Crystal, Clearly

“Did you really want to die?”
“No one commits suicide because they want to die.”
“Then why do they do it?”
“Because they want to stop the pain.” 

― Tiffanie DeBartolo
How to Kill a Rock Star

The first person to wish me a happy birthday in my adult life was a mortician. Earlier that night, I’d taken my great-grandmother’s dinner into her room only to find her body lifeless. By the time all the fuss was over, the paperwork filled out, and her body carted away, we were in the wee hours of the next day. 

I had answered most of the mortician’s questions and he was going to have me sign the papers when I remembered that I couldn’t as a minor, so one of the other relatives present would have to, but then we realized that it was after midnight, and I wasn’t a minor anymore.

He wished me a happy birthday and I signed off on all the information that would go on my great-grandmother’s death certificate. Death has been the constant companion of my adult life, and still grief can knock me off my feet as if we’d never met. 

The first time I wanted to die I was thirteen. Seventh grade was really hard. I’d always been socially awkward and struggled to fit in with my peers. Walter Reed Junior High was the first place I was ever bullied by my teacher, though. Authority figures kept going on about how everything we did now would go on our permanent records but all I could do was screw things up. My record was a mess and I was being told that it was all permanent. The world was full of all of these big problems- world hunger, the A.I.D.S. crisis, police brutality, South African apartheid, so many important things I thought I should fix and I couldn’t even keep track of when my homework was due.

Growing up seems like this ongoing accumulation of things that I cannot unknow and I cannot fix. You learn that there are awful things going on and you’re supposed to just go on like that’s fine. It’s like there’s a part of me that started screaming a very long time ago, and the world keeps adding all of these new horrors and the scream keeps getting louder, but I’m not supposed to fix any of those things.

I was supposed to turn in my homework. I’m supposed to pay my rent. I’m supposed to not become the problem that anybody else’s scream is about. Just keep swimming… Sometimes, I wonder how much of my personality is just trauma response, this desperate optimism, always looking on the bright side because I’m still afraid of the dark.

Suicide runs in my father’s family. More accurately, depression flows like lava, slow and destructive, beneath a deceptively calm shell. It means that when my kids were going through the usual funks and angsts, I was hypervigilant and terrified. It means that when a professor mentions a poet who killed himself with a gun, the part of my brain that is usually a distracted goldfish in class suddenly freezes and pays attention. 

Coincidentally, that poet, Antero Tarquínio de Quental, wrote a poem titled Nirvana. In class, we joked about how it has nothing to do with the grunge band of the same name. I laughed, but then it occurred to me that it has everything to do with them. There are so many parallels between Antero de Quental and Kurt Cobain.

Kurt Cobain is quoted as saying, “Nirvana means freedom from pain and suffering in the external world, and that’s close to my definition of punk rock.” In his poem Nirvana, Antero de Quental wrote “Livre de angústias e felicidades” (“Free of anguish and happiness”). I find it very telling that both men were so interested in an end to worldly pain. 

They each, in their time, fought against the popular illusions. The realists of the 1870s were a response to the romantics that preceded them. The grunge movement of the 1990s was a response in part to the impact of MTV on the music industry. Musicians, particularly lead singers, as teen idols weren’t new in the 1980s. Still, there was a sense in L.A. at the time that a band’s headshots were starting to matter more than their demo tapes. 

That’s where grunge comes in, calling bullshit and refusing to play along. Even outside the music industry, grunge was a giant middle finger to the questionable practice of keeping up appearances. At the time, grunge felt like it was taking ego out of art and I found that beautiful.

De Quental was pro-Republic and a believer in the separation of church and state. Cobain’s politics were less governmental and more societal, playing at Rock for Choice (a pro-choice benefit concert series) and signing off on gems like this:

At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.

– Incesticide liner notes

Both of these artists, Cobain and de Quental, were a special mix of iconoclast and idealist. They wanted to strip away the fantasies of a perfect world, and at the same time, they each seemed to have delusions that underneath the old facades, they would find some dazzling truth. Despite their attempts to ground themselves in something less glamorized they were fatally disillusioned in the end. 

My father isn’t someone I can Google. He grew up picking cotton, tomatoes, etc., in the fields of central California. As an adult, he worked as a tow truck driver, a mechanic, and a handyman. He was intelligent, but he never attended school. His sister tells me that he was always very good with animals. My father didn’t leave any lyrics or poetry. He left no answers and no clues, none that I’ll ever have access to, anyway. 

He’d called one of his sisters that night but she was busy and said she’d call him back. When he wouldn’t answer she drove to his house and found him dead in his garage, having shot himself. I’m told his little dog was lying protectively on top of him. Maybe he told the dog why he did it, but I’ll never know. 

I don’t know if my father was a frustrated idealist, too. I do know that Antero Tarquínio de Quental, Kurt Donald Cobain, and Miguel Ángel Torres (my father) all shot themselves in deliberate acts of suicide. These connections– the meaning of Nirvana, these men who ended their own suffering with guns, the dead men I don’t have to call on Father’s Day, aided by the black clouds of grief and isolation in my Ponta Delgada home all tangled together into dark poetry that June. 

Kurt Cobain and my father had each killed themselves in the privacy of their own homes. Antero de Quental shot himself on a park bench. Above the bench, there is a plaque on the convent wall that has an anchor with the Portuguese word for hope across it. I never did find out if the anchor with the word esperança was put on the wall before or after de Quental killed himself there. It’s such a poetic juxtaposition, suicide and hope. I just wonder if the poetry was someone’s effort to reclaim the space from the stain of death, or if it was de Quental’s final poem to die there. 

After the isolation of quarantine, even after showering and being able to walk to the ocean and back, my energy and spirits were strangely low. The world felt colder. I was wearing a mask whenever I wasn’t sleeping, showering or eating. It felt like strangers were less friendly, maybe because of the mask or maybe because I was less eager to engage. Like the Nirvana lyrics, I felt “stupid and contagious.” I stopped greeting random strangers. Maybe I was salty that someone out there had given me Covid, but it felt deeper, like a great disturbance in the force. 

Even after my roommate moved back into our room, and after I was free to leave it, I felt so utterly alone. I don’t know if the virus somehow does that, altering brain chemistry, or if it was grief for my friend, or a latent heritage of depression without cause or meaning, or if being sent to my room in isolation was all that it took to destroy my spirits, or if being increasingly unable to get a hold of the Work Bestie was wearing on me that much. Maybe it was all of those things or none, or some combination.

All I know is that suddenly and inexplicably, I couldn’t seem to connect to anything anymore. When I was finally free there was an unshakable dark cloud that came out of my room with me. If Nirvana is the end of separation, depression is what happens when isolation is so complete that you’re even separated from yourself.

And I forget, just why I taste
Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile
I found it hard, it’s hard to find
Oh well, whatever, never mind

– Nirvana
Smells Like Teen Spirit