Suicide

I realize this is an inside thought which ought to stay inside...deep inside...but these are extraordinary times, and I'm feeling so frail that it's just got to come to the surface. So if you have ears....

I've been reading Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Stories, which I happened upon when I was doing a search for "New York Review Books" in the e-book section of the public library's online catalog.  When I saw the cover of this book

I was immediately drawn to it. Something about

the cruel starkness of the scene spoke to me, so even though I'd never heard of the book or the author, I fell into it. 

I started by reading the preview. By the time I finished the Introduction, I knew I wanted to read the book...and everything else Varlam Shalamov had written.

And every story so far...some of which are only a couple of pages long...has put its hands on my throat and given me a shake. This shit is so real that it makes you gasp for breath.

This morning I woke up at 4:30 am. My body was cursing me for not getting up to make coffee immediately, but I didn't want to get out of bed, because if I did, both of my kids would wake up, and then they'd have an extra couple of waking hours to endure...and during this Coronavirus Shutdown, that is no fucking favor. Especially not for Joe, who sometimes can't stop himself from raging and screaming and crying as he mourns the loss of his jobs, his friends, his churches, his everything. Sometimes autism is not pretty.

So I opened my Kindle and started reading Kolyma Stories. And then I got to "Field Rations," and this stopped me cold:

"We realized that death was no worse than life and we were afraid of neither. We were in thrall to total indifference. We knew we could put a stop to this life tomorrow, if we wanted, and sometimes we decided to do so, but every time we were stopped by some trivial thing that was part of life. Either we were going to get a 'box,' a bonus kilogram of bread, today and it would be simply stupid to end such a day by committing suicide. Or the orderly in the next barracks would have promised to repay an old debt by giving us a cigarette that evening."

I can't tell you how many times I've thought about killing myself, overwhelmed with pain and despair and feeling unloved and insignificant and  hopeless. Literally thousands of times minimum. Probably every single day of my life since adolescence. And even now, even when I know that I would not do it--because I have two autistic kids who depend on me, and an older son who deserves a better birthright than that--I think about it every day. Several times a day.

And I've learned, as did Shakamov, that sometimes the smallest pleasures are enough to turn my thoughts away from self-destruction: a book I want to read, a movie I want to see, music I want to hear, a friend I want to talk to. I once told a friend that when I was a teenager, there were times when the only thing I was living for was the next David Bowie record. He wrote it down on a piece of paper and taped it to his classroom wall. I always had the impression that he thought I was kidding.