99 New: Slow Learner

I give you this boot. It’s a beautiful boot, especially after I shined it this afternoon, but it’s still a boot.

The boot is here because I can’t sort out what I think about watching Anthony Bourdain on TV. He is the famous chef who hung himself earlier this year. In his television show, Parts Unknown, he is endlessly fascinating in a self-absorbed, careless kind of way and attractive, I imagine, to people of all orientations. So I watch him, thinking how enormously charismatic he is, or was, while I puzzle over his death, asking the question every idiot asks, why would such a person want to end his life?

It is a question with a hundred mile answer. I can’t even start.

I try to imagine being the spouse or the parent of a person who died by suicide; I try to imagine being a suicide survivor. Except I can’t really. You’d think it would be easy since I’ve known several people who have suffered this way. But I try to put myself in their shoes and I can do it only so far as sensing the bottomless grief or more accurately acknowledging my fear of the bottomless grief. Both of which make me want to cover my face with my hands.

And the thinking and sorting out that comes later, probably for years. The sifting through of reasons and context, things that weren’t known, things that were, the endlessness of analysis, how long does it take not to ask the rookie question, not to be the dumb, incredulous person looking at pictures of beautiful people who have died by suicide and asking why would such people want to end their lives.

I don’t understand but I’m working on it.