The technique of being alive

CONTENT NOTE: suicide

My mother was born on this day, eighty-nine years ago.
She killed herself at winter solstice when she was sixty-eight, so it'll be twenty-one years of no birthdays...

Frances Partridge writes in her diary in 1960 that with her husband dead she wants to kill herself, but she forces herself not to. She longs to be dead but knows from experience [Carrington] the hurt that suicide causes other people.
She records that instead:

"I am making strenuous loops as with a giant crochet-hook to fasten myself to the outside world. One loop is a series of violin lessons.... I'm also attacking the technique of being alone.
...
My violin teacher tries to make me think of my left hand as if it were moulding a lump of clay;
I feel that in a more violent and effortful way that is what I'm trying to do to my daily life.
It doesn't give me satisfaction exactly, but helps me stave off pain."

I admire that, and I've seen other people do it--Auntie Vi (my father's sister) at seventy, after her husband's death, looping herself into a new life: picking up and moving to a new neighborhood, making biscotti for her neighbors, getting a part-time job, learning to spin yarn and knit.

My robust sister is like our auntie. She is in no way suicidal--neither was Vi––but since she's retired I see her using the same technique, looping herself into life.
Yesterday she emailed me photos of a gingerbread house she and her wife constructed and are entering in a Gingerbread Wonderland contest.
Sister is also . . . making quilts with a college friend; teaching a child to read (a  school program); walking dogs at the Humane Society; reading the newspaper to an old friend with vision loss; going to the opera with her opera-loving friends; planning trips to visit people around the world. ET CETERA.

All that effort to LOOP INTO LIFE has absolutely no relationship to the sort of person my (our) mother was.
(Nor much to the sort of person I am, though luckily I’m not tempted by suicide). She would never touch the a crochet hook.
No, she filled up her bathtub with New Yorker issues as she read them, filled a bookshelf with DVDs of Italian neorealist films; stopped going out, every year refusing well-intentioned invitations to Thanksgiving dinner; and in her last week, filled her refrigerator with chocolate milk and tapioca pudding, went to bed and shot herself.

No note.

Last night I listened to podcast Mormon Stories for the first time. Mender Julia had recommended it to me when we'd talked about "high-control" groups last week.
I started with a random name from the host's list of Top Interviews: Donna Showalter.

I listened with interest to whole five hours in one go.
Donna was a true believer, and beautifully equipped to sustain and benefit from Mormon life, loving its close community and tight structure.
(I think of how being swaddled tightly can be calming.)

I am not suited to it (ohgodno), but I felt a bit envious of her genuinely happy life--and the host was obviously on board too.

The foundation of Donna's life started to crack, however, when her teenage son came out as gay, the same year the Mormon church declared LGBTQ people personae non gratae. She said that it was as if she'd unknowingly built a solid house on a fault line.

Her entire talk is fascinating and moving. It was not terribly relevant to me though until she talked about how she'd planned to kill herself after the fault line opened wide and the structure of her entire life collapsed.

She chose a way to commit suicide and set a date to do it.
But then she got thinking about all the people she needed to write good-bye letters to. She felt they each deserved individual letters, especially her husband and her four children... and her several sisters... and close friends... and even a woman she'd never met in person but had bonded with online.
All those letters...
"I just didn't have the energy", she said.

It was so, so dear––and so absurd. Marz had come over in time to listen to the last two hours, and we both exploded with laughter.
I entirely, entirely believe in Donna's intense pain—it is obvious! She had lost her skin, as in a house fire.
But if you are so looped into life that you are planning good-bye letters to everyone you know, you are probably well-suited to stay alive.

(A study showed that people who write long good-bye letters are more likely to make unsuccessful suicide attempts. People who make sure they complete the deed are more likely to leave no letter or simply to note practical information: "the car keys are on the hall table.")

Anyway... just thinking on that today.

It is Mend-with-Julia Day today, and I'm heading out to Penny's downtown--with girlettes.

Girlettes are never suicidal.
They are not worried.  They don't care if you're gay, they don't care if you're a devout Mormon. They don't care much about humans at all.
THEY ARE BUSY with their own lives. Little loopsters!
__________

No Sides, Only Love

—the motto of Encircle, the LGBTQ youth center in Mormonland where Donna started to work--(as far I can see, still does)
_______________

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline

If you need suicide or mental-health crisis support, or are worried about someone else, please call or text 988
or visit the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline chat to connect with a trained crisis specialist.

On July 16, 2022, the United States transitioned to the new three-digit dialing code 988 to reach crisis support, called the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (988 Lifeline).
Calls, texts, and online chats to 988 will reach a trained Crisis Specialist.
The change to 988 is one part of a nationwide effort to transition the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to a phone number people can easily remember and access in times of crisis.