The Humbling Read Free

It's euphoric." "Yes," said someone else, "there's a grim euphoria to it. Your life is falling apart, it has no center, and suicide is the one thing you can control." One elderly man, a retired schoolteacher who had tried to hang himself in his garage, gave them a lecture on the ways "outsiders" think about suicide. "The one thing that everyone wants to do with suicide is explain it. Explain it and judge it. It's so appalling for the people that are left behind that there has to be a way of thinking about it. Some people think of it as an act of cowardice. Some people think of it as criminal, as a crime against the survivors. Another school of thought finds it heroic and an act of courage. Then there are the purists. The question for them is: was it justified, was there sufficient cause? The more clinical point of view, which is neither punitive nor idealizing, is the psychologist's, which attempts to describe the state of mind of the suicide, what state of mind he was in when he did it." He went tediously on in this vein more or less every night, as though he were not an anguished patient like the rest of them but a guest lecturer who'd been brought in to elucidate the subject that obsessed them night and day. One evening Axler spoke up—to perform, he realized, before his largest audience since he'd given up acting. "Suicide is the role you write for yourself," he told them. "You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged—where they will find you and how they will find you." Then he added, "But one performance only."
    In their conversation, everything private was revealed easily and shamelessly; suicide seemed like a very huge aim and living a hateful condition. Among the patients he met, there were some who knew him right off because of his handful of movies, but they were too immersed in their own struggles
to take much more notice of him than they did of anyone other than themselves. And the staff was too busy to be distracted for long by his theatrical renown. He was all but unrecognizable in the hospital, not only to others but to himself.
    From the moment that he had rediscovered the miracle of a night's sleep and had to be awakened for breakfast by the nurse, he began to feel the dread subside. They had given him one medication for depression that didn't agree with him, then a second, and finally a third that caused no intolerable side effects, but whether it did him any good, he could not tell. He could not believe that his improvement had anything to do with pills or with psychiatric consultations or group therapy or art therapy, all of which felt like empty exercises. What continued to frighten him, as the day of his discharge approached, was that nothing that was happening to him seemed to have to do with anything else. As he'd told Dr. Farr—and further convinced himself by having tried to the best of his ability to search for a cause during their sessions—he had lost his magic as an actor for no good reason and it was just as arbitrarily that the desire to end his life began to ebb, at least for the time being. "
Nothing
has a good reason for happening," he said to the doctor later that day. "You lose, you gain—it's all caprice. The omnipotence of caprice. The likelihood of reversal. Yes, the unpredictable reversal and its power."
    Near the end of his stay he made a friend, and each night they had dinner together she repeated her story to him. He had met her first in art therapy, and after that they would sit across from each other at a table for two in the dining hall, chatting like a couple on a date, or—given the thirty-year age difference—like a father and daughter, albeit about her suicide attempt. The day they met—a couple of days after her arrival—there had been only the two of them in the art room along with the therapist, who, as though they were kindergarteners, had handed each sheets of white paper and a box of crayons to play with and told them to