I was watching Arrested Development when my sister April called to say that they had found Pat’s body. Our older sister had gone missing a few days before and everyone feared the worst: she had tried suicide in the past, botching the job with a razor, and her house was filled with letters and packages addressed to different people. She was organized to the end; in life she often sent her Christmas presents in November and death wasn’t going to change her habits. But it wasn’t until the sheriff found her body in a hotel room that we knew she had gone through with it this time. These are the only circumstances in which suicide can be seen as a success.
Our friend Paulette was staying with us and was watching Arrested Development with me. The jury was still out on the new season of the black comedy, released online by Netflix; it seemed less agile and clever than the previous seasons and we were braced for disappointment. I took the phone call from April in the yard while Paulette sat in the living room, watching TV by herself. When I came back in I sat with her stupidly for a while, looking at the show and not knowing what to do.
Pat had been the one to call and tell me that our father had killed himself, about eight years earlier. I was working for a magazine in midtown Manhattan and Beth, the editor in the cubicle next to mine, must have picked up on the gist of the conversation—he had been sick and depressed and we had shared stories about difficult fathers—for when I stood up she stood up with me, like two puppets escaping the show. “Do you want to go outside?” she said.
I called my wife first and gave her the news; she suggested I meet her at her office and we could go home together. It was almost the end of the workday and it seemed important to beat the crowds at Grand Central. We walked up Sixth Avenue for a bit and I remember feeling lost in the canyons of buildings. Between the little cubicles and the towering skyscrapers there didn’t seem to be anywhere to put the feelings I had, no place to take the news.
I told Paulette what had happened and she said she was sorry. She knew Pat was missing, and feared the worst. She’s lost a few loved ones of her own, most recently her husband to cancer, and she doesn’t expect that much comedy anymore. But she still likes a good laugh.
Pat died on June 5th of an overdose of Nembutal, a drug I had only heard of before in the Clash song about Montgomery Clift, “The Right Profile” (“Nembutal numbs it all,” Joe Strummer mumbled darkly, “but I prefer alcohol!”). It’s illegal in the US but like most illegal things, it can be got for a price and with a little persistence. I’m starting to learn more about the suicide clubs out there online (Pat belonged to one) and wondering what to do with that knowledge. I have written about Pat’s death and its aftershocks on the site Purple Clover, and they have been great, taking whatever I hit them with. But when I finally met the editor in Venice last week I asked him if I could do anything differently in my columns.
“They could be happier,” he said, allowing that a suicide in the family really brings the conversation down. I don’t want my own development to get arrested while trying to grapple with my grief, but can’t put down the death mask quite so easily either. Two faces have I.