Kill Yourself and I'll Feel Bad

When Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton asks Willem Dafoe what he was thinking as he hung from the cross in the role of Jesus in the movie The Last Temptation of Christ, Dafoe replies, "The sky never looked so blue." Or thereabouts. That's a paraphrase. The point? In those painful moments, it was impossible to miss the beauty of the world; it was right in front of him and he knew it and loved it.

Which I think is the point of Jesus' dying in the Gospel story: so that we learn that life is beautiful, that we should never give up on life and all its in-the-moment, here-and-now possibilities. Jesus's crucifixion is an ironic reprise of his life: over and over again he heals the sick and raises the dead and sits down to good food and plenty of wine in stories that assure us that life is beautiful.

The stories also show that life is a group project. That one life is contingent on the next; that none of us lives in isolation. This, to my way of thinking and living, is a real bummer. Group projects are a pain in the neck. As my 10-year-old daughter pointed out to me recently, the quality of the group project usually depends on the quality of the work of the loudest person in the group. Has nothing whatever to do with the overall quality of the group unless each member in the group is able to deal effectively with the loudmouth--which is to say that the first shall be last and the last shall be first and the meek shall inherit the earth if everyone else would shut up for five minutes and listen.

Contingency and group work are, I think, decidedly un-American ideas. Here we pride ourselves on our individuality, independent thinking, and self-reliance. We make our own decisions; we hold ourselves responsible.

So, for example, when a young man overdoses on the medications he has stockpiled over a few months and succeeds in killing himself, our pastor assures us his decision was his own and we shouldn't hold ourselves responsible. Likewise, when a middle-aged woman blows her brains out one Christmas Eve, we seek the answers in a clinical diagnosis of her mental health and shrug our shoulders in bewilderment. We ask the Great Unanswerable: Why? But we don't care. We didn't do it; it's beyond us. We are not responsible for the answers.

Those who are openly disapproving of such acts of self-destruction (or liberation and independence if we want to borrow from the vocabulary of patriotism and become very uncomfortable, indeed) sometimes post open letters to the universe advising any other one of us who might consider suicide to stop and think of the terrible guilt our self-annihilation would visit upon the hearts of our survivors.

These open letters are open proof of our sneaking acceptance of contingency. Kill yourself of your own free will and I will feel guilty without the pleasure of making you feel guilty in return. Suicide is so unfair.

Suicide, alas, is a group project. It is the careless and cruel act, word, and gesture of one person after another heaped onto a vulnerable soul that is keenly aware of the weight. If this unfortunate beast of burden has had the privilege of a decent Sunday school education, he or she no doubt suffers the added burden of feeling responsible for the careless and cruel acts, words, and gestures that accumulate on him or her. And then there is the burden of being gracious about it--of forgiving and letting go.

This is a specifically delegated task in the world of group projects. The victim alone must do all of this. Before you know it, he or she is working in negative numbers on a balance sheet heavy with negative numbers. Unworthy, unwanted, unloved. The words go deep. They drip on the forehead like small droplets of water. They are all-consuming, maddening, enervating. Before you know it, the sky is not so blue after all. There is no sky. There is nothing. And breaking even with a zero balance is the honorable thing to do for all those unfortunates who have suffered you to endure their unkind natures for so long.

Group projects. How many of us cringed as children when the teacher announced a group project (and most likely not because they teacher liked them but because it was required by whoever was in charge of the latest teaching methods) because we knew we'd be screwed over by the loudmouth or the control freak? Or burdened with all the work because fate left us with the slackers and the other forms of calculating losers who knew damned well we'd carry their load?

Group projects in a culture that prides itself on thriving on competition seem ridiculous. Yet they get to the truth we in our independent glory hate to admit: that we depend on each other, that our survival depends on cooperation and meaningful interaction, that we live or die by the love we make. Or don't.

Feeling guilty about the woman with her brains on the floor? About the young man who poisoned himself ever so carefully? They don't want you to get to them. Not anymore. If you're going to love anyone well, you damn well better feel a little guilty. Then check out the sky. See if it's still there and just how blue it is.