MONTHS OF close proximity to my father’s pattern of thought influenced me to think like him, then behave like him—distant, preoccupied, and critical. I began to question myself, the validity of my undertaking. At times my mood veered into self-hatred. I wasn’t suicidal, but the notion flitted through my mind, an option hiding in the shadowy perimeter. It concerned me enough to take a break from Dad’s papers.
I thought of the poet John Berryman, whose father killed himself, an act from which no son could ever recover. In a poem called “Of Suicide,” he wrote:
Reflexions on suicide, & on my father, possess me.
I drink too much.
I first read this poem in my early twenties with little knowledge about Berryman, having heard incorrectly that he had leaped to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge. The poem had an exotic appeal, a glamorization of suicide and liquor. The lines were meaningful to me, since I often felt possessed by thoughts of my father and his occasional talk of suicide.
A few years after reading the poem, I happened to be in Minneapolis. A friend took me to the bleak Washington Avenue Bridge and pointed out the spot—not where Berryman jumped but where he landed—on the bank of the Mississippi River. It was a shocking moment for me, destroying the romantic notion of the bearded genius soaring from the grand and misty Golden Gate into the sea. Instead, in the middle of a brutal midwestern winter, he jumped off an ugly narrow bridge and died from the impact with frozen dirt.
The last time I lived in Kentucky, my house sat on a hill overlooking a pond, and in the morning the birds declared their various overlapping territories while snatching insects near the surface of the water. I often rose early to listen to them, then returned to bed. Before moving away, I placed a cheap cassette recorder outside and recorded the birds. For many years I carried the tape as a last resort to homesickness. If despair overran me, the knowledge that I could listen to the birds provided strength. The cassette was similar to the Robert Arthur short story “Mr. Manning’s Money Tree,” in which the promise of cash buried beneath a tree sustains a man through difficult financial times. Knowledge of its existence allows him to take business risks he might have avoided. At the end he digs up the money, but it’s not there.
I decided to listen to the tape, surrounded by my father’s dusty archives. It seemed appropriate to hear Kentucky birdsong amid all this material made in Haldeman. The cassette emitted a series of clicks followed by a continual hum. There was no birdsong. Years before, I’d pressed the wrong buttons on the recording device. Like the buried money of Mr. Manning, the promise of hearing the birds when I needed them had gotten me through hard times. The absurdity of the situation cheered me.
Many years ago I purchased an original painting by Ronald Cooper, a Kentucky folk artist of some repute. The eleven-by-fourteen painting is acrylic on canvas. An unpainted section on the bottom right corner has the date 1994, a copyright sign, the artist’s signature, and the name of the painting: Suicide. The colors are straight from the tube, unmixed, and the drawing is quite crude. The composition is divided in half—the top is a blue background strung with clouds, while the bottom is a field of solid green. In the foreground stands a man wearing a black shirt and white pants. Spots of blood mar his clothes. Protruding from his shirt collar is the stump of a bleeding neck. He grips a bloody butcher knife in one hand, while the other holds aloft his own decapitated head. An arrow beside his mouth points to the words:
i WiSH i HADNT DONE THiS.
I kept the painting hidden, believing it was too gruesome for my young sons to see. When they got older, I hung it in my writing studio and imagined it as the cover for a book. The face of the bleeding head has an expression of startled dismay, as if he can’t quite accept his situation. I believe I’d feel the same way if I killed myself—stunned regret at the final millisecond, too late to turn back. It reminds me of the legends of the French guillotine: a freshly cut-off head blinking in a basket, the mouth struggling to speak, the body unwilling to accept its own death.