The Dogs of Babel

Yesterday, while in Barnes and Noble, I spotted a book that I had read about months ago.  At the time I had wanted the book and I knew yesterday that I still wanted it.  I was strongly drawn to it for no reason that I can come up with.  I'm glad I decided to buy it.  I finished it today.  It's a wonderful book that I can't reccomend enough.  The Dogs of Babel A novel By Carolyn Parkhurst.  As far as I can find, this is her first novel and a wonderful one at that.  It's a look at how one man deals with the unexpected death of his wife and takes you through all his stages of grief, however strange they may be.  If you ever feel like reading a really good novel, I suggest this one.  I'm going out tomorrow to buy The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.  I wanted to copy a paragraph from The Dogs onto the journal for all of you to read.  I'll explain my reasoning after I've copied it down.

Suicide is just a moment, Lexy told me.  This is how she described it to me.  For just a moment, it doesn't matter that you've got people who love you and that the sun is shining and there's a movie coming out this weekend that you've been dying to see.  It hits you all of a sudden that nothing is ever going to be okay, ever, and you kind of dare yourself: Is this it?  You start thinking that you've known this was coming all along, but don't know if today's going to be the day.  And if you think about it too much, it's probably not.  But you dare yourself.  You pick up a knife and press it gently to your skin, you look out a nineteenth-story window and you think, I could just do it.  I could just do it.  And most of the time, you look at the height and you get scared, or you think about the poor people on the sidewalk below - what if there are kids coming home from school and they have to spend the rest of their lives trying to forget this terrible thing you're going to make them see?  And the moment's over.  You think about how sad it would've been if you never got to see that movie, and you look at your dog and wonder who would've taken care of her if you had gone.  And you go back to normal.  But you keep it there in your mind.  Even if you never take yourself up on it, it gives you a kind of comfort to know that the day is yours to choose.  You tuck it away in your brain like sour candy tucked in your sheek, and the puckering memory it leaves behind, the rough pleasure of running  your tongue over its strange terrain, is exactly the same.

In my opinion, that's what it's like.  Suicide is just a moment.  It's not something you go through always, it's just a moment in time.  And just with any other strong memory, you carry it with you always.  I'm not ashamed of my attempt at suicide all those years ago.  I wear my scars like a badge of honor.  I made it.  I lived through the worst time of my life, somehow.  If I could make it through that, I can make it through anything.  In times of doubt, pain and grief, I run my finger over that scar, sometimes, unknowingly because it gives me the strength to get through the next obstacle.  When someone asks about it, I tell them everything they want to know, I hold nothing back.  I feel they're asking for a reason, a reason known only to them but that they honestly need to know the answers to their questions.  If I don't answer them honestly, how can I possibly help them?  I guess only those that have gone through that deep of despair can truly understand how I can consider something of strength.  It's hard for a "normal" person to imagine seriously considering taking their own life.  They wonder how you could be so selfish but for that one moment, all those other things in your life no longer matter.  It takes over your life, and your mind.  For that one moment, you no longer control who you are.  What's stranger yet is, during that one moment, you feel calmer and more in control of your life than you had in months.  You stand there, seriously considering how to do yourself in and you feel calm.  To come back from that, I think anyone should consider being strong.  To pull yourself out of that, well it takes some major work.  Once that moment is over for you, it's over but for others it takes much longer for them to leave that moment behind.  They're the sane ones, the ones that wonder what the hell is wrong with your brain to make you attempt such a thing.  You can see it in their eyes for months.  They watch very carefully what they say and worry that they may have said something to send you back to that moment.  But it's not a sentence or an event that sends you to that moment.  It's many sentences and many events all conviently at the wrong time in your life that put you in that moment.  You wonder if things had happened a little differently, if you would've still considered it.  But if you live through it, you learn.  What doesn't kill us, really does make us stronger, no matter how painful it is to get through those things.