I know. I’ve been gone a long time.
I expected the holidays would make my posting sparse, but I didn’t plan on being absent for four-plus weeks, and I’m especially sorry to my regular readers. The reason for my long silence is that we had a tragedy in our family — an unexpected death, a death by suicide.
I want to say that Brian’s death left me at a loss for words, and in many ways that is true. In the face of intense shock and sadness, and in the midst of my surviving family members’ pain, words just simply escaped me. I suppose this was, on one level, because everything I thought to say rang hollow, trite or simply inadequate to the hugeness of what happened so close to home.
But there is more to it than that.
Of all the words that make up my language of astrological psychology — words like love, conflict, aspiration, tension, learning, fighting, defending, reaching out, needing, limiting, ego, boundaries, dissolution — death is both the most ubiquitous and the most out-of-reach. It is very nearly ungraspable in its absoluteness and in the way it brings everything — everything — to a standstill. I just couldn’t, for the last four weeks, grasp Brian’s death enough to form words around it. And since it was all I could think about, I could hardly write about anything else.
But now that I’m back home, with the burial and the memorial service behind us, and a semblance of daily life returning, my first tentative thoughts are taking shape. Here they are.
We often choose death, each one of us, in the course of our daily lives. Of course, the death we choose is usually not literal: It is the death of a relationship, or the end of a job, or the close of a day, the drop into the dark, unpredictable waters of sleep. A door closes and that is that. An ending has occurred, from which there is no return.
Today, I feel sure of very little in life, but I do suspect that the ways we experience the little deaths of the everyday help guide us toward how we handle the final end, when it comes. And yet, although we choose those everyday deaths, in many ways we feel as if we are not, in fact, in charge of them. And so when someone chooses to end their own life, literally, it feels shocking. How could he do this? we think. And: I could never do that!
And yet, we do it too — yes, in a pale-by-comparison way, but we do. Often we blame others for our little daily deaths: I wouldn’t have quit my job if my boss weren’t such an ass. I would have stuck with the diet if things weren’t so stressful right now. I would have chosen strawberry if everyone else hadn’t chosen chocolate.
I don’t mean to be flip, but that kind of thinking — on any level — wraps us up in the Plutonian dynamic of control: Who is the dictator of our lives? Who ultimately decides whether a relationship dies, or a job ends, or a bad habit is over and done with, or even if our life is coming to a close? If our sense of control lies within, we can take responsibility for those endings that prepare us for the final end. But if we see ourselves as the victims of other people’s control, we feel unable to take charge of ourselves, of our destiny.
I’m not trying to analyze Brian’s life. I don’t know how in control he felt or didn’t feel. I’m certainly not advocating for suicide. I am, instead, asking each of us to examine to what degree we give over control of our choices — especially the choice to end something — to other people. Is it always true that others make the choice for us? Or do we instigate that choice sometimes, even unconsciously? And in cases where we truly aren’t in charge, what grace can we see in that?
It is not that we always need to be in control of what happens to us. But choosing to take charge, or choosing to let go and allow the universe to work its mysterious magic on our lives, is, in the most ideal world, a conscious process that advances the work of our souls. For each ending we choose is a distant echo of the Big One, of the final death that will ultimately end our own life as we know it. How do we handle the little earthquakes? Is it the same way we want to handle the big one, when it comes?
This question is often overshadowed by the bigger mystery of death — the what happens next?
Maybe the not-knowing is the most maddening, the most frightening, the most mysterious of all for those who remain. What is Brian experiencing now? Is there a Brian to experience something? The framework of the horoscope chart tells me that yes, there most certainly is — that the circle of life continues spiraling; that time continues on; that his essence has crossed over a particularly transformative point in time/space but that it continues on in some way, being shaped and made evermore whole with each passing day.
In his seminal work Suicide and the Soul, the brilliant scholar and archetypal psychologist James Hillman notes:
If one stands for psychological life, as the [psycho]analyst must, physical life may have to be thwarted and left unfulfilled in order to meet the soul’s claims, its pressing concerns with redemption. (p. 23)
I don’t like it. I don’t want it. I’m fighting it alongside my family. But I am trying to find the place in myself where I can respect it and honor it, where I can hope and believe that Brian’s soul is more whole and alive now than ever before.
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