When your sanity is dissolving, you will not be able to tell how long you have before collapse. In the course of long, slow rust, of gradual wear, we cannot predict the exact moment when the compromised structure will fail. Be it a rusted tower or a section of natural rock that shears off the side of a mountain- we know these things happen sometimes, and that when they do, they happen suddenly.
So it is with the fall to despair.
I want to tell you of the forces I hold accountable for the loss of my friend Lea, who died in April of this year, in distant India, ostensibly of suicide.
I hold the state of US politics to blame for making the country she was living in so unsafe that it seemed better to return to her family of origin despite knowing they would damage her. I blame every part of the alt-right political machine and the wave of anti-trans sentiment and the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment; I blame every fool, every single one, who has taken the easier road of echoing that hatred and spreading its reach, and its power to appear to be THE dominant narrative, rather than taking time to absorb the reasons people have found to challenge and dismantle it; rather than taking on both the hard work and the blow to the ego that taking culpability and taking it seriously, for one's own opinions and for one's place in the world, always, necessarily, is.
And not just in the United States. We live in an Internet age. Cultural conversations do not stop at national borders. I have lived with a roommate in this very city whose conspiracy mindedness and loud, inadequately examined opinions are part of the cultural moment which is one of the primary and direct causes of Lea's suicide. I hold him to blame for propagating, for being a vector of infection of this social disease which keeps convincing our most anxious and beautiful friends that they speak for the world and the world wants them to die, just not in public where it will interfere with my morning commute please.
I hold her family of origin to blame for being too obsessed with maintaining status, wealth and a high-status, high-wealth kind of respectability to make room for her to be nothing like them. I blame them for shaming her for defiance, for calling it ungrateful that she would dare to define herself differently. I blame them for holding out just enough hope of emotional support, of financial support, that she would not leave, would not countenance letting her true friends help with money because we who wanted her out of the despair machine enough to beg her to accept it were not wealthy enough to spare it painlessly.
I blame the fact that we are still living in the kind of artificially maintained and exaggerated scarcity, globally, that makes a few thousand dollars both a needed thing and a hard thing to spare, to help a friend to "No really, get out, be anywhere but there."
And to myself and the others who loved her, who tried, I assign us our own tiny slivers as well. For that we could have done more. We who tried, we are the ones who know we failed; We know we lost, because what we lost is clear. We lost her.
Our power in some ways is so, so small, in the face of the political machine, the whole industry of slant and slander, of framing the narrative; in the face of ICE sweeping through the United States; in the face of the entitled judgement of an upper class family securely established within rather than against the present social order of this political moment whatever that looks like in distant India.
But at the same time, I think those of us with our eyes open know and understand, knew and understood, that although our own parts of the blame for the misery of her situation were so tiny as to be negligible, almost not even there, we were and are responsible.
Because she was one of our own. With our power so terribly small, nevertheless, we have to take responsibility because nobody else was going to. We are the ones who lost because we were the ones working to save her. We were the only ones playing for those stakes, the stakes we held in her health, her heart, her continued existence among us. We lost.
The huge impersonal machines between the cogs of which we scurry and are crushed like ants and like mice will not mourn the loss of my Lea. The alt-right ideologues who condemned her to death do not care to even know her name. Not her living name, nor her dead one.
But I will carry this loss with me for all of my days. I will carry her blood on my hands in the knowledge that I could have done more, even with my tiny share of power, had I more skill, more persistence, in leveraging it. If only. And NOT "if only we knew". We did know. I, at least, did know that she was in a tenuous position. I, at least, did know that if she kept on as she was, she was going to collapse. And it is not in the nature of things that erode and collapse that you can tell when exactly the fall will come.
Nor is it ours to know what, if anything, will survive to be salvaged afterward.
I knew as much in her case as I can ever reasonably expect to know.
If only I had been more alarmed. Pushed back harder when she lied to me that she was okay; You know, chin up, tut tut, carry on, don't fuss over me.
I do not want to be rid of the culpability. The share of Lea's blood that is on my hands is a sacred thing. You cannot and you should not try to remove it from me.
A good friend is a painful stake to lose, and it seems to me that it's good and right that it should change me.
Lea, you are not forgotten. And in your name and in your honour...
I do not intend to let the opportunity slip, to learn from this pain... that I want... to have fought harder. That I want to fight harder.
Not to wait for the permission of the dying to cry out my distress, to plead and to insist:
that what I can is mine to do,
and what I have is mine to give,
and it is my right to judge, and to say and to keep saying, even if it makes them so uncomfortable they might decide to just block me, that one particular other person's life and sanity is worth more to me personally than five thousand dollars I might never get back.
No comments:
Post a Comment