Letter to a Suicide Artist

Let me tell you, I understand.

Still, there’s no way I could have done it, not with the snow falling in Pritchard Park. The way it can tumble in one long intimate hiss. An intensified kind of silence. All of that early Saturday sleep, heavy as iron on the empty city. The wind off the lake stilled, drowned under tons of cold water. Waiting for when it might breathe at first light and expel a chill that reddens morning skin. That would be too much, I think, knowing what would come once you could no longer sense it.

Your wife, still in bed, her naked back a riddle. The lie it tells. Warm to the touch, but cold to the eye. A fossil at the bottom of a riverbed. Perhaps that was her art, the ability to live the life of the object. The mirror that proved your own despair. Her physical body set against the empty spaces you feared would swing open like a vault. Perhaps you tried to paint that feeling, though there’s no record of it.

I don’t know. I’m just speculating. There’s really no way to know what you thought. The report in the Globe and Mail said that you woke early in the morning and loaded the pistol at your kitchen table. Thirty minutes later, your skull was laid open to the sky. Was that the life of the true artist reconciled, the bullet your signature to a bloody composition? Call this one, “Suffering.” Perhaps that’s too melodramatic. There are the critics to keep in mind. The first to wag their fingers at anything maudlin. Maybe “Mister Blank Decides to Die” would be better. A cleverer nod to bathos.

Surely this was no ploy to improve the value of your work. Friends were reported as saying you abhorred clichés. Nothing could be more absurd than offing yourself to gain artistic immortality. No, I don’t believe that. Men don’t do these kinds of things for an audience, even if God enters the equation.

What I keep coming back to is the coffee. You eased from the bed and crept in bare feet across the wooden floors and kitchen tile. Did you have to pause and listen to make sure she hadn’t detected your movement? If she was a light sleeper, you must have. Everything could be undone by an idle cough or the sound of her turning over in bed.

But the coffee, why the coffee? After crossing oceans of space between the bed and the kitchen, to risk it all for a pot of coffee? The earthy crunch of spooning grounds into the basket. The wheezing of the tank as water began to pump past the heating coils. The tinny trickle into the decanter. It must have sounded like hammer strokes inside your head. But still you risked it. There must have been some comfort in it that you felt you couldn’t do without. The simple action of sitting down and putting the porcelain cup to your lips satisfied your desire for something. The quiet, now it allowed you to comprehend. A chain of regularly repeated events. The proof that what you were doing was actually real.

What matters is that you slipped out undetected and walked in the snow for three blocks before you came to the park. Was it light yet? Probably just. Even then, with the smooth wedding-cake layer of snow, it must have seemed bright. No tracks anywhere, everyone still abed or grumpy in their breakfast nooks. And the snow, another mirror. Were you expecting the stark, silent inflexibility it posed?

The paper said a little girl walking her dog found you. She was nine and lived with her aunt in an apartment on St. Clair. Her neighbors are afraid she’s going to grow up traumatized. The dog’s name is Bear and was rescued from a pet shelter. She is said to love him very much. I thought you might want to know.