Guest Post: Doug Dillaman

Today I found out David Foster Wallace hung himself on Friday. And I feel sick.

Speculation on his motives is impossible to avoid but useless and unproductive. There has always been more than a melancholic edge to his work; even his funniest pieces (such as his trips to a State Fair or on a cruise ship, both contained in the indispensable A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) wallow in self-deprecation, mortification, and tragedy.

David Foster Wallace may have been the author with whom I felt the strongest affinity. Words like "best" and even "favorite" seem rather useless to me in rating authors, but I really connected with his dense, heavily annotated prose, a unique style that was most certainly not without its critics. I chafe at the word "pretentious" at the best of times, and I particularly chafed when people called David Foster Wallace pretentious. Possibly because I felt like they were calling me pretentious for finding something so loquacious and seemingly complicated so emotionally direct. Or possibly because I would write the way that David Foster Wallace did, if I could, if I was as smart and knowledgable and funny and trenchant.

Clearly, the accumulation of these virtues, not to mention the achievement of writing what is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest contemporary novels (Infinite Jest), was insufficient for achieving even the modest level of happiness to keep rope a safe distance from one's neck.

I knew little of his life, but today I discovered he was married, and he hung himself at his home, presumably in the knowledge that his wife would find him. This is not, to dramatically understate the case, an admirable decision. It would be easy, I suppose, for many to say, in the words of the commenter on one message board:

fuck this bastard. Seriously. Suicide is selfish enough, but to do it in a fashion that assures your wife will be the one to find you is down right despicable.

I can't really argue with that as such, but I suppose I have a different viewpoint. Which is this: I imagine that David Foster Wallace - and somehow, and this is neither here nor there, I cannot bring myself to abbreviate his name - was a rational person making what he considered to be a rational decision under massive amounts of psychic pain and with incredibly clouded emotional judgment.

To make the rational decision to commit suicide (in a situation that's not a quality of life issue, and at 46, I'm pretty sure he had many many years left) requires a belief that every possible benefit you bring to everyone around you is not worth the cost that either you pay directly yourself or that you impose on people, by letting them down, by ruining their lives in whatever real or imagined ways.

And I have some sense of what that level of internal pain becomes to reach the point where you even consider that calculus, and it is horrible to think of anyone having to suffer through that, and certainly someone that I consider something close to a hero.

In reading about his death, I learned that suicide is something that David Foster Wallace had struggled with before, and said this about the time when he was so low he checked himself into a hospital to be put on suicide watch:

"In a weird way it seemed like there was something very American about what was going on, that things were getting better and better for me in terms of all the stuff I thought I wanted, and I was getting unhappier and unhappier."

And this is what no one that I know knows how to solve: how to make an unhappy person permanently happy. It would appear that, if you are lucky, you can allay the pains and fears for a time, but then they return, en masse.

And stay.

Until you go.

Goodbye, DFW. I hope you are at peace now, and I'm sorry you couldn't find it here.