Why Did My Friend Kill Himself? Why Does Anyone?

While my approach to suicide is not from the perspective of trauma theory per se, suicide is plenty traumatic for everyone involved.  Many who remain will suffer from PTSD. I have been thinking and posting about trauma for almost a decade now. It’s time to broaden the perspective a little.

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I kept up with my freshman college roommate for over fifty years.  We weren’t close, but we were friends.  He visited my university from time to time on business, and we always had dinner, but we hadn’t had much to do with each other for about a dozen years before he called.  He said he was thinking of killing himself.  After that, we talked on the phone every couple of weeks for almost two years–until he didn’t answer my calls.  About a month later I got the call from his son.

Bob’s wife had divorced him.  Or at least that’s the way he put it.  He was in his early seventies at the time; they had been married for decades.  I don’t know why she initiated divorce.  I know that Bob said he would not and did not fight her.  Nor did he reject her lawyer’s demand for a more–than–generous financial settlement.  It’s a sad story, but not an unfamiliar one.  Unusual is only Bob’s suicide.

Even that is not so unusual.  Single men Bob’s age have the highest suicide death rate of any age-sex group. /1/  Bob was helpful to me during a troubled time in my marriage.  I slept on his couch for a week, and he didn’t ask any uncomfortable questions.  Not because he was polite, but because he wasn’t particularly interested.  I was grateful for this quality in his personality, a certain unrelatedness.  He tended toward the schizoid end of the schizoid-depressive spectrum, to use some jargon.

But I was interested in Bob as he talked more and more about suicide, particularly when he began to assemble his suicide kit, a poisonous gas difficult to obtain for someone who was not an industrial chemist or something similar. Evidently it came in a pressure vessel.  The gas had certain advantages, which I won’t go into, except to say that Bob didn’t want to make a mess and didn’t want to endanger any neighbors if he used it.  He lived in an apartment.

All the while, he tried life, taking up various activities and hobbies, such as dancing.  Most involved some physical contact with women, which he enjoyed.  He saw a psychotherapist twice a week and took the usual cocktail of antidepressants.   In the end he made what I would call a rational decision that the pain of living was going to outweigh the pleasure no matter how hard he tried.  He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t deeply depressed either.  Though semi-retired, he went to his office, and out on a few dates.

Martin: The Freedom to Commit Suicide 

Clancy Martin is a professor of philosophy.  In How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind, he tells his class that one of his earliest memories is wishing he were dead.

‘I don’t know how old I was at this time, but I think I was very young, two or three.’  How could a two-year-old wish he were dead? It’s a reasonable question. (p 40)

Does Martin really talk with his class about things like this?  Evidently yes.  The discussion is prompted by his description of his own many suicide attempts on his webpage.  Students curious about their professor discover the page, tell others, and soon most of the class knows.

Readings in his course, which include Schopenhauer’s essay “On Suicide,” foster this focus.  One that leads a surprising number of students to bring up their own suicide attempts, or thoughts about killing themselves (suicidal ideation).

Martin made his earliest suicide attempt in first grade, running in front of a bus (p 41).  The most recent was several years before he wrote this book (published in 2023), attempting to hang himself from the roof beam of his basement office with a dog leash.  It wasn’t quite short enough, and he ended up with a sore throat.

Martin doesn’t just talk about his suicide attempts.  He has a theory, and it’s not a bad one.  The earliest memory he has of wishing he were dead is associated with the panic he felt at missing his mother.  Now I don’t believe for a minute that he remembers anything at two years of age, nor that he experienced missing his mother in anything like the way he would a few years later.  But this does not impugn his theory.

Suicide is the reaction to the loss of attachment to a fundamental source of value.  Generally embodied in a person, this value could be expressed in the loss of faith in a religion or ideology.  Arthur Koestler is exemplary, though his suicide is more complicated than can be dealt with here. /2/  The result is an unbearable panic for which suicide is the solution.  Loss of attachment to sources of value, when total, leads to–or rather, is–a loss of meaning in life.  The meaning of our lives is our attachments.  And without meaning our lives are hardly worth living.

         The possibility of suicide allows some to live

For some, not suicide itself, but the ever-present possibility of committing suicide, is what allows one to continue to live. Martin seems to be among these.  William James put it this way.

A friend and fellow philosopher wrote to me recently, I have not spent a week of my life without thinking of how much better it would all be if I could just end it. Even in the happiest of times. Sometimes I find instant relief just by indulging a quick suicidal ideation. (quoted in Martin, p 126)

James approves, as does Martin.  Thinking suicide, talking suicide, knowing one can choose suicide at any moment, forestalls suicide “for the suicidally inclined.”  How might the inclined person be identified?  As far as I can tell, only by having made several attempts and failed. 

Andrew Solomon has tried suicide a few times.  He thinks along lines similar to Martin and James.

Knowing that if I get through this minute I could always kill myself in the next one makes it possible to get through this minute without being utterly overwhelmed. Suicidality may be a symptom of depression; it is also a mitigating factor. The thought of suicide makes it possible to get through depression. I expect that I’ll go on living so long as I can give or receive anything better than pain, but I do not promise that I will never kill myself. Nothing horrifies me more than the thought that I might at some stage lose the capacity for suicide. (Solomon, p 284)

The relationship between talking about suicide and the likelihood of committing suicide is complicated.  It is usually debated under the rubric of clinical framing.  It was not Bob’s talking about suicide that led him to take his life; he talked about suicide (and then only with me and his therapist) because he was seriously considering taking his own life in the first place.  A good therapist, or more experienced friend, would have replied that both the urge and the pain are understandable but temporary.  Suicide is not primarily about the desire for death, but the desire to escape pain. Shneidman calls this pain “psychache” in his classic The Suicidal Mind.  The inability to bear this pain is characteristic of all suicide (Kindle loc 72, 1695).

Martin holds to the stoic view that the ability to commit suicide is the most fundamental freedom, an open door to liberation when the pain and anguish of living become too great (p 125).

        Why not suicide?  I am not Sisyphus

For Albert Camus, the only true philosophical question is that of suicide (Myth of Sisyphus).  Camus interprets this question to mean “is life worth living?”  Martin makes the point that the answer should not assume the individual is essentially alone in the world, as Sisyphus was, pushing his rock up the hill, only to have it roll down again. /3/

Martin argues that while it may seem as if we own our own lives, to dispose of as we wish, the reality is that we live among others, we are made up of them, and they of us.  We are community and family members first, a point the Sisyphus example guarantees we shall miss.  Martin says,

Our lives are fundamentally reciprocal sorts of things. We live from, for, and with each other, and none of us lives truly alone….So although our lives may well be our own, they are deeply interwoven with others, which might make us wonder whether those people, too, have a stake in us continuing to live….And I know that I feel I’ve made a mistake when I’ve tried to take my own life, forgetting that my continuing existence also belonged to them. (p. 246)

The book mentions ten times in which Martin attempted to take his own life.  Some attempts were more serious than others.

In some people, just some, the suicidal inclination runs deep.  It can start early and exist even in good times.  It has a quality all its own.  The suicidally inclined can’t stand not to have a way out of this life, a door opened by a razor blade or pills.  Life threatens to overwhelm not just because of despair and misery, but panic.  Not just at missing mommy, but at being trapped in this world.

When Shneidman (Suicidal Mind, loc 1617) says that suicide occurs when psychache exceeds the individual’s ability to stand it, we may understand psychache as panic, and “stand it” as the ability to endure panic.  Isn’t that exactly what Shneidman meant?  No, but most people, it turns out, are far better at enduring pain than panic.  The loss of a loved one is painful, but panic at eternal separation and loss accounts for the temptation of suicide.  This is why the freedom of exit, even if never taken, is so important to some. 

From this perspective the stoics conceived the decision to live or die as an affair far too rational, a balance between pleasure and pain. Panic, brought on by the loss of attachment to sources of life’s meaning (originally mommy and daddy in most cases), is not rational.  Or at least it does not lend itself to a cost-benefit calculation.

That doesn’t mean the exit must be used.  Most won’t, most can be persuaded to wait.  Almost all wait until nature takes them away.  But there is a suicidally inclined way of thinking, and the idea that panic at least as much as despair lies behind it, is key.  So too is the idea that suicidality comes close to a character trait.  I refer to the development of this point by Joiner toward the end of my essay.

At first I thought Bob made a disturbingly rational decision, that he was a modern-day stoic.  The pain, the “psychache,” was not going to go away.  It would always exceed the pleasure, thus suicide becomes a solution to the problem of life.  But then I began to wonder if it wasn’t Bob’s aloneness in the world that caused him such feelings of dread and doom that he had to end them.

Bob was alienated from his ex-wife, and distant from his son and daughter.  One lived halfway around the world; the other within a day’s drive that was never taken, the phone call never made.  I was his closest friend, and as I said he had a certain lack of interest in other people at all times.  At one point in my life I found this a relief, but he had almost none of the attachments that hold us in this world.  And so he chose to slip away.

In fact, one of Bob’s children was very upset at his suicide, going to considerable effort to get Bob’s final letter to me, which involved hacking his phone for my address.

Here I should repeat the usual caution.  Anyone considering suicide, or overwhelmed with ideas of suicide, should phone or text 988,  — available 24/7.  Or go to the Emergency Room.  Unfortunately, the support ERs provide is uneven. /4/ 

Solomon makes depression horrifyingly real

I have never read, I have never even imagined, that depression could be so horrifying, but Solomon makes his struggle remarkably real.  Listening to the book before reading it likely reinforced its immediacy.  His is not a book on suicide, but it contains a fine chapter on the subject.   Importantly, however, he does not see suicide as tightly linked to depression. In this he differs from a well-known author on the subject, Kay Redfield Jamison, for whom depression overwhelms reason, making suicide the only possible answer to otherwise soluble problems (pp. 44-47).

Depression suppresses the capacity to imagine alternatives.  Her argument owes a debt to Shneidman, who she acknowledges. Solomon takes depression as seriously as Jamison.  Depression, he says, “is the flaw in love.”  To be able to love means to be vulnerable to despair at its loss. 

Depression is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.  (p 15)   

The result is the inability to gain pleasure from anything, the cardinal symptom of major depression.

Though the book is a little dated in terms of developments in psychopharmacology, Solomon appreciates the role of drugs in lifting depression.  Enough, he says, so that human relationships can do their work.  Medication, when it works, makes it easier to love and be loved. Drugs make attachment possible, and it is  attachment that heals.

          Depression is not strongly linked to suicide

While depression destroys lives, it is not strongly linked to suicide. Lots of suicidal patients are not depressed.  On the contrary,   no strong correlation exists between the severity of depression and the likelihood of suicide: some suicides seem to occur during mild disorders, while some people with desperate situations cleave to life. (p 243-244)

Even though the depressed are more likely to kill themselves, the vast proportion of the depressed don’t.  Nor is there any correlation between the degree of depression and the likelihood of suicide.  In fact, severe depression is a buffer against suicide.

Killing oneself is not like falling asleep.  It takes a strong will, an impulse to action, and the energy to carry it out (p 244).  Or as Solomon puts it, drawing from his own experience, “If you have never tried it yourself . . . you cannot begin to imagine how difficult it is to kill yourself.” (p 276)

So where does suicide come from?  For surely we are creatures who struggle mightily to live, even at the expense of others.  Whatever the answer, it cannot simply be that of Alvarez and the stoics, who hold that those who take their own lives have decided that the pain in life outweighs the joy.

What’s joy got to do with it anyway?  Who says life is about joy?  Probably the pain in life does outweigh the joy for most people, but what we seek is meaning, not joy.  Furthermore, most humans struggle for life even when the only meaning is more life.  If they did not, the species would have long ago disappeared.

If so, then is Shneidman right that suicide is a mad act?  Though he occasionally uses the term, Shneidman does not mean psychotic.  With the term mad he means that the suicide (as the person intending suicide is called) can’t distinguish degrees of feeling, and with it alternatives.  It’s all or nothing, now or never.  The pain, “psychache” Shneidman calls it, must be eliminated now.  Alvarez, who anticipates Shneidman, holds to a similar view: the suicide wants the pain to stop.

     Solomon and the relationship to panic

 

Suicide is really more of an anxiety response than a depression solution: it is not the action of a null mind but of a tortured one. The physical symptoms of anxiety are so acute that they seem to demand a physical response: not simply the mental suicide of silence and sleep, but the physical one of self-slaughter. (p 275) 

Solomon is  a step-ahead of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5-TR), which only proposes for further study a category called “Suicidal Behavior Disorder” (SBD) that may spring from a number of clinical conditions.  But of course, Solomon does not have to work with a committee of psychiatrists and can draw on his own experience as evidence.

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), the  DSM for the rest of the world, does not go this far.  For the World Health Organization (WHO), the problem is the stigma associated with suicide.  In response the ICD treats suicide as a public health problem, to be considered from the outside, not the inside.

Émile Durkheim approached suicide in this fashion in his famous On Suicide (original 1897).  Two of his four categories are relevant.  First, anomic suicide, where custom and tradition fail, leaving desperate people wanting more than they are able to achieve in the competition for status and worldly success.  Second is egoistic suicide, where the suicide can find no place in the world, and so chooses to depart it.  However incomplete this perspective, it is one missing in almost all current accounts, which reduce suicide to a psychological problem.  Alvarez comes closest to getting this part right, seeing the psychic pain as coming from the meaninglessness of modernity, to put it a little too simply.

For Durkheim, as for WHO, suicide is a social problem, in which the organization of society provides insufficient or confused meaning to its members.  The DSM, though I should really say Solomon, comes closer to Camus, for whom suicide stems from a dearth of individually discoverable meaning.  Society may be responsible from an abstract point of view, but it is individuals who make choices.

Does Suicide Take Practice?

Joiner’s Why People Die by Suicide is interesting because it can be read as an elaboration of themes in Martin and Solomon. Even if some people see suicide as a way to cope with a terrifying world from an early age, as Martin did, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.  They have to practice.     Martin attempted suicide ten times.  He’s stopped for now, but won’t say he won’t try it again.  Suicide is his freedom.

Suicide is hard, as Solomon emphasizes (pp 244, 276).  It takes energy, and a certain fearlessness.  What may appear as feckless attempts, says Joiner, are actually practice.    “The diminution of fear through repeated self-injury is, according to my account, necessary for serious suicidal behavior to occur.” (p 58)

Of course, many commit suicide on the first try, like my friend Bob.  What he did, what so many suicides do, is think about it.  Bob thought about it, eventually preparing the means, for about two years.  Probably longer, but it was only over the last two years that he shared his thinking with me.  His practice was to think about how he would do it, hundreds if not thousands of times.  Mental rehearsal.

Joiner puts it this way.

A study of over 3,000 patients at risk for suicide, thirty-eight of whom subsequently died by suicide, provides some indirect evidence regarding mental practice. Of the factors that predicted death by suicide, an important one was “contemplation of hanging or jumping.” Through mental rehearsal of violent death by suicide, these patients may have acquired more of the ability to enact lethal self-injury. (p 82)

Unlike Martin and Solomon, Joiner doesn’t reflect on interior mental life, his own or others.  He does, however, have a moral agenda: to show that suicide is not an act of cowardice.  Where this agenda comes from, I know not.  It troubles me a little.  For while the act may take courage, it remains an escape from the pain of living, when one can always keep trying to do something about it, if only–and it’s a lot–tolerating the pain a little longer.  Or hoping to live with less pain, not no pain.  Solomon lived this way for years before the pain subsided (Solomon, pp 39-100).

Suicide and courage?

To be competent at and courageous about anything, one must have experience with it—the more experience, the more competence and the more courage. The implications of continued experience with provocative or painful stimuli, such as self-harm, are far-reaching. . . . One instance of suicidal behavior lays the groundwork for later instances, and it does so specifically through the accrual of fearlessness and competence.  (p 63)

Joiner is a puzzle.  He holds an endowed chair at a leading university, his book is published by Harvard, and yet he seems to have a personal agenda as powerful, but more concealed, than either Martin or Solomon.  But while the origins of his agenda are hidden, its content is apparent: to  show that the one who commits suicide commits a courageous act, and hence an honorable one, in at least one respect.  Courage is honorable, or at least admirable, because the courageous person acts despite fear, and self-harm is particularly daunting, requiring much practice to overcome.

It is useful (because it is true) to stress the panic that lies behind suicide.  As an escape from panic, suicide is not especially admirable, even if the means of escape require courage.  Seneca, a Stoic, saw suicide as an elegant path to freedom, one requiring little effort.  “No vast wound is necessary; a mere puncture will secure your liberty.” 

In the end he made a mess of it. First he cut open his veins; when they didn’t bleed freely he took hemlock (the poison that killed Socrates), which had no effect.  Finally he was dragged to a hot bath where the heat killed him (Tacitus, Annals 15.60–64)  Not only is it not so easy to kill oneself, but there is nothing dignified about it.  As Solomon puts it, “though sweeping existential arguments are engaging, the reality of suicide is not fine and pure and philosophical, but messy and appalling and physical.” (p 251) This was apparently true of my friend Bob, according to his son, even though Bob chose a method designed not to make a mess.  Describing the death scene months later, Bob’s son was still shaken.

Conclusion

One thing I forgot to mention.  Bob’s father suicided.  The family lived in the Southwest.  Bob’s father drove his car out into the desert, attached a hose to the tailpipe, ran it through the window, sealed the opening with duct tape, and the car ran until it was out of gas.  He didn’t leave a note, and his body wasn’t found for several days. /5/

All this happened when Bob and I were in college together.  I remember that Bob was not close with his father, and whenever he spoke about his father, which was rare, his tone was not so much angry as distant, as though he were just some other man.

Not once during the two years in which Bob was preparing to suicide did he mention his father.  Not once did I think to ask.  Belatedly I acted, calling Bob’s son after he notified me of his father’s passing, as he put it, telling him there was a family tradition of suicide now, and not to continue it.  I’m not sure what was going on with Bob, but whatever it was it was more powerful for being unspoken.  It overpowered my ability to distance myself and think abstractly about what Bob was doing in terms of our shared history, for Bob and I were at our closest around the time his father died.  

Evidently Bob’s father traveled a lot, especially when Bob was young.  It was as though he didn’t exist for Bob until much later, when, for example, he paid Bob’s tuition and was generous with pocket money.  But Bob’s father must have communicated an attitude toward life since even before Bob could speak.  Every parent does.  “Life will kill you,” or “Life will love you as much as you love it,” or whatever.  I don’t know what messages Bob’s father sent.  Likely closer to the former than the latter, but that is unknowable now.

Though I think it likely that Bob panicked at his unrelatedness to anyone or anything, though I think Martin and Solomon are right that suicide is closer to a panic disorder than a depressive one, there remains a mystery to Bob’s suicide that even a good theory cannot unravel.  Perhaps it’s that way for every self-inflicted leave-taking from this earth.  On the other hand, life is often so painful one might ask why most of us choose to remain.  Life, it seems, has its own imperative.

Notes

1  One reason the death rate is so high among older men is that they more often choose guns, which are almost invariably lethal.  www.statnews.com/2025/07/17/suicide-rates-rising-older-men-cd c-data-say/?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

2. Arthur Koestler was suffering from Parkinson’s and leukemia when he took a lethal overdose of barbiturates. But Alvarez, in The Savage God, sees more than medical rationality at work, arguing that his approaching death revivified Koestler’s feelings of loss at the total system of Soviet Communism.  George Steiner makes a similar argument in Language and Silence.

3.  That “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” is Camus’ famous conclusion (p 123). Perhaps he is, but without doubt Sisyphus is an exile in his world.

4.  Half a million Americans are taken to hospitals because of suicide or attempted suicide every year. It is the third leading cause of death among those under 21, the second for college students.  The World Health Organization (WHO) says suicide is responsible for 2% of deaths worldwide, more than war or homicide.

5.  Few suicides leave notes, roughly one in four. Most notes are banal (Jamison, p 82).  One would hope that a suicide note would afford a last deep glimpse into motivation.  They rarely do.  See Suicide Note, ed. Freid, a collection of suicide notes.

References

A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. W. W. Norton, 1971.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, translated by J. O’Brien.  Vintage, 1955.

Émile Durkheim, On Suicide, trans. R. Buss.  Penguin, 2006 (original 1897).

Mason Freid, ed.  Suicide Note: A Real Collection of Real Suicide Letters.  Kindle (publisher).

Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide.  Vintage, 2000.

Thomas Joiner, Why People Die by Suicide.  Harvard University Press, 2005.

Clancy Martin, How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind.  Pantheon Books, 2003.

Edwin Shneidman, The Suicidal Mind.  Oxford University Press, 1996.

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.  Scribner, 2015.

George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman.  Open Road Media, 2013 (original 1967).

Freud’s speculations about the death drive (Todestrieb) are no longer  accepted by most psychoanalysts. /1/ Yet, Freud’s thoughts about the death drive are worth considering from the perspective of trauma theory, since Freud regarded the inability of the traumatized to let their trauma pass into memory as the strongest evidence in favor of the death drives (he almost always used the plural). A version of the repetition compulsion, Andre Green calls the death drive the “murder of time.” Embeddedness in temporality is the mark of human existence. The murder of time is the murder of lived life.

Freud first posited the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). His English translator, James Strachey, made the mistake of translating two German words, Trieb and Instinkt, with the same term, instinct. There is no death instinct. A drive is a motivation directed by a physical need. A drive is culturally and psychologically mutable within limits. /2/

If people seek pleasure above all else, as Freud had previously assumed, why would a traumatized person hold fast to a terrible memory of trauma, repeating the experience again and again, not just in memory but in the physical sensations accompanying that memory?

Freud’s first answer was that repetition is an attempt to master an experience that was originally too immediate, too intense, or simply too difficult to bear, such as the abandonment of a child by its mother. Freud comments on his grandson’s fort/da game in which the child threw a spool of string away and then reeled it back in during his mother’s absence. Or more frequently, he just threw his toys away, as though to say, “See, I don’t need you anymore. You’re not leaving. I’m sending you away.”  

Freud seems unsatisfied with his own answer, for Freud was never comfortable with the idea of an independent instinct or drive for mastery or control (Beyond, p. 54). Not mastery but the death drive is Freud’s explanation of life beyond the pleasure principle. Trauma incites the death drive, the urge of the organism to return to an original inorganic state. One sees this in Freud’s speculation about the Nirvana principle, which he interprets as the longing for the cessation of stimulation and tension (Beyond, p. 95). We desire our own deaths, but only in our own time and in our own way. If we are fortunate, we savor the journey that takes us from nothingness to nothingness, Nirvana. Trauma may make life so unbearable that a shortcut is tempting (Beyond, pp. 61, 95). To die and so end the constant intrusion of stimuli may seem like liberation from the burden of being.

Freud believed that the psychic drives are conservative. “Their goal is the restoration of a previous state of non-tension, calm, inertia.” This is what Freud means with his remarkable statement, “the aim of life is death.” (Freud, 1920, p 224) In its original formulation, the death drive.  

Has nothing to do with aggressiveness . . . and Freud always refused to recognize the existence of a destructive autonomous energy. (Valdrè, p 24)

Why drives are conservative can be explained by considering the original German title of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Jenseits des Lustprinzips. Jenseits doesn’t mean “beyond” so much as it means the other side of pleasure, the pleasure of no tension. It is another type of pleasure, the pleasure of not having to be, to do, or respond. In the language of psychoanalysis, it is a pure narcissistic pleasure. In the language of Green and Lacan (that is, the French tradition, in which speech takes the place of experience), it is the pleasure of not having to represent oneself in language.

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People come here to die: Winnicott and the the trauma of old age 

This essay draws on my experience with a continuing care retirement community (CCRC).  It is an essay on trauma–the trauma of old age and impending death.  The CCRC serves as what D. W. Winnicott calls a transitional object.  Only in the case of the CCRC, it’s a transitional object in reverse.  That’s good and bad.  Mostly it’s interesting, especially for me, since I live in one.  

People come here to die.  A CCRC, of which there are over 2,000 in the United States, provides independent living, assisted living, and nursing home care under one roof in the smaller communities.  The larger CCRCs often occupy a campus, but the same principle applies.  I live in one of the smaller CCRCs, with about 200 residents in independent living.

My wife died close to five years ago now.  I lived alone in a big house for about two years.  Keeping up the house and living alone became too much, and I moved to the CCRC.  I’ve lived here now for almost three years.  

The CCRC as transitional object in reverse

I’ve thought a lot about the psychology of living in a CCRC.  What set me off was the remark by my first friend here.  He said people don’t make close friendships in retirement communities because they know their friends will soon die.  My friend died about a year after I met him (he was in his 90s), and I think what he said was only partly true.  

The CCRC serves as a transitional object.   What’s unusual about the CCRC is that it’s a transitional object in reverse.  The infant and young child’s use of the transitional object serves to help him or her separate me from not-me, and so move from dependence to relative independence.  The CCRC is the opposite, helping the residents move from independence to relative dependence.

The flipper is a good example, the first step in this move.  The flipper is a little tear-drop-shaped piece of wood that swings on the outside of the independent living resident’s door.  A worker pushes it against the door late at night, and it flips to a down position when I open the door in the morning.  If the door isn’t opened by about 11am, the flipper stays up, and someone checks to see if I’m dead or seriously ill.  

The flipper is the first step in a series of events—call them care—that usually eventuate in the resident dying in the nursing facility in an adjacent building. 

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Aftermath

I’ve rarely devoted a post to criticizing one book.  But there are aspects of Aftermath that highlight all that’s wrong with the adoption of trauma theory by literary critics, a recurring theme of this blog. 

What makes Aftermath different is that it is engaged with an actual trauma.  Instead of using trauma theory to explain a text, it uses the literary imitation of trauma, above all the experience of fragmentation, to explain a genuinely traumatic experience, a double murder.  It doesn’t work.   

A highly regarded book

Preti Taneja, a British author of Indian descent, received the Gordon Burn Prize for Aftermath. The prize honors the year’s most dazzlingly daring and avant-garde work of English-language fiction and non-fiction.  Her first book, We That Are Young, a version of King Lear, set in a modern-day Indian business family, received the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was short-listed for several others.  I found it hard to find critical reviews. Critical comments yes, here and there, but no critical reviews. 

The most critical comments were reserved for Goodreads, a reader response website sponsored by Amazon.  Many readers stated that large parts of the book were incomprehensible due to its stylistic peculiarities: absent punctuation, large gaps between words and phrases, incomplete sentences, and so forth.  One reader says rip out 80 pages, presumably the ones written in an attempt to represent the traumatic experience as a textual one, and the book makes sense as a history and critique of the Muslim experience in India and England.  I agree.  The book gets better toward the end.

The Atrocity and its background

Though the book often reads as though Taneja was in the midst of the double murder, she wasn’t.  She didn’t learn about it until the next day when her partner read the newspaper to her over breakfast, and Taneja realized she knew the name of the attacker, Usman Khan.  The 28-year-old had taken the creative writing course Taneja led at a high-security prison two years earlier. The attack took place at a reunion of the program.  The newspaper reported that he had been shot dead by police, after stabbing five people, two fatally.  One was her colleague, Jack Merritt.  Darkly amusing to some was the fact that Khan was initially subdued by a participant using a Narwhal tusk fastened to the Cambridge conference room wall. 

Taneja had been invited, but stayed home, preparing for a literary festival. She says she feels both relieved and guilty to have missed the horror and has been left wondering how to make sense of her peripheral connection to the atrocity.

She tells me she has now come to call it “disenfranchised grief … for those who had known the perpetrator, it was something unspeakable”. She is now, she notes in Aftermath, writing “in the wreck”. (Guardian, November 27, 2021) *

“Astro-city”: the attempt to represent trauma in a text

The simplest way to convey the narrative style is to point out that “atrocity” is spelled “astro-city” every single time, I estimate well over one-hundred times throughout the book.  It took me 88 pages to figure out what she was trying to say with this affectation.   The state did it, creating the conditions that led to the atrocity.  One problem with this use is that it denies Khan his autonomy.  Furthermore, at other points she presents a nuanced account of the question of where the responsibility began and ended.  The narrative portion of the book is capable of subtleties the stylistic portion can’t capture. 

Taneja uses fractured form to reproduce in the text the experience of trauma.  Trouble is, actual trauma becomes confused with textual trauma, as when she refers to “the atro-city, this prison of narrative and counternarrative.” (p 60) Elsewhere she states that “prison is a palace made of narrative . . . nothing in there but narrative.”   No, prison is a place made of concrete and steel.  It’s hard and its real.  “Concrete Mama” it’s called by some prisoners (McCoy and Hoffman).  It’s hard and its cold but it’s always there, always waiting to take you back.  To be sure, prison is alive with stories.  I listened to prisoners’ stories for more than a year (Alford,1997).   But no one tells stories in solitary confinement (“administrative segregation”), and confined lives lead to confined stories, lacking in imagination.  Dreams, a realm of freedom, are the exception, and prisoners generally keep dreams to themselves. 

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