My father killed himself in January of 2008 at the first signs of the sub-prime mortgage financial crisis, not long after Barack Obama’s surprising victory in the Iowa caucuses. The day he died, I had just arrived in Montpellier, France on a bus from from Valencia, Spain. I was embarking, on very unsure footing, on a sort of vagabond’s journey, guitar in one hand, violin in the other. I would support myself by working on farms for room and board. Once the sun was up, I went into a cyber cafe to check my email (I had no cell phone). In my inbox was a one-line email from my brother telling me to call him ASAP – extremely unusual. I called, he told me my dad had passed away, I should come to Alabama immediately. I did this, never quite able to believe in the truth of the situation. It was when I made it to Abbeville, I learned that he died by suicide. It was the gun he had always kept locked in a box with a chain around it. He had shown it to me a total of one time in my life, and I don’t even remember what it looks like now.
By far, this was the most traumatic event of my life. I found myself alternately lost in a foggy trance and clear-minded, calm, and fearless. After his funeral, under blue skies with winter sun, a silver sugar pot from a tea service was placed in my hand, I don’t remember by whom. Inside, I was told, were my father’s ashes. I looked up at the sky, probably to avoid looking at the ashes, and it was beautiful, extremely beautiful, as it always is, but not how I am always ready to see it. It struck me that, if my dad had happened to look up at the sky for a minute, only a few days previously, he may have been able to see how beautiful this life is, and that may have allowed him to jump off the train of decisions that would carry him to his death.
The elections last week brought up emotions that took me back to that moment, the alternating fog and clarity of grief. I think suicide played a part in this event as well, because putting Trump and Republicans in power at this moment in history feels suicidal, in light of the state of climate change and the violence in Gaza, Ukraine, everywhere. In no way am I implying that the Democrats would have saved the world if they had won; of course I wanted them to win and voted for them. But they seem more interested in maintaining a status quo that is preferable only in that it is less fervently suicidal.
However, though American voters have chosen the gleefully suicidal option, suicide is not necessarily what will happen next. Life may be impossible to kill. Has any genocide ever completely destroyed a people? You can tell me—-I’m asking because I am ignorant. It seems like a universal law that any violence perpretrated against any subject will be reflected upon the agent of that violence.
That’s a kind of faith I have, I suppose. But it seems more solid than most of society, which reminds me of a fake Western town: precariously balanced façades constructed in haste out of cheap lumber. I also believe (maybe you can tell me why) that there’s a future where life is better, and where people are allowed to be as complex and beautiful as they always were, even when they themselves denied it, even when their beauty and complexity were too painful to bear. In that future, the whole world is battered, scarred, crusted in dried blood, but alive. Catching its breath like an action movie hero, looking upward at how beautiful the sky is, in disbelief at their freedom. The sky…it’s as beautiful in that moment of blissful relief as it is now, in this moment of tension and distress. It’s as beautiful as it was before there was even a single word to describe it, and as beautiful as it has always continued to be, indifferent to history’s massacres and liberations, and like always, just waiting to be seen.
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