The Grief of Mourning Sentences
Personal Essay by Peter Babiak
“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.
—SørenKierkegaard
These fragments are about a young man who, for reasons as unclear to me as they’re understandable, recently decided to end his life.
I met him when he was a boy and took to calling him Jpeg because he loved video games. It was through wordplay and language games that we first came to know each other. Almost imperceptibly he grew into something of an intellectual and by his late teens he became a lover of books, a genuine reader — curious, attentive, enviably patient, and committed to knowing all he could about things. In recent years, he was troubled by thoughts that seemed to shadow his mind, cleaving his sense of reality in dangerous places. And he inclined himself more and more to solitude and silence.
I gave him books the last few Christmases and birthdays. I guess this was my way of communicating with him, trying to figure him out. “Tell me how you read,” Heidegger once said, “and I’ll tell you who you are.” These fragments are also about the books or some of their sentences. I want to believe he read the same words, considered the world through them, and was as moved by them as I was, though I know that’s unlikely. I also know I didn’t speak to his silence enough and I should have. I can’t speak to him anymore or give him any more books, so I need to believe he and I read and thought about the same words and were momentarily together in the same thought.
Painting by Laura Zerebeski
“I don’t want to die without any scars.”
— Chuck Palaniuk, Fight Club
Three or four years ago, I wrote an instruction in a card I put on one of his Christmas gifts. Turn to turn to Chapter 5, it said, read the first sentence of the second last paragraph. Remember it. He read it aloud on Christmas Eve. He knew I loved Fight Club and taught the novel. It’s classic, not least of all for punchy sentences like this. The narrator, an intelligent but unstable man who finds meaning in sublime acts of shared pain, thinks it in his internal monologue, probably to rationalize the violence the novel aims at our dissembling culture of consumerism. The message is simple, though it’s tinged with a gendered romanticism that feels out of place in the age of kale and fluidity. Don’t just think or consume your way through life. Act, critique things, break them if they need to be broken, embrace anger now and then, punch a face if it needs to be punched, and if in the process you’re cut or bruised, the scars are signs that you’ve lived your life fully.
I went to his ICU bed three times the night Jpeg cut himself and each time tried hard not to think about that gifted sentence. The first time with everybody else after three doctors came to the waiting room to explain that he’d lost so much blood at home that, though there was still hope there wasn’t much. His alcove was busy with machines, a convolution of wires and hoses, the attending nurse, and six of us, or maybe it was five — I can’t recall if one could manage. Not being a blood relative, I walked in last, and the only space left to stand was on the far side of the bed, by his right hand. I was relieved it wasn’t his left, which was inflamed, the four swollen fingers pushing out from under the gauze wrapped around his wrist, the edges stained by the congealed drama he’d inflicted there a few hours earlier.
The nurse explained things and his parents spoke to him, his uncle, too. I didn’t. I think I recited a Hail Mary to myself, maybe because the first coherent thought I had was regret. Not about rousing him out of bed all those times when he lived with us, complaining about his half-hour showers, or telling him to pick up his laundry from the floor or bringing his dirty dishes upstairs. Looking at the blood stains on his left hand and then at the red that had seeped through the gauze around his neck, I couldn’t help but think how that beautiful sentence now feels unseemly and cruel while I’m holding the warm hand that delivered those all too real scars.
The guilt crept into my mind hours earlier that Thursday. His mother came upstairs to say she’s worried about him, to which I responded with some cliche about people feeling depressed around Christmas. Twenty minutes later, we’re downstairs eating left-overs from when he came for dinner and to help make Christmas cookies two days before, and she’s worried again. He texts her and she worries more. I brush it off, though I know that death usually happens in the middle of the most mundane events. Like Joan Didion said on the death of her husband in Year of Magical Thinking, “Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” A few minutes after dinner, his mother comes upstairs again. “Can you drive me? It’s J. He tried again and he’s probably not going to make it this time.”
At the first corner I said one of many stupid things. “It’s going to be alright. He’s not gonna die. I know.” I drop her off behind the cruiser outside her ex-husband’s, say “text me when things settle,” then drive home asking myself if not wanting to get in the way is the real reason I’m driving back or a denial that the tragedy his mother feared intuitively that evening — had feared for half a year since his first try — was now unfolding behind me. And that infernal sentence, as much as I’ll always want him to have been drawn to its blunt form and hold onto its metaphorical truths, pushed its way in, auguring a guilt over those literal scars with which this poor boy was about to die. You don’t need to die with these scars, I think to myself maybe hoping he can feel the message in his hand, that’s not what it means, not exactly, though the sentence doesn’t come with a caveat.
“Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul.”
— AldousHuxley,The Doors of Perception
I gave Jpeg two books for his birthday a couple of years ago. One was Huxley’s Doors of Perception. I read it when I was his age because some prof mentioned it alongside The Doors when explaining the poetry of William Blake. I thought Huxley’s take on drugs might be a literary bridge to Jpeg’s recent interest in psychedelics, nootropics and the science of chemically fiddling with the mind. Earlier that year he brought over three sickly cactus plants hoping I’d nurture them to better health. He wanted to ingest their psychoactive element, apparently, to set things right in his head. I never noticed much in his language or action that needed chemical fixing and assumed he just wanted to get high.
Minutes after I got back home that Thursday his mother texts, “Going to hospital in cop car.” I checked my phone on the way to VGH. “They got his heart going,” she wrote. “But not looking good.” ICU waiting room 2302, its well-lit innocuous silence was like the proverbial skull in the corner of the room reminding us we’re all going to die, except that on this day it’ll be the youngest of us. Hugs and handshakes, one goes for coffee, the stilted conversation far from overwrought with emotion, and speculations. Besides waiting, the role of family is to characterize, analyze, and weave a narrative from remembered anecdotes, though those fragments never really work themselves into a tapestry of truth. Our stories are not always accurate, like Alisdair MacIntyre says, but they “aspire to truth.” We all live in the hope that life will attain “the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative beginning to middle to end.”
Mental health struggles were peaking. There was an increased tendency to self-criticism. Young people face unimaginable degrees of loneliness these days, it’s true. Someone mentions recent modulations in behaviour, the audio hallucinations. Probably undiagnosed schizophrenia. He had the good sense to leave a note. Someone was reading it over, then another, their facial expressions reacting to its odd turns of phrase, characters and scenes more fantastical than real, and everybody shuddering to themselves at the heart-breaking isolation that motivated it. There’s talk of drugs. I found a hit of acid on the shelf above the TV, I say. Somebody mentions the death kit. Then through the generalized numbness of the room one of his parents says the unsayable but necessary. We have to remember it was his choice. Which it was, yes. Nothing anybody could have said or done would have changed this course of events. Saying it relieves the stress — or maybe it was the sense of culpability or immanent sense grief, which might be guilt in disguise — in six pairs of bewildered eyes. For now.
I didn’t mention Huxley. Nobody really believes the books we read lead us to actions, do they? Though of course they can, especially sensitive readers. But that line about needing to be “shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception” did cross my mind. This is among “the principle appetites of the soul,” he said, a choice in other words. And so too “the urge to escape” a “painful” life. In the Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida says dying is an experience “nobody can undergo or confront in my place.” What he means is that our sense of self is only ever marked “by death,” which is always ours and ours alone to experience, though I’m not sure if this applies to death by one’s own hand or death instigated by psychological crisis. We have to remember it was his choice. Yes, we do because it was, and I found myself thinking about déja vu, about life imitating art, wondering if Jpeg ever got to this part in Huxley, if he stopped and seized the content of the sentence. How did you read this “urge to escape?”
Some weeks later, I read about the steel net extending twenty feet from the railing erected along the Golden Gate Bridge. A suicide prevention measure, it makes jumping impossible. Research shows that suicide is an impulsive act, “with a period of acute risk that passes in hours, or even minutes.” It’s similar to that line from Robin Williams — “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem” — though he eventually decided on a permanent solution, too. Years ago, Nelly Arcan, writing about similar barriers built on a bridge in Montreal, lamented that these architectural measures replace the role of other people in our lives. “We mustn’t forget that the most solid barriers against despair are the people who are dear to us,” she says, “and that’s still you and me.” She’s right, isn’t she? But the question of intervention — what could have been done? — usually arrives too late, and often segues to the dead weight of guilt. Since it happened, I’ve thought and even said out loud, it was his choice, quite a few times. It’s impossible not to think or say if you’re among those — the “you and me” — left behind, isn’t it?
He was a better reader of Huxley than I was. He’d speak of Psilocybin, MDMA, Ketamine, and LSD at Sunday dinners. He was serious. I dismissed it as stuff he’d picked up from his science and psychology classes to cover for the fact that he just wanted to take some good drugs. I found my copy of Doors of Perception recently and read it over, maybe in the way I thought he’d have read it. I came across a simile that I’d never paid much attention to before. The schizophrenic, Huxley writes, “is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality . . . which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of human or even cosmic malevolence, calling for the most desperate countermeasures.” This is also a terrible and beautiful line, I want to tell him. You found your relief because you didn’t see the world with “merely human eyes.”
“What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, Signs and Symbols
I hoped The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the other book I gave him for his birthday that year, would appeal to his interest in chess. Nabokov thought novels were like chess because both involve plots, characters, strategies, hours of solitary labour. Earlier that year a chessboard appeared on top of the drawer near the front door. He’d make his move before school and I’d make mine when I got back from work. It was fun but lasted only a few months. His skill and patience surpassed mine and I think he was bored.
Chess spoke to the left side of his brain, to his relentless Archimedean need to find logic in the order of all things. He liked it when I once called him a “biological reductionist” for saying the brain’s neurotransmitters outweigh any influence language has on our thinking and behaviour. This was around the same time he started reading books more. The Nabokov novel was my way of nudging him to think even more about words.
The aesthetic of the ICU, for all the conciliatory tones of the nurses and cleanliness of the place, always teeters on the edge of tragedy, especially at night. Around 11:00 or 12:00 his mother and I went to find a chapel. The room was nondenominationally sterile except for two windows fashioned like stained glass. I think she was hoping for something more iconic on which to hang the weight of anxiety, the sadness. We went in to see him a second time. His life was still signified only by the beeps of the monitor and the muffled poetry of the ventilator, but she speaks to her boy and I don’t think I’ve heard immaculate tenderness like this before. I hold his right hand again and think about a conversation he and I once had.
I took him for burgers around the corner at the Slocan one evening. I don’t recall if he read Sebastian Knight yet, but for some reason I was explaining why I stopped teaching Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols.” It’s an enigmatic story about a couple who go to see their son for his birthday at a sanitarium but they’re turned away by a nurse who tells them that he tried to commit suicide again the night before. The son suffers from “referential mania,” a condition that makes him think “that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence.” I said I don’t teach it any longer because, what with the recent discursive explosion in mental health issues, I didn’t want to be responsible for triggering students. It’s too bad, I tell him, because they might never experience Nabokov’s virtuoso way with words. Like when he frames the suicide attempt as the son’s desire “to tear a hole in his world and escape,” which I said was a “beautiful” metaphor.
You should read it. It’s not about chess, but you’ll get it because you play chess, I say, or something along those lines. There are riddles in it, oddities in events and symbolic cues that baffle people. Reading it is like playing chess against a strong opponent. He said that dealing with language in an English class seemed to involve some “magical thinking.” I never asked if he picked up that phrase from Didion, but this is how he described unscientific thinking. Like Mom’s horoscopes, he’d say, or when I said a metaphor is “beautiful.” Standing next to his ICU bed, I was embarrassed for having said what I did about the metaphor for that young man’s attempted suicide. I hoped he understood that stories, like video games and films, are fictional, closer in dramatic scope to chess and never manuals for how to live your life, or how not to. You must have, I want to ask him, right? The embarrassment swells when I remember the fridge magnets. I had hundreds made up years ago featuring just that one sentence, along with Colville’s painting “Pacific.” I used to hand them out to students when I still taught the story. There’s a few on the fridge and the one on the mailbox has nearly melted onto the black metal. I didn’t think of the mail carrier or any of my former students, just of how many times Jpeg walked by the sentence on the mailbox and wondered if he read it for something other than its beauty.
The contours of his mind in recent months seemed slightly unlatched, maybe somewhat like the young man in the story. There were those delusions, yes, but they were sporadic and never a main thread in any conversational narrative. Maybe because nobody wanted to believe it, or maybe he hid it so well. Yes, he came to think of some people close to him as imposters, actors living parallel lives, some who even intended to cause him harm, which is an agonizing thought and always will be. That time last Spring when I found a thumb-sized child’s toy — a plastic duck or goat — on the ground when I got out of the car at White Spot. I picked it up, announced to my daughter, Jpeg, and his mother that a kid must have dropped it, and stood it upright on the next curb stone. A week later his mother mentions that he interpreted my act as a secret sign I was transmitting to the Mafia. I asked if he was serious — I didn’t know how else to respond — and she said that he knew he was misinterpreting it, part of him did.
Months later I told my daughter, who suffers from paralyzing anxiety and had spoken to her stepbrother about mental health matters at our Sunday dinners, that the convention of teaching English literature might need to be reconsidered given the mental health crisis. I relayed the Mafia comment and she reminded me that those suffering autism spectrum disorder have difficulty with symbolic social cues and metaphorical language. I know she’s right but I don’t fully understand how this difficulty relates to people who, like Jpeg or Nabokov’s character, read symbolic significance into things that are neither symbols nor signs. Is it that when they aim for metaphorical readings they exaggerate because they have no solid basis for understanding how the arbitrariness of signs are processed?
I don’t recall where the conversation went from there, but the exchange edged its way into my mind while I held Jpeg’s hand that second time. The memory was accompanied by a mortifying shame for having called a metaphor for an attempted suicide “beautiful,” but more so by the profound humiliation of having misread Jpeg and the harrowing nightmare he was going through all alone, until it was too late. I’ve read Kierkegaard, I’ve read that the “greatest hazard of . . . losing one’s self” occurs “very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.” I even left a copy on the table hoping Jpeg might pick it up and read it. They’re striking words, sure, but a literary appraisal provided no clear sense that someone was experiencing this loss in front of me, and no concept of how to deal with it, either. Since that long Thursday night in the ICU, I’ve told anybody who’s bothered to ask that I always prided myself on understanding young minds, but that’s obviously not the case.
“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
The last Christmas he was alive was 2022. That year I gave him a Murakami novel. He’d come to live with us earlier that December and the first night he made a point of saying he’d been reading Kafka, Lovecraft, and Murakami. He knew I get chuffed at book talk and I appreciated the gesture. I went down to the guest room and pointed out some books I thought he’d like, told him to browse the titles behind the glass up in the living room shelves, too. Blake, Kierkegaard, Camus, Woolf, Houellebecq, the kind of reading that puts you in touch with ideas the world at large isn’t too interested in. I don’t know if he ever did, but I hope so.
He had a brain outfitted for reading in a way that I never did at that age, a philosophical bearing and an imagination inclined to plot and character building that I envied, even if it was fatal. The narrative of his life, especially near its end, was punctuated by a decision that always preoccupies writers and thinkers — whether to live a full life in a beleaguered world or stop the plot. He opted for what people sometimes say is the easier solution but what is, in fact, much harder. Whenever the agonizing image of what he did to his left wrist and carotid artery takes hold, I remind myself that the story can be told another way. Didn’t he think through Hamlet’s unthinkable question — “To be, or not to be” — and didn’t he quite literally enact “the one really serious philosophical problem” Camus announces at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus?
Maybe we should think of suicide as a necessity? There’s a line from a Miriam Toews novel that, like the Nabokov story, is inflected with painful thoughts on mental health and suicide: “There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct.” It’s not something you’d say in front of all people, but she’s right, isn’t she? We institutionalize the measurement of a life in the number of years lived, but what about considering the depth and breadth of what the mind experiences, the scope of the dramas and fictions it erects for itself, both real and imagined, even by what it reads. Who’s to say, maybe twenty-two years was just about enough for him?
For most of the novel, the narrator of Norwegian Wood, Toru, is a college-aged young man who’s surrounded by grief and death. He loses his best friend and his lover to suicide, and eventually leaves everything behind to figure shit out. He entertains the idea of ending his own life but doesn’t. One of the take-away themes is that death and life are not incompatible categories but complementary. Toru calls Midori and declares his love for her, which is a nice, happy ending, but then she asks him where he’s calling from and he doesn’t respond, just grips the receiver thinking he’s in “the dead centre of this place that was no place.” I wonder if Jpeg, if he ever read this story, latched onto the romantic terrain of Toru’s past life instead of thinking of it in real time, when the narrator is in his late thirties and is only remembering this past because he hears a cover of that Beatles song when his plane lands in Hamburg?
How would he remember this last year if, like Toru, he decided against consigning all his aspirations and desires to the past tense? There’s something inauspicious hearing a doctor invoke the metaphysical expression “quality of life.” Though we knew, there was a change in the tenor of ICU waiting room 2302 when just before 2:00 a.m. the one doctor came back and said hope had now dissipated. It was as if the warmth generated by all that talking, listening, thinking, waiting surrendered to the functional resonance of the fluorescent lighting and periodic sound of dedicated air-cushioned footsteps in the hallway. He’d done too much damage to himself, too much blood was lost, too much time had passed. I remember an overhead speaker announcing a recorded “Code Blue” alert. Though his father, who ran to the bathroom when he heard the thud, knocked in the door, then tied off the bleeding on his boy’s cuts, and though they managed to quell the trauma by infusing him with more blood, it was now a “quality of life” matter because only the machinery will keep him alive. Again the “Code Blue.”
There were two overwhelming moments for me that night. The first happened to be when Jpeg’s father, who until then maintained an admirable stoicism, said at one point during our first visit to his son’s bedside, “Oh, dude.” It was a simple interjection, but his voice was transparently vulnerable, and it crumbled gently into the painful truth of things at its last syllable as he withdrew himself, as if bowing or experiencing a centrifugal pain, from the foot of the bed and stepped into a darkened space of the alcove.
If the grief of a father for his son has a sound and an accompanying look, that might be it for me, though I’d never want to know it firsthand. The feeling is close to what Kierkegaard writes about “despair’ in Sick Unto Death. When facing death, we hope for life. But when our despair becomes so great that the only hope for us is death — which is what Jpeg experienced — there’s a torment in “the hopelessness of not even being able to die.” Despair at the immanent loss of a child must be like the impossibility of finding comfort in a death of one’s own.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The doctor lingered through quite a few repetitions of the Code Blue that chimed at regular intervals. It’s got to be hard asking six people sitting in a waiting room who wants to be there when they remove the patient from life support. His mother said yes, or maybe she didn’t and it was just a foregone conclusion that she was going to be there. His father had already seen his boy die, in a manner of speaking, when he found him in the tub and tried to save him. It was more than any parent should see, an unimaginable scene I was only able to partially fill in two days later when we drove over to help remove items so the remediation company could strip the flooring and tend to the damage from the water and blood which leaked through to the lower level. It could be that I was expecting some amazing thoughtfulness to come over me in the presence of death, but I wanted to be there, too. It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when his mother and I went in the last time.
Though preoccupied with the business of sustaining life, the ICU is a remarkably hushed setting with its low-key lighting and whispered tones, as if it’s always already in the presence of death, like a funeral home. I went to the right side and held his hand again but the monitor collecting info from the ECG leads and most of the tubes and lines in him exited to that side and, thinking I’d get in the way, I moved across to his bandaged left hand. The doctor came and explained the procedure then left, and then the nurse came and explained that it sometimes takes hours, mentioned possible convulsions and the sounds. Don’t be alarmed if it looks like he’s alive. Sometimes there’s even a surge that just looks like conscious thought. And so the removal started, gradually, and by degrees.
God bless the nurse for increasing the dose of morphine on his returns to the bed. The heart’s final countdown and the organs slowing down. His breathing was punctuated by strains and some choking, there were some eye movements, gurgles, and gasps. It all passed without alarm or drama. His mother spoke to him continuously, without pause, as if she were speaking to him directly. Or rather it sounded to me as though I was overhearing her speak to him poignantly but calmly about some matter of living that was at once significant yet casual. She didn’t cry, not then. She spoke, continuously, and there was neither self-consciousness nor fear nor apprehension in her voice. It was consummate maternal comfort, and listening to her undiluted voice, or overhearing her speak to her son as he was removed from his life was the other overwhelming moment that night.
I didn’t speak at all, or if I did I said nothing of consequence. I held his hand, though, looked at him, listened to his mother, and at one point I tried to feel what I expected to be a coldness or clamminess in Jpeg’s left hand as they gently unplugged wires and removed the tubes, but it was still warm when he passed around 4:00. When he died, the machines still beeped and whirred and voices of nurses moved around. It was a regular night or morning, just a little later or just a littler earlier than usual. It’s this comforting regularity of things that “makes the parting tranquil / And keeps the soul serene,” as Emily Dickinson once said. Funny, but during his last hour I kept imagining what Jpeg would say if he were here narrating his own death. I had to smile because he’d be more matter-of-fact and empirical than metaphysical. The death rattle is noise produced by the secretions in the oropharynx, hypopharynx, and trachea during inspiration and expiration, and the secretions are produced by the salivary glands, or Intubated patients can’t expectorate. Death is simple, after all.
One year I gave Jpeg a Wittgenstein hoodie for Christmas, along with a copy of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a terrific book made up of declarative statements on the relationship between language to reality. It’s organized around seven basic propositions, and the last one is that line that says we should stay silent about things of which we can’t speak. The line has drifted into my thinking a few times since Jpeg passed, mostly because I wasn’t able to speak at the bedside or grieve like the others afterwards. I don’t know why, though I apologized to his mother for not being more visibly or audibly emotional because I do miss him. She just said grief isn’t a performance, and I guess it isn’t.
There’s no moral or thesis here. I guess grief takes different forms and for whatever reason I had to write it this way because this, too, is one of those forms. There are two books I expected to give to Jpeg on Christmas Eve three days after that Thursday night in the ICU. They were already wrapped — they still are — in the closet. One is a study of neuro-linguistics. I think he would have liked it. The other is Huxley’s novel Brave New World, which I’m sure he’d like, too, though not as much as the first. Like the other books I gave him — and like all books — they were intended to prepare him for life, which he decided not to live, so perhaps they can prepare me, in some way, for the remainder of mine. »