I wrote some suicidal song lyrics for Lexi’s Song on my new album All Who Wander, which is available for preorder on Amazon and the iTunes store. Before we go any further, I want to give the hotline for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline — if you’re struggling right now, please call 1-800-273-8255 

The hardest things are left unsaid goes the line from the song “We Burn” by my friend Caleb Paxton of Eine Blume. I think that’s true for suicide and for anyone like me who both lost someone to suicide and contemplated suicide themselves, a lot of the hardest things are left unsaid.

I intend to say them now.

You need to know going into this that a couple of years ago, I lost one of my favorite people in the world. Lexi Bolton, my cousin, was one of the brightest of lights in my hometown of Salem, Illinois — a town of about 8,000 people. Every day that goes by, you miss her a little more and cry a little softer, but the sadness lingers when words in a birthday card or the back of some stranger’s head remind you of the one you loved. Lexi made us laugh as hard as my sister Lauren and they both grew up something like fraternal twins, born a month apart and both with much older siblings who couldn’t quite relate. In many ways, I lost a second sister and my mom lost a second daughter.

When a book like The Triumph of the City tells me that I’m statistically more likely to die in Salem, Illinois from heart disease, a car wreck, or suicide than to die in New York City from crime, that statistic has faces and names for me for each one of those. Salem suffered through a cluster of teen suicides and tragic deaths over the past few years that, at least in the experience of anyone I know, is statistically unprecedented. Of course, Murphy’s Law: what can happen will. It applies to bad things.

But, on the flipside, Murphy’s Law applies to the good:

What can happen will.

It applies to the hope and light in the world.

So today, I want to talk about the mindset of someone like me when I almost took my life. I want to talk about the hope and light of all the good that can possibly happe, and I want to equip you to enter into the sadness of others and linger there with them, strong and courageous.

Again, if you’re or someone you know is struggling right now, please call 1-800-273-8255 

For one, in the unspeakable void of that darkness I can tell you that had I taken my own life, I would have done so for a different reason moment-by-moment. Some days, when I walked by my grandpa’s gun case I thought “My family don’t want me to have my way, I’ll show them,” which is vengeance. Some days, when I walked by a high ledge I would think “Throw yourself down — if anyone cared about you, they’d be there to catch you, and if they don’t catch you, then nobody cares,” which is despair and a lie. Some days, when I was chopping veggies with a long butcher knife I would think “Slit your wrist and die slowly, that way when they show up, you’ll have their attention once and for all” which is loneliness and kind of a corrupt desire for fame. It shifts, you see, so we can never know, day-to-day, exactly why someone took their life except for the general term “depression.”

“Sometimes femurs break and sometimes minds break,”

— my mentor Randy

I know that’s hard to talk about, but the reality is that everyone I know who has gone through this level of depression does still vary in their emotion. The threat to take one’s life could come on the heels of virtually any feeling under the blanket of “depression” or even “grief.” Depression and sadness is a survival trait we humans have. When we lose something or someone, depression and sadness force us into introversion to consider the state of our life and puzzle our way out of the labyrinth. It’s why writers and artists suffer from it statistically more than others: they spend too much time in their heads. But it is, in small doses, a wonderful trait. Having considered our future options from inside the safe cocoon of our depression, we can make a good choice, emerge in living color, and fly forward.

The key is making a choice. And moving forward. And typically that can only happen with help or a very practiced hand at journaling and then action or sometimes even medication. One of the top three pieces of advice my father ever gave me was at the pit — the trough — of my suicidal depression. He said, “It’s only going to get better when you want it to and I’m here when you’re ready. You can stop the meds if you decide to get better and actually try with us.” I wanted to stop the meds (all five of them), so I tried with him and he helped me out of it.

If Lexi could speak right now, she’d tell you the other part of Murhpy’s Law: any good that can happen, will. There is absolutely no logical reason for either Reason itself or gravity or even voids out in the deep of space to exist, and yet they do. And here we are. We exist against all odds: there’s an infinite statistic that roots for everything to stop existing. And yet here we are. The ancient Jews who believed in resurrection did so logically: they believe if the world existed once in fullness and life, and if death is true loss in the sense of “it wasn’t supposed to be this way,” then naturally — Murphy’s Law — the good that could happen once will happen again. I believe, logically, that I will be reunited with my cousin.

And that’s where Lexi’s Song comes in.

You can sample it here:

 

Or preorder it on Amazon and the iTunes store.

I wrote the song like a letter addressed from someone who escaped his own suicide by chance (me) to someone who did not escape her suicide by chance (Lexi), from one end of Murhpy’s Law to the other. You see, when I got the call about Lexi, I immediately booked a plane ticket and flew home to perform an emergency eulogy alongside Phil Martin. 2,000 people showed up to the visitation and in Salem, Illinois — that’s literally ¼ of the town. Everyone was at various stages of grief at the same time: some angry, some sad, some in denial, some accepting it, some bargaining for her to return immediately. The conflict happens when someone going through one stage doesn’t understand why someone else is going through another stage in a different order. It’s tricky, especially with this. I went to her wake, stayed as long as I could, and then flew back to New York alone.

When I arrived, late, on my street in Brooklyn it was weeks after a heavy snowfall. In New York, they plow the streets just hours after the blizzard hits and the trash gets picked up with the snow in great white piles. You never see it until it melts and I never noticed it until I came home that night after Lexi’s wake: the snow had melted into what looked like the black corpses of snowmen with broken plastic bones sticking out everywhere. I thought of two things. I thought of the coming of spring and I thought of next year’s return of snowmen.

All the ice melted
leaving dark snowmen every forty feet
and all their plastic bones are exposed 

It was late, my bride was sleeping, but I began writing out all of the grief. That’s the only way I know how to process extreme emotions: write through it until you emerge on the other side.

Memories came flooding back:

I remember throwing you into a pool
at only two or three with no kiddie wings
to save your life. 

Lexi was a competitive swimmer, you see. And they did that to her: threw her in, diaper and all, and she knew how to tread water — in my mind — before she could talk:

You would surface. Smiles.
And take to the water
like men take to streets when hope arises. 

Lots of protests recently, most of them rooted around folks hoping for a better tomorrow. And I suddenly remembered how I had gone through the very same things as Lexi in high school, how my freshman through junior years were some of the saddest in my life:

All my time moping
over every dream’s cusp
while you’re staying later – why’d I bet you a hundred and four
that now when you hope it’ll glow until it’s a purple love,
what are truces for?
Now I’m sponging up my sins,
will the breaking tire? 

I remember knowing you before your school days
at only two or three, why won’t you grow wings
to save your life? 

Did you know that some of the biggest role models in history struggled with suicide?

The Catholic saint The Apostle Paul said of his depression:

“Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me; and I do not know which I prefer. I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. Since I am convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy.”

It’s a line he stole from The Apology of Socrates who was condemned to die by drinking hemlock himself:

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: – either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. …What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! …For in that world they do not put a man to death for this; certainly not. For besides being happier in that world than in this, they will be immortal, if what is said is true. 

Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth – that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own approaching end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that to die and be released was better for me; 

Socrates was moments from a state-mandated suicide by hemlock. I knew the feeling well and knew that “no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.” Believing, as I do, in the justice of God is to believe, as I do, that God will make all bad things right in the end of history. Even suicide. He weaves it into his grand narrative and that’s part of what The Archive of the Redemptive Clockwork is about — the story Mearcstapa comes from, the soul of the album of those who wander through thresholds they did not expect to encounter, the heart of the thresholds of The Vale, which is why the suicide scenes in Wombrovers is so important.

For Lexi’s Song, I compared that “better for you if I stay and better for me if I go” :

All our past hoping
every string cut
I than you ain’t greater – two marionettes slumped on the floor
We both thought better for you if I stay, but better for me if I go 
And I keep staying while you left me, you left me, you left me

That’s not only a statement of grief, but one of wombroving.

you left me, you left me, you left me alone
with all these plastic homes
all these plastic folks exposed 

I’m no better than my cousin. In many ways, I wish this were her album and I was in the grave. She chose the path that was “better for her” or “to die is gain” that ended her mental struggles. I chose the path that was “better for you all” and did not yet say goodbye to a world that has been cruel to Lexi and me. You see, I considered putting a “trigger warning” on this post. But as Neil Gaiman says, life and art do not come with trigger warnings:

Neil’s right: I received no immediate warning of Lexi’s impending fate. And I received no warning of the pains that accompanied my birth. In fact, if anything, art — like life — is the exact opposite of a trigger warning: art is not first and foremost self-consuming, sarcastic, and jaded. Great works of art, and great lives, force us to face the real, the true, the authentic so that it earnestly changes us. A week — ONE WEEK — after coming home from her funeral and wake, I went to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown and found myself face-to-face with a painting of a father whose flashlight discovered his son with a noose around his neck in the basement.

I lost it.

My composure. My balance. Everything. I ran out of the gallery, hit the nearest wall, and in a whoosh my butt hit the floor. I started crying right there in the crowd, my eyes wide, staring off into the light of MoMA’s courtyard. We had to leave for the sake of our fellow MoMA members, I didn’t want to make a scene, but that painting forced me to face what I had been hiding from.

A month later, my brother sired the first grandchild in the family.

He named him Cooper Lexington Schaubert. Cooper like a wine barrel maker. Wine like the thing that comes from grapes after they fall off the vine at harvest time and die. And a barrel like the thing that holds that very wine as it ages and prepares for the coming feast. And of course Lexington after Lexi — not that having Cooper now brings Lexi back from then, but Cooper’s name is a promise of a coming feast where we will join Lexi in song again:

I hope you will surface smiles
and take to air currents
like women will conceive when hope arises 

All the ice melted
winter is over, Aslan’s on the move
And all our plastic bones are exposed.

I’ll be honest: I’m not going to make any money off of this album. In fact, I’ll likely lose some money on this album. I don’t do music. I’m an author. So why make an album? Because this is a chance for me to:

• commission a lot of artists in whom I believe
• tell stories in another medium from The Vale universe
• talk (or sing) about my 2015-2017 which honestly were the hardest years of my life so far.

That last part starts with Lexi’s Song and my hope that we can raise some suicide awareness and help some friends and family walk through the grief of those they’ve lost. My family already did a suicide prevention walk and it got me thinking:

I’m supposed to be STANDING in the corner FIGHTING for the down-and-outers. I’m supposed to be in the corner for the poor, for the weak, the lowly, the mourning, the meek, the sick, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the refugee, the persecuted, the pure in heart.

Therefore, I have a simple question for me and you and all of us:

Where is the song for the suicides?

Because honestly, I can’t think of anyone more “poor in spirit” than people like my love and light Lexi. Or like that scared and depressed highschool version of myself. Again, if you’re or someone you know is struggling right now, please call 1-800-273-8255 

When this album comes out, I want you guys to steal this song. I want to lose a lot of money on this song by having people give it away. I want you to give it away on bit torrents or social media or whatever else to help some people. I want anyone struggling with suicide to know that I have been there, I have spelunked down into that deep dark valley, and I am still here with all of you missing my cousin who took the other side of that road diverging in Frost’s yellow wood. I’m no better than her, but I also don’t want anyone else to take that path. I want you to come walk through the sadness with me, okay? Let’s get to the other side of this valley together. And if you have someone struggling with this, I want you to send them to me or to a counselor so that they can talk through this issue. It’s very hard. I didn’t even get through writing this post without crying again. It’s something we seldom talk about in America, but it’s there. And we can ALL get through it if we stick together.

If you can, then get on board with helping raise some suicide awareness through a song like the one I wrote Lexi, one full of suicidal song lyrics, a song for the suicides and suicidal folks like she and I who live and work out there in the world. I will keep reinvesting in the earnest art behind this project in order to make room for those doing the great work of caring for our culture and turning it back towards hope and light and life.

I love you all.

Hold one another close and if you’re depressed, please find someone to talk through. Having seen the other side before, I promise you alongside the Children of Húrin day shall come again. Here’s the way to sample the song one more time or you can preorder the whole album on Amazon and the iTunes store.