“All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. // Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? / I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.”
– Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
“You have to lose – you have to learn how to die if you wanna be alive.”
– Wilco, “War On War”
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing. … None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.”
– David Foster Wallace, to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College
Hurry! While supplies last – die before it’s time to, well, actually die.
In all seriousness, I’ve been thinking about suicide recently – thinking about who would react, how they would react, and generally circling around the dirty-ass, molded-hair-infested drain of “I’m tired of being in so much pain, of being so lonely; I don’t want to be alive any more.” These are the kinds of racing, repeated thoughts I get stuck in on occasion, and it’s no secret that thinking of others’ reactions is my way of trying to gauge my importance in the world and potential love received from it. And it’s no surprise that, in struggling to deal with the seeming inanity of mundane daily life, I want to gauge that in an especially dramatic fashion. After all, shame – which I love attaching myself to – for me typically involves some sort of imagined dramatic public (and internal) reaction.
“Die while you’re still alive,” Chance says. “Die before you’re dead, and spend the rest of your life alive.” I sincerely doubt that he’s advising me to partake in any self-harm – in fact, I’m sure he’s not. But what exactly does he mean?
I think there are at least two aspects to this dying: One involves suffering, and the other involves a certain liberation achieved in accepting how meaningless our actions can be.
First, the suffering: Look, life is fucking hard for just about everyone, but we can agree that there are degrees of difficulty here. My life has certainly been harder than others’ lives, and I’m sure that my suffering, if we are to measure our suffering-sized dicks, pales in comparison to the pain others have felt.
The point here is that, “like salt on melon,” as poet Linda Pastan says, suffering offers us perspective via contrast. It offers the bad so that we may see the good, the horrifying winter to a splendor-filled spring. In short, we must calibrate our sense of joy, peace, and love with doses of grief, maelstrom, and contempt.
Secondly, nothing really matters that much. I mean, who cares if your dancing looks sort of like a starfish rocking out to a bad bass line? Will that person really remember rejecting you (in a polite way, of course) 20 years from now? Are you going to starve, be hopelessly alone, lose all of your worldly possessions, or – even – die just because of a few things you said at a corporate meeting? For most of us privileged Americans lucky enough to find some semblance of socioeconomic stability, very few decision seem to actually end in catastrophic circumstances. So why not say fuck it and do what you want? Why not treat yourself and others with love and live a little before you die?
Saturday, when my suicidal ideation had reached its most recent peak, I felt a bit desperate. I felt desperate to escape my suffering, to let go, to give in to the idea that no one else’s suffering and potential suffering due to my death mattered. It was a time of desperation.
And then I felt free, when I realized that my pain is infinitesimal; it’s microscopic, meaningless, compared not only to the death of our planet but even to my own previous pain. (Childhood was a bitch.) And I realized that, beyond my narcissistic desire to demap myself as an author calls it, that every day truly is a time for desperation. Today is about life and death. It’s about life before death. It’s about living with the freedom that only a taste of death can grant.
Obligatory: Don’t kill yourself. Someone is available, 24/7, to talk: 1 (800) 273-8255.