Say Not the Day is Done

For Suicide Prevention Month

I don’t really “do” Awareness Months, I have to be honest. I have a curmudgeon’s aversion to them, especially for non-serious things, but even for serious things like child disability, breast cancer, or suicide. September is apparently the month to be “aware” of the latter. It’s still not my tea, but I figured while we’re all being aware, I could say a few things about suicide.

I’ve been touched by suicide. Not scarred like those whose family and closest friends have taken their own lives, but touched in that I lost someone I knew and admired. (That someone was Mike Adams. You can read my first eulogy at The American Conservative or my one-year anniversary tribute here at the Substack.)

Even before that, though, suicide had always held a strange, dark fascination for me. Not that I’d ever had thoughts of it myself, thank God. But I wanted to understand people who did.

As I recall, the first time I felt a light brush with it was when I was a kid, I think somewhere around 12 or 13, and my father came into my room to tell me soberly that a friendly acquaintance at our local chess club had hung himself. He’d been a regular for years, had stuck with the club through venue changes, a well-liked face. He was Vietnamese by birth, and I remember he had a dramatic story of having been a baby when Saigon fell, desperately tossed to safety. He had an aggressive chess-playing style, quick and dirty, tactically sharp. He was fond of the kids in another family at the club. Later, I would learn that he’d paid a visit to bring them his last crop of homegrown tomatoes before he ended it all. I never had any idea that suicide was on his mind, nor did I ever know why.

I wrote about suicide a few times, as a young writer. It wasn’t bad writing. I just wasn’t a writer yet. (Writers will understand this.) I was very earnest, well-meaning, a little stilted. Maybe a touch priggish, trying as I tended to do in those really young years to say all the things, all at once. I was sincere. I was just really young.

I’ve learned a few more things and met a few more people since then. One time, I found myself suddenly up close to it in a Discord server, with a man who was probably bipolar and used the virtual community for ersatz therapy. By day, he was bright, gregarious, interested and engaged in whatever you were discussing. You would never guess he was suicidal. By night, it was a different story. I remember entering the text chat once to discover friends in the act of talking him off the ledge. He had tried to rig up his bedsheet. Eventually, he untied it, calling himself a coward. I didn’t play an especially pivotal role in this group effort. I was just one more voice in the chat saying “Don’t do it, man. Please, please don’t.”

One friend, a fine, thoughtful film critic who gave me valuable encouragement when I was making the transition from potential to actual writer, was very public about his own battle with chronic depression. For him this manifested in vicious self-hatred and regular suicidal ideation. He shared once that at one point he all but downed a bottle of pills before calling a hotline. He was particularly brave in sharing all this as a Christian, speaking to other Christians. Hearing him explain it calmly on his podcast was very unnerving, but oddly uplifting as he offered practical coping suggestions for fellow sufferers. I remember thinking “How? He hates himself? But why?” I suppose he got that a lot, like a lot of people.

It dawned on me once in thinking about Frodo in The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien must either have been depressed or known someone well who was. Passages like these reminded me of how people with depression talk, explaining that the worst part is simply the not feeling:

‘Do you remember that bit of rabbit, Mr. Frodo?’ he said. ‘And our place under the warm bank in Captain Faramir’s country, the day I saw an oliphaunt?’

‘No, I am afraid not, Sam,’ said Frodo. ‘At least, I know that such things happened, but I cannot see them. No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.’

Sam went to him and kissed his hand. ‘Then the sooner we’re rid of it, the sooner to rest,’ he said haltingly, finding no better words to say. ‘Talking won’t mend nothing,’ he muttered to himself, as he gathered up all the things that they had chosen to cast away.

The film version adapts this passage to good and much-loved effect, although it heightens the drama by placing it at a more pivotal moment where Sam has to hoist Frodo on his back and carry him. I admit, perhaps heretically, that I think it also adds some poignancy by placing Sam’s emphasis specifically on the Shire, on home: “Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

In this version, I’m darkly reminded of the far more hopeless moment at the climax of The Deer Hunter, when Michael Cimino has harrowed hell to find troubled Nicky in Saigon. He finds himself in a den of vice, looking across a roulette table into the eyes of the stranger who used to be a friend. “Nicky, do you remember the trees?” he asks, grabbing Nicky’s wrist as he goes for the gun. “The mountains? Remember that?” Nicky always liked the trees back home, all different, changing and fading and blooming with the Pennsylvania seasons. “Come home,” begs Michael. “Just come home.” Slowly, remembrance dawns, like a crescent of sun over the horizon, so near you could reach out and touch it. Nicky smiles one last time. Then he overpowers Michael and pulls the trigger.

I find veteran suicide particularly haunting, perhaps because it seems even more cruel, even more unfair. Men who might have begun as happy, healthy, whole individuals, offering that happy wholeness in a willing exchange and coming back in shattered pieces. I can’t recommend highly enough this moving piece by Grayson Quay about his friendship with a veteran named Andrew who lost an arm, then trained himself to the point where he could return to active duty. But a TBI played tricks on his personality, until he could no longer continue serving. Quay and his wife found themselves neighbors of Andy and his wife, first becoming aware of Andy as “the guy who says ‘f—’ a lot.” He could be loudly heard in the courtyard yelling “F— this” and “F— that,” “to anyone or no one, in a Don Corleone rasp.” Then the pandemic happened, and Quay figured he might as well get to know his neighbor. What followed is a moving testimony to the power of community in impossible circumstances.

Heartbreakingly, it would all end with Andy taking his own life. Here Quay writes about the last time he ever saw him, after a night of drinking and bonding with friends:

Andy stood up to go inside but couldn’t keep his balance. I caught him before he fell, draped his arm over my shoulder, and led him toward his building. Thankfully, he lived on the first floor. My shoulders strained under his near-dead weight, my heart under his pain. Later, I tried to imagine what such despair must feel like, and the best image I could come up with was sliding down into a pit. The incline is steep, and the soil is loose. You fall faster and faster, grasping at roots that protrude from the pit’s walls. One root is your wife and another is your friends and another is a movie you still haven’t seen and another is your pride and another is God, but none of them hold, and finally you run out of roots. And you stop grasping. And you just fall.

We reached his door, and he told me he could make it to bed just fine. Not knowing what else to do, I made the sign of the cross over his chest and said, “Bless you, Andy.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m not very religious, but thanks. Bless you too.” Then he went inside. As far as I know, mine were the last words anyone ever spoke to him.

This was August 19, 2020—less than a month, I realize, after my friend Mike put a bullet in his head. Mike wasn’t a veteran, but he was a warrior in his own way, constantly spending himself and doing battle for causes he believed in. I will always remember the way a mutual friend’s voice broke at a memorial when he said “Sometimes, soldiers come home hurt.”

Mike, like Andy, had many friends such as this one around him, ready to pick up the phone, ready to pick him up if he fell. I feel winter’s chill in my soul when I think how intentionally he went about making sure they couldn’t catch him on July 23, 2020. And I can only pray his last heart’s cry was that God would forgive him. I can only bow my head and acknowledge the hard truth that even with God, even with family and friends and a girlfriend, nobody could help Mike unless Mike wanted to help himself. And this is sometimes the hardest thing of all.

My paid subscriber base is small. But I know for a fact it includes readers who know the black dog intimately well. Whether you’ve beaten it, or whether it still follows close behind, my prayer is that Sam’s song on the stairs of Cirith Ungol might be your song. That, like him, you would resolve in your heart to say not the Day is done, to bid not the stars farewell.

In western lands beneath the Sun
the flowers may rise in Spring,
the trees may bud, the waters run,
the merry finches sing.
Or there maybe ‘tis cloudless night
and swaying beeches bear
the Elven-stars as jewels white
amid their branching hair.

Though here at journey’s end I lie
in darkness buried deep,
beyond all towers strong and high,
beyond all mountains steep,
above all shadows rides the Sun
and stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
nor bid the stars farewell.