Winter in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland

I'm sorry.

I can't be snarky or funny today. On Friday night, my hero de-mapped himself, and I can't snap out of it. I think about it every time I'm alone with my thoughts. So maybe if I work through it here I can find some peace with it. Or maybe Sweetney and Amalah will have tell me to take a medical leave of absence or something. I am beside myself over the death of a man I never met.

David Foster Wallace will remembered best by some for his frequent use of footnotes. Already dozens of obituaries and tributes have been littered with them. I won't do that, though. I think it would cheapen his meaning to me, somehow. David was more than a footnote, more than an afterthought or tangental tidbit.

He was my first crush on a writer, my first real love affair with a particular writer and his body of work. No one has come close to exciting me as much since. I sat down tonight, determined to right something upbeat and funny. I was going to write about Lindsay Lohan or naked Harry Potter. But every time I tried, David dominated my thoughts. So here it is, a feeble attempt to understand it, or at least why it's affected me so deeply.

I read Infinite Jest when I was 19 at the behest of my boyfriend at the time. It took me three times to get past page 87. The first 200 pages are hard, but then you just can't put it down, he insisted. God, how pretentious does that sound? And, yet, he was right. I loved it. It was grandiose, epic and—I must admit, nine years later—in need of a heavier editor's hand. But as oppressive and intimidating as it seemed, this book deeply affected me. It burrowed into some undiscovered part of my brain, tickled it awake and made me realize I wanted to be a real writer. And so, in a way, I feel as though I've lost more than a beloved author: I lost a mentor. The feeling is crushing, and yet I'm embarrassed by the weight it bears for me, though not nearly as embarrassed as I imagine David would be to see the outpouring of grief for his passing and praise for his work upon the news of his death. He always seemed so uncomfortable with the word "genius," and it chased him wherever he went during his short life.

David wrote like he spoke in his '97 interview with Charlie Rose: in rambling, self-conscious and complex thoughts, forming run-on sentences that seemed to be going nowhere until they came to a logical, grammatically correct end; seeming both stream-of-conscious and perfectly premeditated. He was brilliant, but I always got the feeling he didn't think so, that he was constantly plagued with self-doubt. While he has been called pretentious and self-indulgent by critics, I always found him humble and endearing; dorky and cool at the same time. Intimidating, yes, but nevertheless approachable.

David alluded many times to problems with severe depression and subsequent substance abuse; his experiences in AA were instrumental to the writing of Infinite Jest. Wallace also had been previously hospitalized in the late 80s on self-requested suicide watch. According to his father, James Donald Wallace, David took anti-depressants for more than 20 years, until June of last year, when he stopped at the suggestion of his doctor due to the side effects. The depression returned, and while he made several attempts to treat it again, all of them proved unsuccessful.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Since reading of his death, I have read and heard many comments from friends and strangers that suicide is a cowardly act. That only selfish people kill themselves. And I've grappled with that idea a lot, because part of me wants to agree. It's so much easier than the alternative. And yet, I keep returning to a passage from Infinite Jest that is particularly poignant in hindsight:

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
- DFW, Infinite Jest

When I read that, I simply cannot diminish mental anguish as somehow lesser than physical anguish. I know from firsthand experience the pain of depression, though mine was episodic rather than chronic, and far less severe than the depression DFW suffered. Even still, I wanted to end my life at times. I could choose to write David off as a coward as others have, on the grounds that I survived my own depression; or, I can acknowledge that, though I had the "courage" to withstand the pain, my endurance may have been possible only because the flames weren't hot enough.

The truth is, no one can ever fully understand another person's experience. All I know for sure is that, sometime on Friday night, the world lost a great writer, as well as several points off its collective IQ. And whether it was the result of an act of cowardice or hubris or euthanasia, it's fucking sad.

...

The board will nod and you will go, and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-blotched sky, punctured light emptying behind sharp stone that is forever. That is forever. Step into the skin and disappear.

Hello.

- DFW, "Forever Overhead"

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