To an aesthete dying young

The outpouring of grief that has followed on Terry’s death has been in the large style that Terry so loved. The first response to the news of someone’s self-annihilation is to start doing things, connecting to the people he knew, getting involved in all the reassuringly time-consuming pieces of death. You listen to his favorite music and you read his favorite books; you dig out all his old letters. You write about him; in your head, you write to him. You try to do all the things you didn’t do so much when he was alive, as though first able to act on love when it is over. Your heart begins to widen with all the memories it cannot shake—memories of happiness, these being sad because they are of lost time; and memories of sorrow, which are sad by their very essence. I began a process of rereading e-mails and reliving conversations and recalling experiences, and it was as though I noticed for the first time how much I had loved Terry, how little I’d known it. I don’t know whether it’s worse to imagine that speaking such love might have mitigated his despair, or to imagine that it would not. Nothing is more present than absence. The world with Terry was a world full of other people; the world without Terry is a world from which he alone seems to be missing.

I am back in touch with all our mutual friends, some of them people I hadn’t spoken to in three decades. I keep thinking how much Terry would have loved being the only topic in all our minds, month after month. It remains hard to believe that we aren’t planning some kind of surprise party for him, that after all this emotional outpouring, he isn’t going to sweep in, delighted, wearing that green cape. It would have been his twenty-fifth reunion in spring 2009, and I had hoped he’d fly to the United States for it. It was mine this spring, and the seven-month shadow of his death seemed to fall long across all the events in New Haven; Terry has taken a certain pleasant haze of memory right out of the world with him. All that happiness under the banner of Eli, that becoming of ourselves? It was awfully high concept, as it turns out. Terry has broken hearts over which he did not know he held any dominion. If he had known, would it have saved him? Would this aftermath of his suicide have been enough to prevent it? If we had loved him alive the way we love him dead, might he be alive still? Do his failed hopes mean that the joy he felt was never real? And the joy he gave to other people? Do we need to retract it? Can it live on in the world without him? Was death always written in you, Terry? Should we have been able to see it? Back in those days of the green cape and the Charles Jourdan boots, should we have known that you were as tragic as the operas you relished for their absurd theatricality? Did we keep ourselves blind because we were careless, or because we didn’t want to see you, or because we had only fooled ourselves that the surfaces in which we traded were depths?

While some people get the worst of their anguish over volcanically and early, in others it builds up like a coastal shelf. People kill themselves at any or every stage of life. Terry would have been more likely to commit suicide if he had been elderly and Hungarian and if it had been April, but none of those things was true, and the vast science on the topic is mostly just a compendium of such correlations. The fact that someone is extremely happy does not mean that person is not also extremely sad; extreme happiness is often a window onto sadness if we know enough to look through it. And yet I had continued to believe in a permanent Terry-ness impermeable to damage. I did not realize how Terry had perceived a pressure to be exuberant, an imperative that made him feel he had failed whenever he was blue. From his sense of failure there grew a great darkness out of keeping with his lifelong affect, and in the end, his personal etiquette of jubilation eclipsed his clinical decay, so that even those of us who specialize in the psyche could not see it.

Terry had an illness that was distinct from but contiguous with his personality. He had been brave enough to start treatment, to seek insight, but insight had not redeemed him, as insight often doesn’t. It is heartbreaking to give words to your pain only to find that pain unaffected by articulation. It is a betrayal—the betrayal inherent in art’s and philosophy’s clear descriptions of what they cannot improve. For Terry, art historian and philosopher, that familiar betrayal became a disease state. Psychoanalysis can look to early experience and trauma; social theory can pin things on an emotional style, or on homophobia. Behaviorists can blame the way he processed his experiences, or the stories he told to himself. Neurobiologists could comment on the rate at which serotonin was taken up in his brain. All we can say for sure is that the clues Terry gave of being depressed looked smaller to all of us around him than the depression they marked turned out to be. Why this October? Why in this way? Why, if he had enough Terry-ness left to choose so beautiful a spot, did he not want to live? Life is unimaginable to everyone at 20 and there are no instructions to let you see a way through. But if you can make it to 48, what goes wrong so far along the course of life to make the prospect of being 49 so much worse than the prospect of being 47 was two years ago? What suddenly makes hope seem like a naïve posture, when it had cushioned you for so many decades?

No one who has known someone who killed himself can feel free of the burden of guilt. A suicide is the failure of a thousand chances to help, of everyone’s capacity to save the person who has died. Suicide takes you back to tragedy as a through line that holds experience of every kind in place. Terry’s other friends and I, grieving together, have agreed that we could not have changed his sadness, but I like to think I might have taught him the pleasure of sadness, something his ruthless merriment kept him from learning. We all might have explained that it is possible to be overcome with sorrow and still find meaning in that sorrow, reason enough to stay alive. The strange thing is that Terry is one of the people who taught that to me; our friendship was a long lesson in resilience. In my times of darkness, he was part of the scaffolding that held me in the world. Terry, who cheered my mother up before she died, has now died himself for lack of cheer. Isn’t there some mathematics to fix that damaged equation?

I wanted to ask Marcello whether they had been happy days for Terry, the ones I kept remembering from that time when we lived together in Silliman, whether Terry had remembered them fondly, too. I knew I had failed to understand who he became, but I wondered if I had been right in understanding who he was, at least. But I felt I could not weigh Marcello down with my trivial wish for reassurance, and I kept my anxieties to myself. Ten days after the suicide, unprompted, Marcello told me via e-mail that he had been called to the morgue to prepare Terry for cremation. “I was told to bring some clothes,” he wrote to me, “and I think that Terry would have appreciated his Yale jacket.”