Suicide's legacy
by Julia M. Klein
NOVEMBER 12, 2008 TAGS:
To those left behind, suicide seems like the wrong solution: overkill. It is usually an irrational act, precipitated by severe depression. Depression doesn’t just lower mood; it distorts cognitions. It leads to inaccurate assessments, a conviction of hopelessness when there is, in fact, hope.
And, yet, to survivors, suicide can also seem, like a Freudian dreamscape, over-determined. The victim-perpetrator may have suffered a slew of provocations: marital stresses, career and money woes, self-esteem problems, genetic predispositions, family history. Who is to say which supplied the crowning blow?
Two survivor memoirs, each moving in its own way, turn on this paradox: of at once too many causes, and insufficient cause. They wrestle with similar questions: Why? Could I somehow have prevented it? And can I ever forgive him for leaving me?
In Blue Genes: A Memoir of Loss and Survival (Doubleday), Christopher Lukas relates a family history riddled with suicide and assesses the fault lines in his often distant relationship with his brother, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner J. Anthony Lukas. In The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt), novelist Joan Wickersham struggles to come to emotional and intellectual terms with the gunshot suicide of her beloved father.
One suicide was a renowned journalist; the other was a failed businessman. But it was their internal assessment that counted: Neither man felt he was good enough. Both books etch vividly the damage suicide causes to entire family systems, and how its reverberations echo across generations. “Suicide isn’t just a death, it’s an accusation,” Wickersham writes. “It sets up unresolvable dilemmas of culpability and fault.”
The order imposed by literary narrative is an obvious counter to the radical disorder of suicide. But what form is appropriate to contain and describe such a chaotic act?
Blue Genes begins with a harrowing childhood scene – when Christopher, known as Kit, clubs brother Tony with a bat. It skips ahead to the final, shattering phone call from Tony’s wife, Linda, and then moves forward in fits and starts, sometimes circling back in time to recover a connection.
Lukas details his actress-mother’s early romance with her much-older teacher and then the tensions in her marriage to his father, a story made more compelling by intimate family letters. Suffering from bipolar disorder, Elizabeth Lukas kills herself with a razor blade at age 33. The tragedy is the original sin in both brothers’ lives. Kit is 6 and Tony is 8 at the time, and it would be a decade before they learned how their mother died.
Just as astonishing, their father, who would become a noted civil-rights attorney, is mostly absent, too. He gets tuberculosis and has to spend a year recuperating, so he sends his bereft sons to a chilly Vermont boarding school. Even afterwards, he leaves them largely in the care of their maternal grandmother, Missy, a woman at once strict and needy, with a “taffy-like grasp” on her young charges. Adult terrors spring from such abandonments.
Suicide turns out to be the family business: Not just their mother, but Missy and an aunt and uncle are also lost to it. Edwin J. Lukas, the boys’ father, kills himself, too -- slowly, with alcohol.
Kit goes on to work in public television, start a family, seek therapy for his own depression, and, in 1985, co-author a book for suicide survivors, Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide. (Wickersham quotes from Silent Grief in her memoir.) Tony becomes a reporter for The New York Times, where he wins his first Pulitzer. After he leaves the Times, he writes his 1985 classic Common Ground, on three families during the Boston busing crisis, and it wins him another Pulitzer. But the acclaim never suffices. “His great successes,” Lukas writes, “were always tempered by an interior sense of failure, of fraudulence” – what we have come to know as “imposter syndrome.”
The book’s most interesting passages describe the brothers’ relationship. Kit is puppy-dog grateful for his brother’s praise, indeed for any trace of fraternal feeling. A vacation in Mexico, for just the two of them, is a “golden time,” a memory loving preserved. But mostly they live separate lives, and a rift develops when Tony declines to co-sign Kit’s mortgage and Kit reacts lukewarmly, perhaps jealously, to Common Ground.
Over the years, Tony talks about being depressed, takes psychotropic medication, has highs and lows. He finally embraces the family fate on the eve of the 1997 publication of his second book, Big Trouble¸ about a murder in Idaho. And, in the end, despite his “blue genes,” his psychological scars, and his literary frustrations, nothing will really ever explain the suicide, nor heal the pain it causes.
Nor will Wickersham ever really be able to put her father’s death in order. The form Wickersham chooses for her narrative is an index in which every entry is filed under suicide. Subheadings include “factors that may have had direct or indirect bearing on,” “intrafamilial relationships reexamined in light of,” and even “finding some humor in.”
As with the Lukases, there is ominous family history. Joan’s father was abused by his father; his grandfather killed himself, and his mother may have tried. His repeated business failures, his wife’s disappointment in him and infatuation with another man, his shattered finances, his physical ailments -- all may have contributed to his final desperate act. We can’t know: He never left a note. Still, he becomes vivid for us: a Willy Loman figure who keeps grasping hopefully, and hopelessly, at the American Dream.
“It’s a crooked, looping, labyrinthine story,” Wickersham warns us, but her control over its telling is astonishing – the overcompensation of the survivor betrayed by fate. We get nothing resembling strict chronology, but rather the gradual accretion of detail, the endless circling back to snippets of memory, sudden flashes of prose lightning that seem to promise illumination, but then just as suddenly leave us in the dark.
This is a meta-narrative; the effort to find an appropriate form is part of it. Wickersham segues at times into third-person: “She believes that someday she might be able to tell it in a way that’s definitive, that makes it stay told, like a picture that finally stops falling off the wall once the right hook or adhesive is found,” she writes. As for her obsessive circling around facts and incidents, she asks plaintively: “Does it have to do with trying to let him go, or trying to keep him?”
The question hurts. Wickersham is not just writing family history, but rewriting every episode of her father’s life, mining it for clues to his identity. “Suicide destroys memory,” she writes. “It undercuts one of our most romantic, and most comforting, notions: that we don’t really die when we die, because we live on in the memories of those who love us.”
For survivors, suicide doesn’t just shatter the present and short-circuit the future. It blows up the shared past. These memoirs try, with agonizing honesty, to reclaim that lost ground.
--
Also by Julia M. Klein
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Time Unkind
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Not Invited
"It's just a small graveside service for the family." But weren't we family, too?
And, yet, to survivors, suicide can also seem, like a Freudian dreamscape, over-determined. The victim-perpetrator may have suffered a slew of provocations: marital stresses, career and money woes, self-esteem problems, genetic predispositions, family history. Who is to say which supplied the crowning blow? Two survivor memoirs, each moving in its own way, turn on this paradox: of at once too many causes, and insufficient cause. They wrestle with similar questions: Why? Could I somehow have prevented it? And can I ever forgive him for leaving me?
In Blue Genes: A Memoir of Loss and Survival (Doubleday), Christopher Lukas relates a family history riddled with suicide and assesses the fault lines in his often distant relationship with his brother, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner J. Anthony Lukas. In The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt), novelist Joan Wickersham struggles to come to emotional and intellectual terms with the gunshot suicide of her beloved father.
One suicide was a renowned journalist; the other was a failed businessman. But it was their internal assessment that counted: Neither man felt he was good enough. Both books etch vividly the damage suicide causes to entire family systems, and how its reverberations echo across generations. “Suicide isn’t just a death, it’s an accusation,” Wickersham writes. “It sets up unresolvable dilemmas of culpability and fault.”
The order imposed by literary narrative is an obvious counter to the radical disorder of suicide. But what form is appropriate to contain and describe such a chaotic act?
Blue Genes begins with a harrowing childhood scene – when Christopher, known as Kit, clubs brother Tony with a bat. It skips ahead to the final, shattering phone call from Tony’s wife, Linda, and then moves forward in fits and starts, sometimes circling back in time to recover a connection.
Lukas details his actress-mother’s early romance with her much-older teacher and then the tensions in her marriage to his father, a story made more compelling by intimate family letters. Suffering from bipolar disorder, Elizabeth Lukas kills herself with a razor blade at age 33. The tragedy is the original sin in both brothers’ lives. Kit is 6 and Tony is 8 at the time, and it would be a decade before they learned how their mother died.
Just as astonishing, their father, who would become a noted civil-rights attorney, is mostly absent, too. He gets tuberculosis and has to spend a year recuperating, so he sends his bereft sons to a chilly Vermont boarding school. Even afterwards, he leaves them largely in the care of their maternal grandmother, Missy, a woman at once strict and needy, with a “taffy-like grasp” on her young charges. Adult terrors spring from such abandonments. Suicide turns out to be the family business: Not just their mother, but Missy and an aunt and uncle are also lost to it. Edwin J. Lukas, the boys’ father, kills himself, too -- slowly, with alcohol.
Kit goes on to work in public television, start a family, seek therapy for his own depression, and, in 1985, co-author a book for suicide survivors, Silent Grief: Living in the Wake of Suicide. (Wickersham quotes from Silent Grief in her memoir.) Tony becomes a reporter for The New York Times, where he wins his first Pulitzer. After he leaves the Times, he writes his 1985 classic Common Ground, on three families during the Boston busing crisis, and it wins him another Pulitzer. But the acclaim never suffices. “His great successes,” Lukas writes, “were always tempered by an interior sense of failure, of fraudulence” – what we have come to know as “imposter syndrome.”
The book’s most interesting passages describe the brothers’ relationship. Kit is puppy-dog grateful for his brother’s praise, indeed for any trace of fraternal feeling. A vacation in Mexico, for just the two of them, is a “golden time,” a memory loving preserved. But mostly they live separate lives, and a rift develops when Tony declines to co-sign Kit’s mortgage and Kit reacts lukewarmly, perhaps jealously, to Common Ground.
Over the years, Tony talks about being depressed, takes psychotropic medication, has highs and lows. He finally embraces the family fate on the eve of the 1997 publication of his second book, Big Trouble¸ about a murder in Idaho. And, in the end, despite his “blue genes,” his psychological scars, and his literary frustrations, nothing will really ever explain the suicide, nor heal the pain it causes.
Nor will Wickersham ever really be able to put her father’s death in order. The form Wickersham chooses for her narrative is an index in which every entry is filed under suicide. Subheadings include “factors that may have had direct or indirect bearing on,” “intrafamilial relationships reexamined in light of,” and even “finding some humor in.”
As with the Lukases, there is ominous family history. Joan’s father was abused by his father; his grandfather killed himself, and his mother may have tried. His repeated business failures, his wife’s disappointment in him and infatuation with another man, his shattered finances, his physical ailments -- all may have contributed to his final desperate act. We can’t know: He never left a note. Still, he becomes vivid for us: a Willy Loman figure who keeps grasping hopefully, and hopelessly, at the American Dream.
“It’s a crooked, looping, labyrinthine story,” Wickersham warns us, but her control over its telling is astonishing – the overcompensation of the survivor betrayed by fate. We get nothing resembling strict chronology, but rather the gradual accretion of detail, the endless circling back to snippets of memory, sudden flashes of prose lightning that seem to promise illumination, but then just as suddenly leave us in the dark. This is a meta-narrative; the effort to find an appropriate form is part of it. Wickersham segues at times into third-person: “She believes that someday she might be able to tell it in a way that’s definitive, that makes it stay told, like a picture that finally stops falling off the wall once the right hook or adhesive is found,” she writes. As for her obsessive circling around facts and incidents, she asks plaintively: “Does it have to do with trying to let him go, or trying to keep him?”
The question hurts. Wickersham is not just writing family history, but rewriting every episode of her father’s life, mining it for clues to his identity. “Suicide destroys memory,” she writes. “It undercuts one of our most romantic, and most comforting, notions: that we don’t really die when we die, because we live on in the memories of those who love us.”
For survivors, suicide doesn’t just shatter the present and short-circuit the future. It blows up the shared past. These memoirs try, with agonizing honesty, to reclaim that lost ground.
--
Also by Julia M. Klein
Time UnkindIrène Némirovsky died with other Jews in Auschwitz, but that has not saved her from searing criticism as an anti-Semite.
Not Invited"It's just a small graveside service for the family." But weren't we family, too?
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