Endless Knots

"Ducking Grief"

I just wrote a long post re: this haunting column in today's NY Times by K.A. Ledding about the suicide of her teenage daughter and, as I was writing the last sentence, the screen went blank. I leave it to readers to interpret. Having had this happen in the past, I'm prone to ascribe all kinds of meaning -- and to try to reconstruct a complicated piece.

Just this for now: I hesitate to write about grief at all for reasons the author of the Times piece clarifies: This column explains why there are a lot of people studying the nutritional content of canned goods in grocery stores.

That which is unsaid is often what the griever needs to hear most: the hug, the nod, the wordless walk on a path the dead person loved, shawls--one made by hand, a floral arrangement sent by a child on an important date.

Asking *how* someone is doing is not that helpful. And as we used to say in the (RIP) newspaper biz...

-30-

Liam Rector's death

Liam Rector, the highly honored poet and founder and director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, which includes its low-residency MFA program, shot himself to death last Wednesday at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 57 (New York Times obit here by Margalit Fox, same woman who wrote Carolyn Goodman's obit).

Several of my friends teach in the Bennington program; others have been Liam's students; still others knew and respected him professionally. I only met him once and not in a situation where we had the chance to talk. He was on an accreditation visit for a prospective writing program; the executive director of the program, a dear friend, asked me to speak with Liam and a few other accreditors about why I thought the program would serve students well. I enjoyed the hour or so that I spent with him--and he made enough of an impression for me to gasp when I opened The Times last week.

Suicide is destabilizing to survivors in ways that no other type of death is. In my efforts to understand why people I have loved have ended their own lives, including my cousin, Gretchen Older, my aunt, Isabel Shoket Grossner, and our friend, Frank Aller, among others, I have written about suicide over the years. Here, I offer this 700-word excerpt about a suicide that takes place in my novel, The Persuasion.