The summer I was fourteen going into the ninth grade, I worked as janitor and ticket cashier in a bar-melodrama venue in Buckskin Joe, Colorado.
Buckskin Joe is a fake gold-mining ghost town a few miles west of Canyon City, in the mountains, near Royal Gorge.
I got the job because the kid who had it before me had told everyone he had to leave, no one knew why.
It turned out he left because he was planning to commit suicide.
He trained me in over a few evenings in his last week.
The news that he had killed himself was a shock, even though I hadn't liked him much—he seemed coldly arrogant and fastidious.
I’m sure that this was partly a self-defensive impulse on my part, but when people would talk about the “tragedy” of the loss (and I could see how devastating it was for his mom and brother, who immediately left the production), my strong reaction was that, in the broadest sense, there had been no loss at all.
The kid’s life was not less valuable for the fact that he had not lived to adulthood. And there was nothing further he could have gained in life that would have remained to him, anyhow.
This feeling has stayed with me to this day.
And it is a joyful feeling, too—a conviction of the unique and equal value of every life. The kid was himself, and that fact can never change, whatever his pain and maladaptation. (It was easy or me to feel this way, of course. I did not love him, and thus did not have the labor of re-assimilating the parts of myself that I had lost in him.)
Not long ago, I had a conversation about suicide with my younger daughter.
I said the only way I could survive the devastation would be to respect and accept the decision—scary, because it almost seemed like permission—but I as father have no power to forbid or permit such a thing.
As it turned out, I not only got the kid’s cashier job, but his brother’s role in the play as well.
I remember, I was talking about the suicide backstage with a high school girl from Canyon City I flirted with. She asked me if I would ever kill myself.
“Yes,” I said.
But (just me)
I’m pretty sure I never would.
Buckskin Joe is a fake gold-mining ghost town a few miles west of Canyon City, in the mountains, near Royal Gorge.
I got the job because the kid who had it before me had told everyone he had to leave, no one knew why.
It turned out he left because he was planning to commit suicide.
He trained me in over a few evenings in his last week.
The news that he had killed himself was a shock, even though I hadn't liked him much—he seemed coldly arrogant and fastidious.
I’m sure that this was partly a self-defensive impulse on my part, but when people would talk about the “tragedy” of the loss (and I could see how devastating it was for his mom and brother, who immediately left the production), my strong reaction was that, in the broadest sense, there had been no loss at all.
The kid’s life was not less valuable for the fact that he had not lived to adulthood. And there was nothing further he could have gained in life that would have remained to him, anyhow.
This feeling has stayed with me to this day.
And it is a joyful feeling, too—a conviction of the unique and equal value of every life. The kid was himself, and that fact can never change, whatever his pain and maladaptation. (It was easy or me to feel this way, of course. I did not love him, and thus did not have the labor of re-assimilating the parts of myself that I had lost in him.)
Not long ago, I had a conversation about suicide with my younger daughter.
I said the only way I could survive the devastation would be to respect and accept the decision—scary, because it almost seemed like permission—but I as father have no power to forbid or permit such a thing.
As it turned out, I not only got the kid’s cashier job, but his brother’s role in the play as well.
I remember, I was talking about the suicide backstage with a high school girl from Canyon City I flirted with. She asked me if I would ever kill myself.
“Yes,” I said.
But (just me)
I’m pretty sure I never would.
