The American writer and essayist David Foster Wallace committed suicide seven years ago, on September 12, 2008. I have just read his wife’s – Karen Green – grief memoir Bough Down, a beautiful and moving collage of poetry, prose and images.
Green found her husband following his suicide:
‘I worry I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down. I keep hearing that sound…’
‘The policeman asks, Why did I cut you down. The question abides in the present tense. Because I thought and still think maybe.’
Bough Down is a wonderfully strange read, sometimes challenging to follow Green’s train of thought. But perhaps that is how it should be. The experience of grief, and of love, are ultimately subjective and individual, uniquely lived by those affected.
‘It’s hard to remember tender things tenderly.’
‘I have few desires and fewer aims. I dream of standing on the shore and not seeing his ear whorls in every shell.’
‘Pine, to wither away from longing or grief.’
Green addresses Foster Wallace throughout, Bough Down unfolding as a love soliloquy:
‘I could love another face, but why?’
The depths of Green’s distress are compounded by the nature of his death:
‘I call the doctor: I am suffering, it’s embarrassing, and I need I need I need…The doctor says if you were so quote perfect for me unquote you’d probably still be around, no offense.’
This is a gem of a book, raw, honest, challenging, sad and beautiful.
‘Ultimately, the loss becomes immortal and hole is more familiar than tooth. The tongue worries the phantom root, the mind scans the heart’s chambers to verify its emptiness. There is the thing itself and then there is the predicament of the cavity.’
CQ
Living through the Arts 