wallace-l: the last moments...

Wed Sep 17 14:39:18 CDT 2008

Yes, so on the mark Marie and Leigh. In my experience, too, it wasn't pain,
but the lack of it. It was feeling nothing about everything. And to go
outside where people seemed to move so easily through the world with no
apparent happiness or curiosity about Life, well that made it worse - an
affront, a taunt. I'm the same species?! Drop the bomb.

I keep thinking about his Kenyon address and when I first read it I wished
the entire world would, could just do what he says, and then everything
would be manageable.Why is it so hard to see 'the water'?

My heart's also broken for his wife. I'm going to em-bare-ass myself here
and say that when it was announced he was engaged I felt that twinge, that
irrational,silly, juvenile "damn!". (C'mon girls, I know I'm not alone in
that...) But she has a final image of him that's going to pop-up uncalled
for, for the rest of her life. When I see the letters DFW I cry for his
struggle and the books that will never be, she sees... oh god..."tabula the
rasa". I'd take some of her grief from her, as payment for the joy he's
brought me, if I could.

As for my days at the office this week, I've worn my ETA shirt and I've been
listening to his interviews and readings, occasionally interrupted by
coworkers who say "oh yeah, that writer you like. Sucks. Listen, could you
____?" wallacelist, thank you. Thank you.

Brenda

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 10:20 AM, Leigh <herself at gmail.com> wrote:

> << William Styron in "Darkness Visible" >>
>
> He wrote in that book that if he were sitting at a table, and on the
> other side of the table, there was something that he knew would help
> him feel better, he was so paralyzed by depression that he could not
> reach across the table for whatever it was. At least that's how I
> remember the description.
>
> Personally, I think one has to be very brave to face suicide. I also
> think it takes a certain level of competence. When one is that
> depressed, just assembling the materials you will need to kill
> yourself can be a challenge.
>
> << the pain is too much >>
>
> In my experience, there wasn't really pain, there was vast emptiness.
> I never cried once during the bad depression, I couldn't. When I was
> younger, I was bulimic. At one point during the depression, I forced
> myself to go buy a bunch of donuts, hoping that somehow binging would
> bring me some sort of feeling. Nope, nothing.
>
> That's why I found the recent suggestion to go "eat something
> wonderful" to be quite off the mark.
>
> Thanks for the description, Marie, I think you got it right.
>
> Leigh
>
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 7:04 PM, Marie Mundaca <mungo181 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I can't speak to anyone else's particular state of mind, but this I know,
> and for the sake of search engines this happened to someone else I'm very
> close to.
> >
> > It's not like one day you wake up and think "This is a good day to die."
> You wake up every day thinking this. Actually, you're thinking this is a
> fucking terrible day. Everything is terrible. This very dear friend of mine,
> she'd see people on the subway with 3 kids with terrible colds, on their way
> to drop the kids off at school or day care before they go to their horrible
> job where they get yelled at by men with tight polyester pants and bad
> comb-overs and she would think, "why don't these people want to jump off a
> building like I do?" Sure, she had some real problems, but she felt like
> this before she had those real problems. She'd been on and off
> anti-depressants for years, and in and out of therapy. nothing worked. she'd
> go to work every day and see her friends and pretend nothing was wrong, but
> she hated everything and nothing brought her any joy, not even chocolate and
> petting the cat (not a euphamism). she attempted suicide like maybe 3-4
> times, 2
> >  were just half-assed attempts, more a "goddamn i'm so angry and sad i
> don't know what to do" and 2 very serious attempts. but she was always too
> chicken to do anything not reversible, so after each one she walked herself
> to the hospital after a few minutes or hours. well, the last one she didn't
> walk, someone poured her into a taxi.
> >
> > oh, yeah, the question. definitely mind-blowingly out of her mind at
> those times. but also a big fat chicken. a calculated decision, but crazy.
> >
> > she often, for months at a time, would think every day about killing
> herself, but would set little goals for herself because she knew that a few
> people would feel really bad about the whole thing, and that her father
> might yell at her mother that it was all her fault.
> >
> > for the record several other women in her extended family have attempted
> suicide. they obviously all have very fucked up brain chemistry. none of
> them, also for the record, were as smart or successful as DFW, but all
> pretty much held things together for a long long time and no one ever knew
> these things about them.
> >
> >
> > Several times she thought about checking into a facility, but she was
> afraid of being treated badly by nurses and being on thorazine and having to
> play ping pong all day because her insurance sucked. several of her
> psychiatrists recommended ect, but she was afraid of memory loss. but other
> than those two things she tried everything, even crazy shit like brain-wave
> stuff and eye movements and yoga.
> >
> > she's on cymbalta now--it's the 1st drug that ever worked for her, and
> she can't believe that this is what normal people feel like! It's crazy.
> they don't think of jumping in front of trains or anything like that.
> >
> > I imagine that for quite a long time poor Dave felt like she did, but
> then it got worse. Dave was always much more successful than her at
> everything he did, unfortunately.
> >
> > Every time I pass a movie poster for "Blindness" I think "Didn't Dave
> want to stick around for that??"
> >
> > -marie
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --- On Tue, 9/16/08, RS <rs40 at roadrunner.com> wrote:
> >
> >> From: RS <rs40 at roadrunner.com>
> >> Subject: wallace-l: the last moments...
> >> To: "'wallace-l'" <wallace-l at waste.org>
> >> Date: Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 6:20 PM
> >> Look, I'm really not trying to intellectualize this, or
> >> to turn our
> >> beloved's passing into fodder for conversation.  But I
> >> really need to know.
> >> In those moments when he did it, was he sane or was he
> >> driven over the edge,
> >> basically temporarily insane in those last moments.  Is
> >> suicide by
> >> definition irrational and "crazy," and thus is
> >> the act undertaken by a
> >> person whose sanity has suddenly and profoundly left them,
> >> or can it be a
> >> calm, rational, calculated decision?  What haunts me most
> >> is the potential
> >> fear and feeling of loss he might've been feeling when
> >> it happened.  But I
> >> think, maybe if he were almost in a near deranged state,
> >> that it might be
> >> easier to handle.  Just wondering if anyone has knowledge
> >> of this.
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Wallace-l mailing list
> >> Wallace-l at waste.org
> >> https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/wallace-l
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wallace-l mailing list
> > Wallace-l at waste.org
> > https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/wallace-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Wallace-l mailing list
> Wallace-l at waste.org
> https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/wallace-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://waste.org/pipermail/wallace-l/attachments/20080917/b2adbd83/attachment.htm 