The Thread
Excerpt from Girl of Light & Shadow: A Memoir of My Daughter, Who Killed Herself (2022), pp. 341-343
IT TOOK THE UNIVERSE 13.8 billion years to create my daughter and just twenty-eight years, three months, and six days to kill her.
Divide twenty-eight into 13.8 billion and you get a number so infinitesimal that it equals, in effect, zero. A blink so brief, the eyelid never flickers. But even if she had enjoyed a long, full lifespan—say, a hundred years—from the perspective of the cosmos, she barely existed at all.
Like you and me.
Yet she, like you and me, was, in fact, a child of the universe (this one, at least). One among its gazillion offspring, an astonishingly unique assemblage of sentient atoms and molecules. Unlike any other that has ever emerged from the cosmic womb since the birth of time and space itself.
From the moment two random haploid cells merged to spark the exponential proliferation of a salient new Homo sapiens within the weary womb of her most recent progenitor, Baby Beth—already genetically unlike even her older sibling, whose DNA was derived from the same two, poorly pair-bonded hominids and nurtured within roughly the same quasi-apocalyptic environmental niche, which we called home—underwent a completely exclusive sequence of events, experiences and extenuating circumstances over her twenty-eight years of continuous growth and development here on planet Earth, under the unpredictable pressures of perplexingly complex, interwoven biological, psychological and social forces, which consequently and consequentially configured and molded, twisted, bent and shattered, repaired, healed, reconfigured and, ultimately, transfigured her into something, well, utterly singular, rare, precious, mysterious and, yeah, sacred to that equally unlikely and infinitesimally tiny fraction of the universe (i.e., humanity in general and me in particular) which had become—through unimaginable eons of astronomical and terrestrial evolution—both conscious and capable of contemplating, indeed, even loving itself.
Which is a pretentious, long-winded way of saying that my daughter was one of a kind.
As such, neither she, as a (hopefully) sympathetic character, nor her life, as an epic poem, nor her death, as a sort of Greek tragedy, can be reduced to a meme or a parable, an object lesson or even a cautionary tale, just because she killed herself and made me the reluctant keeper of her story . . . the singer of her song . . . the weaver of her rainbow shroud.
What I’m trying to say is: there may be no universal message lurking in this particular medium.
The open invitation I extend, therefore, at the finale of this long, rather bizarre, three-act performance, is, simply: Take from this whatever you will.
No one, least of all me, can tell you what you should or should not do about the cosmic conundrum of suicide—either before or after the final, fatal fact. In this universe or any other.
You could turn your face away and close your mind today. Begin your own biopsychosocial autopsy this afternoon. Or terminate your interminable pain tonight. You could wrestle through the night with the why question or its terrifying doppelgänger, the why-not question, or gracefully accept defeat and go to sleep. Ask a different question tomorrow.
Maybe just remember to be grateful for the ephemeral beauty of the blink, however long or short it lasts. To pause and graciously allow the universe to see and know and love itself for one more magical moment before the eye closes forever.
Whatever makes sense of suicide to you, my friends, please, keep your eyes and heart wide open.
What makes sense to me—as a silly stand-in for the fearsome fingers of the Fates—is simply to spin this yarn for you around the communal campfire of our flaming hearts and invite you to follow your own strand of Ariadne’s ball of thread through the labyrinth of life and death.
If my story, if Beth’s story could spare one more human being one more night of solitary torment in the clutches of the Minotaur, believe it or not, that would make the whole unspeakable tragedy well worth speaking aloud.
No, it wouldn’t bring my beloved daughter back from the dead, or fill the smoking holes in my chest and head.
It would, however, lend her seemingly senseless annihilation one more precious ounce of meaning—which could, justifiably, unbalance the cosmic scale again. And tilt it, ever so slightly, toward the tiny bit of light still flickering in an endless sea of dark.
That, my friends, is the thread of hope that I hold onto.
With uncommon ferocity.
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
—William Stafford, “The Way It Is”
Amen.
Jay E. Valusek
Father’s Day, June 19, 2022
Divide twenty-eight into 13.8 billion and you get a number so infinitesimal that it equals, in effect, zero. A blink so brief, the eyelid never flickers. But even if she had enjoyed a long, full lifespan—say, a hundred years—from the perspective of the cosmos, she barely existed at all.
Like you and me.
Yet she, like you and me, was, in fact, a child of the universe (this one, at least). One among its gazillion offspring, an astonishingly unique assemblage of sentient atoms and molecules. Unlike any other that has ever emerged from the cosmic womb since the birth of time and space itself.
From the moment two random haploid cells merged to spark the exponential proliferation of a salient new Homo sapiens within the weary womb of her most recent progenitor, Baby Beth—already genetically unlike even her older sibling, whose DNA was derived from the same two, poorly pair-bonded hominids and nurtured within roughly the same quasi-apocalyptic environmental niche, which we called home—underwent a completely exclusive sequence of events, experiences and extenuating circumstances over her twenty-eight years of continuous growth and development here on planet Earth, under the unpredictable pressures of perplexingly complex, interwoven biological, psychological and social forces, which consequently and consequentially configured and molded, twisted, bent and shattered, repaired, healed, reconfigured and, ultimately, transfigured her into something, well, utterly singular, rare, precious, mysterious and, yeah, sacred to that equally unlikely and infinitesimally tiny fraction of the universe (i.e., humanity in general and me in particular) which had become—through unimaginable eons of astronomical and terrestrial evolution—both conscious and capable of contemplating, indeed, even loving itself.
Which is a pretentious, long-winded way of saying that my daughter was one of a kind.
As such, neither she, as a (hopefully) sympathetic character, nor her life, as an epic poem, nor her death, as a sort of Greek tragedy, can be reduced to a meme or a parable, an object lesson or even a cautionary tale, just because she killed herself and made me the reluctant keeper of her story . . . the singer of her song . . . the weaver of her rainbow shroud.
What I’m trying to say is: there may be no universal message lurking in this particular medium.
The open invitation I extend, therefore, at the finale of this long, rather bizarre, three-act performance, is, simply: Take from this whatever you will.
No one, least of all me, can tell you what you should or should not do about the cosmic conundrum of suicide—either before or after the final, fatal fact. In this universe or any other.
You could turn your face away and close your mind today. Begin your own biopsychosocial autopsy this afternoon. Or terminate your interminable pain tonight. You could wrestle through the night with the why question or its terrifying doppelgänger, the why-not question, or gracefully accept defeat and go to sleep. Ask a different question tomorrow.
Maybe just remember to be grateful for the ephemeral beauty of the blink, however long or short it lasts. To pause and graciously allow the universe to see and know and love itself for one more magical moment before the eye closes forever.
Whatever makes sense of suicide to you, my friends, please, keep your eyes and heart wide open.
What makes sense to me—as a silly stand-in for the fearsome fingers of the Fates—is simply to spin this yarn for you around the communal campfire of our flaming hearts and invite you to follow your own strand of Ariadne’s ball of thread through the labyrinth of life and death.
If my story, if Beth’s story could spare one more human being one more night of solitary torment in the clutches of the Minotaur, believe it or not, that would make the whole unspeakable tragedy well worth speaking aloud.
No, it wouldn’t bring my beloved daughter back from the dead, or fill the smoking holes in my chest and head.
It would, however, lend her seemingly senseless annihilation one more precious ounce of meaning—which could, justifiably, unbalance the cosmic scale again. And tilt it, ever so slightly, toward the tiny bit of light still flickering in an endless sea of dark.
That, my friends, is the thread of hope that I hold onto.
With uncommon ferocity.
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
—William Stafford, “The Way It Is”
Amen.
Jay E. Valusek
Father’s Day, June 19, 2022
