this. The
feeling behind this behavior is that it seems more reassuring and safe
to be with others, even though everybody is going to die. Why are the
Japanese so vulnerable to the power of suggestion? There are no
samurai left in Japan today, there are no kamikaze pilots either. All
that remains is a feeling that suicide can be beautiful. The suicidal
tendency among Japanese authors has been extremely high, and if you just
list them, going through the decades there are many who took their
lives. And the pattern is totally out of shape with the rest of the
world. There is nowhere else where the suicide of novelists is so
prevalent.
What makes a suicide hotspot
become a famous location for suicide? In the case of Tojimbo cliffs,
there was the local author Jun Takami. He wrote a book “From the Edge of
Death.” Death is always a bestseller and it made a tourist attraction.
For Cape Ashizuri, there’s the author Torahiko Tamiya. His novel was
also made into movie. It made the Cape a popular spot for suicide."
I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world would be the space my brother's body made. He was a little taller than me: a young man but grown, himself by then, done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I'd say, What? And he'd say, This - holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. And I'd say, What? And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.
