Falling on Black Days

Photo by Prof. Dr. Franz Vesely

Viktor Frankl lived the darkest of black days, stubbornly refusing to die in Auschwitz and helping others whenever he could. He expressed his formula for life in the concentration camp—and anywhere else, for that matter—like this:

Water on the Rock, Boughs Shaken on a Tree

Suicide is nearly incomprehensible. Wanting to end pain, whether psychic or physical—and they both can feel unbearable—we understand. Putting your loved ones in that hurt locker like no other . . . we can't.

Chris Cornell was the last celebrity I would have expected to kill himself. He had talent, a creative life, and a family he was very close to. Like Eddie Vedder, he seemed to have emerged into a mid-life that was healthy and happy while still being a compelling artist.

We don't know what was going on with him leading up to his death, and it's possible that his death was the result of a prescription drug related state rather than a truly deliberate suicide. But two artists have helped me make sense of at least the idea of suicide this week.

One is the singer-songwriter Sara Groves, who wrote a song about addiction called "On Your Mark." (Listen to the song here.) These are the lyrics that struck me:

Days they turn into lifetimes

Water it drips on a rock

What could be stronger in time

Than our fears and our thoughts

Soft water wearing down hard rock is a well-used analogy, for good reason. The relentless pressure of bad thoughts can wear down even the strongest rocks of our lives: love, children, hope, reason, even the fun and thrills and small delights that light up existence. This is the power of time.

The other artist is John Knowles, who wrote the high school curriculum classic A Separate Peace. If you haven't read this short novel, you may want to skip the rest. In the novel, the teenage protagonist makes a split-second decision that has terrible repercussions. Simmering with resentment at the annoying good fortune and charm of his best friend, he has an impulse to shake the bough of a tree that his friend is perched on. This friend, this golden boy, falls to the ground and breaks his back.

The frailty of the human body has always seemed one of the best arguments against intelligent design. Who would design a body that, if deprived of air for a minute or two, expires? That can be destroyed by a passing accident? Bill Cosby described how, when he was a child, his older brother died and he stood by the coffin thinking, "Just get up." It seemed crazy that his brother's death was irreversible. It just takes a second to alter everything. This is the power of the moment.

Suicide is the lethal collision of the power of time and the power of the moment. The wearing down of the mind—whose attachment to family and the prospect of happiness normally keep us bolted to life—weakens us so that our momentary bad judgment becomes irreversible.

A man who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge spoke with NPR about the experience. He was, of course, depressed and suicidal. But, he said, the moment he jumped, he instantly regretted it. He knew immediately that it was a terrible mistake. He miraculously survived, but for most, immediately is just not quick enough.

Chris Cornell

"Times are gone for honest men

 and sometimes far too long for snakes"

The Virtue of Cheerfulness

Let me introduce you to someone. This is my father:

He has some faults, like all of us. Some that have annoyed me quite a bit over the years. But it is only recently that I have realized that his seemingly innate cheerfulness is not just a personality feature (one that I, sadly, do not have). It is a virtue. A moral virtue.

The day after the 2016 presidential election, I was inadvertently exposed to the official meeting between Barack Obama and the putative winner of the election. The election of an amoral fraud and narcissist was devastating to me, and the fact that Obama would have to shake his hand and make nice . . . it made me ill. Still, I watched the clip, dreading what I would see.

What I saw was so improbable: Barack Obama looking as chipper as ever, conducting himself with grace and self-possession. And as I watched him, I felt something I didn't expect: a lightening of my heart. I hadn't realized till then how fearful I was of the devastation that Obama must have felt. Nor how critically important his lack of devastation would be.

In the months following the disastrous political travesty of Trump's election, I have mostly been depressed—and kind of militantly so. My war-weary liberal friends would post on Facebook with a forced tenacity that we couldn't crumple, that there were people in the world who needed us to be fierce and fight for them. I was all, Eff that—I'm crumpling. Something terrible has just happened. Can't we take a minute and mourn it?

But then I think of Barack Obama on November 9 in the White House with Trump, looking confident and unruffled. And I think of Hillary Clinton on November 9, hiking in New York and looking chill and happy with a supporter she met on the trail. And I think of my father at 90 years of age, battling sciatica and still ending each phone call with "Call me if you need me!" And I think of the doctor's office I visited today after getting lost and arriving late, and how nice and upbeat the staff was, such a balm on a difficult day. I thought of my own guilt as I've crawled inside my sadness for weeks on end, and my husband who still always has a smile and a sympathetic ear, no matter how high up the laundry piles and how many times a night he has to listen to me sigh like a martyr.

Cheerfulness is powerful because it lifts people's spirits. And when their spirits are raised, people feel like they can fight another day. Cheerfulness puts a mosquito net around our own pains and tries, as much as is practical and healthy, to protect those around us from being stung a hundred times a day by our misery. Cheerfulness acknowledges that the world is more than us, that whatever we're feeling and going through, others have their own worries and cares and joys and jobs to do.

I'm not good at cheerfulness. And I'm cognizant of the way a melancholy temperament can free people to be open about their own sadness, to let down their guard, to feel like they don't have to be striving and winning every damn second of the day. But I appreciate cheerfulness, the expression of a resilient spirit that rallies us to change.