The Post about Suicide April 24th

I was feeling pretty blue today, and my mind drifted to the idea of suicide.

Not my own, mind you, or even that of anyone in particular. Just a general, sobering thought that a person has to be experiencing something God awful - a hundred times what I felt - to even contemplate such an act.

That, in turn, brought to mind a conversation I'd had maybe ten years ago. While it might seem a bit out of character, the truth is I thought rehashing it might do someone in trouble a bit of good.

Yes that right: welcome to my first (and probably last) Public Good Deed.

A long time ago, when the world was new and I still thought the future held riches and fame (but should have known better) I had a pretty decent job.

One of my co-workers, an aspiring architectural student, was involved in a motorcycle crash that temporarily put him in a coma with head injuries.

When he woke up, he no longer wanted to be an architect.

He also no longer wanted to be a man.

All this was before my time, but recent enough that fellow co-workers still gossiped about how he left for vacation a man and returned a woman.

I always questioned the decision. Not just for the obvious reasons, but because I wondered how much the crash had affected his reasoning.

Certainly it still played havoc with her life, as she was often sidelined with severe headaches.

I doubted life was very easy for her, and one day she admitted it.

After telling me her life story - but omitting any reference to gender - she told me she contemplated suicide on a daily basis.

She was lying; she thought about it far more often.

Not long before that I'd taken a friend to the hospital following a suicide attempt, and the subject still hit close to home.

So I asked her what stopped her from going through with it.

It was out of line she had every right to tell me to go to hell.

Instead, she told me some very good advice.

"Every day I woke up and wanted to kill myself," she said. "And every day I said no, I can't. And it didn't help, and sooner or later I was going to do it."

"So finally I gave myself permission to go ahead," she said. "I said to myself, just shut up and do it. But first I had to meet one condition."

"I had to go a week - seven whole days - without thinking, not even for a split second, that I wanted to live."

"A lot of times I'd go five, six days before I had to start over. Once I made it six and a half, and I thought 'this is it'."

"But it never happened. I'd see a movie preview and think 'I'd like to see that', or laugh at a dumb joke, and I'd be angry that. I'd have to start over"

I asked her how long this 'contract' had lasted.

"I'm at three and a half days right now," she said.

Without question, someone in a similar situation needs to seek medical help. Yet I think there's a kernel of genius in her approach.

In the course of a week - 168 hours - there has to be something - anything - that proves that life is worth living.

An upcoming episode of a TV show, the onset of spring, a good meal - whatever it takes.

Because life is too precious to waste on one bad decision.

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The Post about Kurt Cobain April 5th - 11 years later

Eleven years ago today - as best the medical examiner could determine - Kurt Donald Cobain died.

His death was officially recorded as a suicide, and despite great efforts to prove otherwise, it probably was.

[Yet questions remain. Not the least of them how a man injects a dose of heroin large enough to kill instantaneously, yet still finds the time and strength to roll down and button his sleeve, store his paraphernalia, and pick up and use a shotgun]

Whatever the method, his death was a tragedy.

A tragedy for his infant daughter, who has spent her life spinning memories of her father from what she sees and reads about his career.

A tragedy for his fans, who were denied the gift of his talent -and the dozens who mourned his death by following in his footsteps.

And a tragedy for Kurt himself, whose memory and music are now horribly intertwined with a macabre death.

That quite frankly, is obscene.

Obscene because everything you see and hear about Kurt and Nirvana is viewed through the lens of his death. People refuse to think of him as anything but a character in an art house movie, where every scene and every line of dialog has to foreshadow the end:

• MTV turned Unplugged in New York into a funeral dirge when the station played it endlessly after his death.

Never mind that it was one of the most innovative and enjoyable concerts of the series.

• Biographies of the band read like psychology texts, probing and engorging any event for a clue to the suicide.
• The lyrics are dissected and robbed of context. Why? to find a line that has no literal connection to what occurred, but which proves too tasty a quote for some authors to ignore.

Enough.

Go fire up your stereo and listen to Nevermind, their breakthrough album that knocked Michael Jackson from the #1 slot and ended the reign of Michael Bolton and New Kids on the Block.*

Tell me On a Plain, Lithium, or God forbid Smells Like Teen Spirit are anything but joyous anthems of Generation X.

Or their follow up album In Utero: darker, with less concession to commercial demands, but rife with memorable hooks. From the opening notes of Heart Shaped Box to the relentless attack of Scentless Apprentice, this was not the work of a man who had given up hope and abandoned what was important to him.

Of course Nirvana wasn't the The Judds, and not every song was suitable for a child's birthday party.

But I often wonder how much of that was Kurt just living up to his billing. For a man who allegedly hated the limelight, he certainly sought it out enough. He seemed to recognize this contradiction in himself:

Teenage angst has paid off well

but now I'm bored and old . . .

It may be hypocritical, given that I'm choosing to honor him on the annniversary of his death, but I prefer to forget how it ended and concentrate on the things that made me love his music in the first place.

Ear shattering drums that made your speakers quake. Bass lines that refused to quietly submit to a subordinate role, and in fact led the charge on most songs. Guitar that could be manic one second and controlled and subtle the next, with solos that were truly part of a song, not an excuse to write one. Vocals that were raw emotion, with lyrics that gained their strength and context as they wrapped themselves around the music.

That was Nirvana.

And that was Kurt Cobain.

 

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*long time readers will know what a bittersweet,double-edged sword it is to say that