That which is most tyrannical in your life has become the ugly underside of your death. Breath for breath there will be more suffocation brought on by this early passing than all the sighs and swoons, the suns, the moons, the gravity and the thick and heavy air of this planet. The struggle to exhale--your struggle, your "bad mood"--will fill the lungs of the dozen or so dearest or doubted connections that were supposed to hold you here. Captive. To the life that had gone on before. To Memory. Regret.
And there must be the chorus of the usual cliches: no longer suffering, a better place, you could never have predicted this, or cared to... And then there is that vicious accusation so very disrespectful to the dead:
this is so selfish...
so selfish...
You are so selfish that you felt the need to decimate the self. That sounds a far cry from my ideas of selfish. In fact, those people, those rowdy egos that pursue death's couriers with their hunted judgement, their wounded desires and aflame with indignation are the real Narcissists when they imagine that this or any corpse owes them an explanation.
Chosen, decided, the moment when you would breach the threshold and break...
free
falling into the black uncertainty scrubbed of your neurosis, exempted from history, escaping the words. Even your name will race to its erasure, a bitter lozenge quickly melting on a few sentimental tongues.
What did you know and when?
She asked me, a marvelous fetish for death revealing itself in this eager interview, "How did he do it?" And that is the question that supersedes any prurient demands to know, "Why?" She already knows that; it would be dishonest to pretend that suicide is some kind of shock. That despair is as familiar as breathing.
They will break off pieces of you
to remember.
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