Pier Suicide in January
NB: This piece is unfinished.
A suicide of the ego it was, an annihilation of the madness gifted to her by big pharma who knew better how to cure her madness than any method of the spirit we might have tried to bestow upon her.
It was one of those terrible Welsh winters when she escaped from the madhouse and walked into the water at the pier and her body was found the next morning. She had left a note for her only child. Apparently drowning is the least painful way to go.
Outside my window the snow was about three feet deep when the phone rang early and a voice said “have you heard about —“
I had received a text from her less than a week ago which said, “wish I had never come in here and agreed to all these drugs, don’t know where my head is now. Wish I had stuck to the program.”
She was one of the privileged few whom I met when I rolled up at an AA meeting before yet another breakdown in my life.
She did not appear to like me at all because I had blue eyes and blonde hair.
Her remark indicating that I was not one of her favourites went, “blue eyes can get you anything.”
Not true. Not at all true. But the jibe was duly noted and so I set out to make her like me.
She was seemingly very intelligent and a writer too. A Welsh language writer. Nationalistic to the core. Published. Well known within the tiny goldfish bowl of Welsh-speaking Wales. Everything I disliked about my so-called homeland. Not my homeland. Not at all.
Her family tried to find out if she had been to any more AA meetings by asking me. They did not approve of AA, they maintained that AA was making her mad.
This is possible, of course. AA never really helped me. AA made me insane, really. AA perpetuated the problems, told me that alcoholism was an inherited illness; basically put all the blame on me when I have survived the torment of AA to come through it and say that AA does not work.
Many suicides later (none of which were mine) – I testify wholeheartedly to the fact that there are other, better, more effective ways to get sober and stay sober than via the fucked up vortex of twelve stepping which can easily turn into a self-centred ego-trip that will last the rest of your life.
She took me to the cinema one night because I was new in the city and she was a local by then. We saw ‘Julia’ – not a good choice for a woman trying to recover from alcoholism. Tilda Swinton, stunning as always, though – gave me hope that redemption comes in myriad ways if only one can be awake when the means are presented.
I began frequenting her kitchen because I had nowhere else to go during the day and writers who do not work are always at home.
What was it about her book that haunted her so during the nights? She reckoned she had sabotaged her own future by publishing that book, that she had carved out a future for her daughter, too, which she regretted, which she feared.
She made Welsh cawl – a dish I find revolting – and we sat and chatted and smoked. She was not well when she smoked, it gave her “scorpions on the brain.” She was not really an alcoholic, she told me. She was only toying with AA. She was confused. She could have just one drink and go home.
“Then you are not an alcoholic,” I said.
She called me and said, “I don’t suppose you do that sponsoring thing, do you?”
This is a typically Welsh-crafted question… Welsh questions begin by assuming a negative, Welsh questions kick off by negating the recipient’s response… imagine what that does to the collective consciousness of an entire nation?
So I took her question on board and immediately responded, “yes of course I sponsor and it would be an honour to be your sponsor.”
Thinking ‘thank god for California – where I first found sobriety – the land of positive feedback and a spirit based on the words ‘you can.’
Leave it to Wales to kill the spirit of positivity.
She knew R.S. Thomas. She told me he was a miserable man. She told me the story of how he had shut the door in the face of some journalist who drove all the way from London to North Wales to present the great poet with a literary award… she told me that R.S. became happier later in life when he got himself a younger wife. R.S. Thomas wrote: “Alright, I was Welsh / does it matter?”
I will love R.S. Thomas into eternity. Unflinching honest poetry from the gut. Puts that imposter Dylan to shame…
She told me about sex, too – something Welsh women simply have to talk about no matter what… and they make sex sound so ugly that the only way for me when here is celibacy.
So into the sea she walked in January. Hypothermia would have set in. Drowning? Maybe not. Maybe the cold killed her.
This week I walked by night to the pier. Long forgotten was the suicide of this “friend.” And when I saw the pier I realised that I had not visited it since before she killed herself there. It’s a nice pier. It was two o clock in the morning when I went for a solitary walk there… I was standing in the dark entrance to the beach when a couple saw me and said, “are you alright, love?”
I wondered did anyone ask her the same, that night when she walked into the water. But it was January, unlikely that anyone would have been out there in January.
What have big pharma done to assist the depressed and suicidal among us? And why are there no reliable psychiatrists in this country? And why is AA such a catastrophe in this country? Why is the relapse rate so horrific? And are there any recovering alcoholics in this country who actually live fulfilling lives?
I think there is something terribly wrong with Wales.
*As of December 2020, revisiting this unfinished short story, that last line stays in and ought to be written again… I think there is something terribly wrong with Wales.
These stories are based on actual experiences… I write them for love of life and nothing more… if you like these stories and wish to contribute to the continuation of their production please consider donating… writing is a most impecunious business and I signed up for life… any donation, no matter the amount, is sincerely appreciated but never expected…
