I find that I'm responding to the death of David Foster Wallace (who hung himself last September) much as I did to that of Kurt Cobain. I wasn't more than superficially familiar with either man or the work thereof before his death - my reaction has been much more of my mind than my gut. Cobain showed me that a person could be living his (my) dream - making a living doing the thing he loved to do, receiving critical and popular acclaim for doing so, maintaining a home in a beautiful city, and creating a family with a woman he loved - and it still might not be enough to quiet the hateful voices in his head. Limitless alcohol and heroin might not be enough. For him, the only way to silence the voices was to extinguish himself.
Kurt Cobain taught me that living the dream did not mean you'd have peace of mind; that having it all was not the same thing as having enough. When Cobain died, I was well into active addiction and I didn't really put it all together until after I got clean. I just knew his death commanded my attention.
In David Foster Wallace I see the me that has fought the good fight - gone through year after year of treatment for the depression that required multiple trials with various pharmaceutical cocktails before achieving some relief. My illness has been called "medically resistant" and ever since reading Undercurrents I have wondered if I should ask about the ECT Wallace submitted himself to. He lived my back-up dream - writer, college professor, spouse - and survived well into middle-age before whatever it is inside us became too much to beat back.
I'm not sure what I'll ultimately take away from Wallace's life and death. My audience is certainly not as demanding as his; my life is the result of not making promises I was afraid I wouldn't be able to keep. I'm not a high-energy person to begin with and I deliberately conserve strength to fight my disease(s) - is that the best I'll ever be able to do?
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