THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 20

When Darkness Speaks Softly

There are afternoons when I am watching M*A*S*H on Foxtel and the opening music begins before I have decided whether I have seen that particular episode recently enough to remember every line. That is not necessarily a reason to change channels, because familiarity is part of the attraction. The helicopters rise over the hills, the wounded are carried towards people who will try to repair what other people have deliberately broken, and that familiar tune gathers the whole contradiction into less than a minute. I find myself singing along, although the television version has no words and therefore provides limited assistance to the singer. My head supplies what the program leaves out, as it has done often enough that the title no longer needs to be announced. Suicide Is Painless¹ has entered the room disguised as comfortable television.

The arrangement does not sound like a warning. It moves with enough pace to fit between the advertisement and the opening scene, introducing a television comedy whose characters will shortly be insulting one another, organising a card game, manufacturing alcohol or helping Corporal Klinger find another inventive reason why the United States Army should send him home. There may be a laugh track waiting nearby, although M*A*S*H was always at its best when the laughter became embarrassed by what it had wandered into. The lightness of the theme belongs to that same disguise. It is music that can be hummed while wandering through the house, even though the title describes something that should stop the wanderer in his tracks. Television has made it familiar enough to be harmless, and familiarity is one of the most effective ways of making us stop examining anything.

That is perhaps why the song disturbs me more now than it once did. It does not shout its proposition or arrive with the musical equivalent of storm clouds gathering above the house. It speaks gently, almost politely, as though it has considered the available evidence and reached a conclusion that any sensible committee would eventually endorse. There is no obvious hysteria in it and no demand that the listener panic. Its danger lies in the calmness with which surrender is presented as one of the available options, no more extraordinary than selecting a different road home. Depression can speak in exactly that voice.

The title is not true, and this chapter cannot allow it to pass as truth merely because it fits so neatly into the melody. Suicide is not painless for the person already carrying pain, and it does not become painless because that person can no longer imagine another way of ending it. It is not painless for the family, the friends, the workmates or the strangers who are left trying to reconstruct the final hours from fragments that refuse to form a complete answer. The pain does not disappear; it changes address, multiplies and settles into rooms where it may remain for generations. That statement is easy enough for somebody outside the deepest darkness to make, but ease of expression does not make it useless. The title must be challenged, even while I try to understand why somebody might temporarily believe it.

I have never regarded ending my life as a calling I might answer. I need to say that plainly, not because it makes me stronger than those who have stood closer to that edge, but because accuracy matters when discussing something capable of swallowing every qualification around it. I have wanted pain to stop, situations to change, mornings to become less difficult and the Black Dog to release its teeth from whatever part of me it had selected that day. I have wanted escape from feelings that seemed too large for the room and too private for anybody else to see. I have not wanted life itself to end, because some stubborn part of me has continued to wonder what my children might do next, what tomorrow might reveal and whether the radio in my head might choose a better program after the next station break. That distinction has mattered, even when the darkness has tried to blur it.

The mistake is to assume that because I have never wanted to die, I cannot understand anything about the road that might take somebody there. I do not understand the final decision from inside it, and I will not pretend otherwise. However, I recognise the narrowing of the world that depression can produce, when a life containing family, achievement, humour, work, memory and possibility is reduced to one dark fact that appears to cancel everything else. The room becomes smaller while the problem becomes larger, until the problem seems to occupy every chair and breathe most of the available air. Other people may be standing just outside the door, but depression has already prepared a convincing report explaining why they cannot help. It is a dishonest report presented with the appearance of professional competence.

That may be one reason the song reaches the accountant in me as well as the human being. The Black Dog can produce a balance sheet containing every liability I have ever carried while omitting the assets on the ground that they are difficult to value. It records disappointment at full historical cost, depreciates hope immediately and refuses to recognise goodwill under any circumstances. Any unexpected happiness is treated as a non-recurring item and removed from the forecast, while every failure is assumed to continue indefinitely. Having manipulated the figures, it then presents the result as objective evidence rather than the work of a dishonest bookkeeper. The analytical Jeff should be able to expose the fraud, but there are days when he is too tired to open the ledger.

Depression does not always resemble the public version of despair. It may not produce tears at the expected moment, dramatic declarations or behaviour sufficiently unusual to alert everyone within reasonable travelling distance. It can sit behind competence, continue answering emails, complete work, make jokes and discuss other people’s problems with considerable intelligence. The person suffering may still be useful, and usefulness is often mistaken for wellness by those who benefit from it. I have been capable of advising others while privately struggling to move myself from one room to another. A mind can understand the solution to somebody else’s difficulty while being unable to apply the same patience or generosity to its own.

The people around us can only respond to what they are permitted to see, and I have spent much of my life controlling that view. The professional Jeff knew how to enter a room carrying certainty, even when certainty had not accompanied him from home. He could speak, explain, challenge and make difficult ideas appear manageable, which is not a poor collection of skills until they become a hiding place. The Black Dog does not necessarily remove those abilities; sometimes it uses them as camouflage. If I could still sound like Jeff Banks, perhaps nobody would ask whether I still felt like him. More dangerously, I could sometimes use the sound of my own competence to avoid asking the question myself.

That is where the calmness of Suicide Is Painless becomes more than a problem with an unfortunate title. The song does not sound as though it has lost control, which allows its argument to creep past the defences normally raised against despair. It resembles the voice that says there has been a careful assessment, all practical alternatives have been considered and there is no point troubling anyone further. The language of surrender can borrow the tone of logic, particularly when exhaustion has made continued resistance appear irrational. Depression does not merely make a person sad; it can interfere with the method by which conclusions are reached. It places its hand on the scales and then invites the sufferer to admire the balance.

I wrote in a February diary that the song sat on a razor’s edge, capable of becoming either a way out of the well or another weight keeping somebody submerged. I still think that is true, although the image now troubles me because songs do not control which function they perform. One listener may hear recognition and feel less alone, while another may hear apparent confirmation that the darkness has understood the situation correctly. The same words can become a rope or a stone, depending upon what the listener is carrying when they arrive. Art is often praised for its ability to meet people where they are, but that meeting place is not always safe. Sometimes the words know where the wound is without knowing whether they are about to cover it or press upon it.

The history of the song adds another layer of absurdity. It was written for Robert Altman’s 1970 film M*A*S*H, where it accompanied a staged suicide arranged around a character known as Painless, and the lyrics were supplied by Altman’s teenage son after the adults decided the song needed a deliberately foolish quality. The sequence was black comedy, using an elaborate performance of death to address a problem that had overwhelmed the character’s confidence. What began as an intentionally ridiculous song inside a ridiculous ceremony escaped from the scene and acquired a seriousness nobody could completely contain. The television series removed the lyrics but kept Johnny Mandel’s melody, polishing the contradiction into one of the most recognisable themes in television. A joke written for a false death became music capable of accompanying real darkness.

That transformation is not entirely foreign to M*A*S*H. The program itself repeatedly used frivolity to survive material that would otherwise have been unbearable. Hawkeye’s jokes were not evidence that war was amusing; they were field dressings applied to a mind expected to repair young bodies so they could be returned to a world still committed to damaging them. Klinger’s dresses, Henry Blake’s bewilderment, Radar’s innocence and the still in the Swamp allowed viewers to laugh without forgetting that helicopters kept arriving. The humour made the truth watchable, but it did not make the truth less true. Perhaps the theme performs the same function, carrying a terrible proposition in music light enough to cross the threshold. The difficulty is that, after entering, it does not always explain what it has brought with it.

I have watched enough episodes for the music to be connected with comfort rather than alarm. It belongs to familiar characters, familiar tents and familiar arguments in which I often know the response before the actor delivers it. There is something reassuring about a world in which the same episode ends the same way each time, because real life has never displayed that level of discipline. Henry Blake will still board the aircraft, Radar will still enter the operating theatre and the sentence he delivers will still land with the force it carried the first time. Repetition does not alter the outcome, but it allows the viewer to approach it prepared. Depression offers no such courtesy, because the episode may look familiar while changing the ending without notice.

The frivolity of my own response to the theme is therefore part of what the chapter must examine. I sing along because the melody is memorable, because the program is familiar and because the tune has become separated from its words through years of repetition. There is no conscious endorsement of the title in that response, any more than humming a murder ballad means I have begun considering suitable locations for a body. Yet the ease with which I can carry those words is unsettling once I stop to hear them properly. They have travelled beside laughter, military incompetence and television nostalgia until their edges have been worn smooth. The chapter exists because some edges should not become completely smooth.

Johnny Mandel’s music is beautiful enough to make the proposition feel gentler than it is, while Mike Altman’s words give darkness the appearance of thoughtfulness. That combination is precisely what makes the song effective and precisely what makes it dangerous in the wrong morning. A crude declaration could be rejected immediately, but a beautiful melody invites the listener to remain. The mind follows because music has often been trusted to speak for feelings ordinary language cannot carry. By the time the title is examined, the tune may already have made a home inside us. I cannot blame the song for the places the Black Dog might take it, but neither can I pretend that beauty is always benign.

The Black Dog’s words can be darker than anything Mandel’s melody or Altman’s lyric ever carried. They arrive without music, although my internal radio occasionally supplies an accompaniment that displays a disturbing lack of editorial judgement. They tell me not merely that a day is difficult but that difficulty is the permanent condition of the days remaining. They take pain that is present and project it indefinitely, as though tomorrow has already lodged its tax return and declared there will be no assessable joy. They discount the possibility of surprise because surprise cannot be entered reliably into a forecast. It is an impressive piece of reasoning, provided nobody checks the assumptions.

People looking from the outside may see no evidence capable of supporting such a conclusion. They see the books, the work, the family, the humour, the advice, the golf, the writing and whatever other signs indicate that Jeff continues to function. They may reasonably conclude that a person surrounded by those things should not feel trapped in darkness, which adds guilt to the original feeling without making the darkness any less real. Depression is not always persuaded by an inventory of blessings, particularly when the person conducting the inventory cannot feel ownership of them at that moment. Gratitude matters, but it is not a stick with which to beat an ungrateful mind back into good order. Sometimes the mind knows exactly what it should appreciate and suffers further because the knowledge produces no corresponding light.

This is one of the hardest things to explain to somebody who has not lived inside that contradiction. There is no shortage of evidence that life contains value, yet the part of the mind responsible for experiencing that value may have temporarily closed for stocktake. The shelves are not necessarily empty, but the lights are off and nobody can locate the switch. A person outside can point through the window and describe everything still sitting there, while the person inside hears only another reminder that he is failing to see what should be obvious. I suspect many people suffering depression know the frustration of being told they have much to live for. They may agree completely and still be unable to feel the force of the argument.

That does not mean the argument should be abandoned. It means it must be delivered with presence rather than as a correction, because somebody in darkness may need company before they need a lecture on the electricity supply. I have often been better at offering solutions than sitting beside a problem whose timetable I cannot control. Professional life rewarded answers, strategies and actions, while depression has repeatedly demonstrated that not every human difficulty responds appreciatively to a spreadsheet. There are occasions when listening is the action, even though it leaves the adviser feeling suspiciously underemployed. The person in the well may not need another description of the sky; he may need to hear that somebody is staying near the opening.

I also resist the easy language that describes suicide as cowardice. That judgement usually comes from a position where the full weight of the other person’s pain is neither visible nor imaginable. It converts suffering into a moral failure and allows the observer to feel protected by being made of supposedly better material. I cannot accept that simplification after knowing what depression can do to thought while leaving the outward person almost untouched. Courage and despair are not opposites that can be measured cleanly from the outside. A person may have fought privately for years before losing a battle nobody else knew was being conducted.

At the same time, I cannot romanticise the decision or allow compassion to become agreement with the title. Understanding why the walls might appear to close does not mean accepting that there was truly no door. The tragedy is that suicide converts a temporary inability to see possibility into a permanent inability to experience it. It allows one terrible hour, one exhausted conclusion or one seemingly complete set of circumstances to exercise authority over every hour that might have followed. That is the madness I hear in the act, although I use the word carefully. The madness is not that the person lacked character; it is that pain acquired the power to impersonate the whole future.

My son Justin’s song One Way Ticket² brings that finality into sharper focus than any reassuring statement about tomorrow could manage. The title contains movement, but it is movement stripped of exploration, detour and return. A ticket usually suggests possibility: a place not yet seen, a person waiting at the other end or at least the prospect of complaining about the seating arrangements on arrival. Justin’s ticket has only one destination, and its most terrible condition is not merely where it leads but what it prevents the traveller from ever seeing. There can be no later train, no changed mind and no discovery that the destination imagined in darkness was not the only one available.

That is what suicide steals before tomorrow has been given the opportunity to reveal its hand. Tomorrow may not arrive bearing a miracle, and it would be dishonest to promise that every morning rewards the effort required to reach it. Some mornings arrive with the same pain, the same unpaid account, the same damaged relationship or the same Black Dog already waiting beside the bed. However, tomorrow possesses one quality the final decision cannot tolerate: it is not yet completely known. The unknown can frighten me, particularly when age and illness make uncertainty feel less like adventure and more like poor administration. It can also contain the thing no forecast included.

My children have provided enough surprises to make that uncertainty personal. They have taken paths I could not have designed for them, developed abilities I did not place there and become people who continue to reveal themselves beyond the limits of my expectations. I have not always been sufficiently present for every stage of that journey, which gives the future greater importance rather than less. Remaining allows me to see what comes next, even when I have no authority over what it will be. It allows another conversation, another achievement, another mistake, another piece of music or another moment in which one of them does something that leaves me proud, amused or completely bewildered. A one-way ticket cancels all of those possibilities before they have had the chance to exist.

This is not an argument I would throw at somebody standing at the edge and expect gratitude for my wisdom. Telling a suffering person to consider what the family might achieve tomorrow can sound like another demand to remain alive for everybody except themselves. It may add obligation to pain, particularly for someone who already believes they have become a burden. The future must eventually contain a place for that person, not merely a list of duties they are required to continue performing. I know too well how easily usefulness becomes the price I charge myself for occupying space. Survival based entirely upon remaining useful can become another form of imprisonment.

For much of my working life, I found identity in being needed. Clients brought complexity, danger or confusion, and I translated it into decisions that appeared manageable. Family required provision, businesses required attention and problems had the decency to announce that they wanted something from me. Depression is less cooperative because it can remove the feeling of usefulness while leaving every responsibility in place. The person may continue doing what is required but experience no corresponding sense that his presence matters. When usefulness has become proof of existence, retirement, illness or exhaustion can feel like an audit in which the principal asset has suddenly been written off.

That is one reason Part Five of this book must contain this song. The words did not simply know that darkness existed; they knew how persuasive darkness could sound when it stopped shouting. They knew that surrender might present itself in the language of choice, reason and release rather than panic. I could not have understood that fully when the television theme first became familiar, because life had not yet supplied the Black Dog, professional disappointment, ageing, physical limitation and the quieter fear of becoming unnecessary. The music waited until experience translated it. What once introduced a comedy now introduces a question I cannot hum past as casually as I once did.

The question is not whether I secretly accept the title. I reject it, because the word painless erases everything leading to the decision and everything radiating from it afterwards. The more difficult question is why the title can sound temporarily believable to somebody whose pain has occupied the entire field of vision. Condemning the conclusion without understanding the altered landscape may protect our moral certainty while leaving the suffering person alone inside it. Compassion requires us to oppose the act without turning the person’s despair into evidence of weakness. We have to hold two thoughts at once: the pain is real, and the future described by that pain is not necessarily true.

The analytical Jeff dislikes the phrase “not necessarily” because it appears to offer insufficient security. He would prefer evidence, probability and a clear statement of the expected outcome. The human Jeff knows that sometimes the only available case for tomorrow is that today does not possess all the evidence. Neither part can guarantee that the next morning will be easier, but both should be suspicious when depression claims certainty about events that have not occurred. A forecast based entirely upon the darkest available data is still a forecast, not a verdict. The Black Dog may speak with authority, but it has never been appointed auditor of the future.

There have been days when continuing has not felt courageous. It has looked more like failing to make any alternative decision, which may be one of the occasions when inertia deserves greater respect than it usually receives. The next hour arrived because I remained where I was, and the next morning followed with no requirement that I make a speech about resilience. Survival does not always march forward with banners; sometimes it stays in the chair until the worst of the weather passes. There is no need to convert every continuation into triumph. It is enough that the one-way ticket remained unused and another possibility retained the chance to appear.

The Black Dog does not appreciate that kind of patience because its strongest arguments depend upon urgency. It says the feeling must be resolved now, the failure is complete now and the burden has already become permanent. Time threatens that conclusion by allowing circumstances, chemistry, conversation, sleep, treatment or simple human interruption to alter the evidence. Even a small change exposes the claim of permanence as an exaggeration, and depression dislikes having its language audited. The next day may not defeat it, but the next day can force it to prepare another argument. Sometimes making the darkness repeat itself is the beginning of hearing where the reasoning fails.

When I hear One Way Ticket, I do not hear merely a destination. I hear every unopened door along the route being sealed behind the traveller, including doors nobody yet knew would be built. I hear the end of surprise, which may be the most complete definition of finality available to me. Life has disappointed me often enough that I will not pretend every unopened door conceals something wonderful. Some contain further nonsense, more expense and people who should never have been placed in charge of anything more complicated than a hat. Yet one of them may open onto the conversation, person, idea or ordinary moment that makes continuing feel less like an obligation.

This is where Justin’s song and the M*A*S*H theme meet inside me. One gives darkness a calm and dangerously attractive voice, while the other exposes the destination hidden behind the apparent choice. The first can make an ending sound like relief; the second reminds me that relief purchased through finality includes the permanent loss of every alternative. Neither song provides a complete answer, and I would distrust either one if it claimed to. Together they keep the question uncomfortable, which may be the only honest way to hold it. Suicide cannot be reduced to a slogan, whether that slogan condemns, excuses or claims to explain it.

I still watch M*A*S*H on Foxtel, and I still find myself joining the melody when the helicopters appear. Habit has not surrendered merely because reflection has caught up with it. The tune remains connected with characters I know, humour I enjoy and a program that understood how people use absurdity to remain human inside machinery designed to destroy them. However, I can no longer allow the title to pass through the room without answering it. Suicide is not painless, and the calm voice claiming otherwise is part of the danger rather than proof of the conclusion. The song may continue, but it does not get the final word.

Tomorrow does not promise to be kind, and I have lived long enough to be suspicious of promises made on its behalf. It offers only the possibility that something remains unknown, which is a modest offer until the alternative removes even that. My children may surprise me, the radio may choose something ridiculous, the Black Dog may loosen its grip or I may simply reach another evening having done nothing more heroic than remain. None of those outcomes can be entered as certainty, but neither can the darkness honestly exclude them. For now, that unanswered possibility is enough to keep the ticket in my pocket and let another train pass without me.

Notes

1. Suicide Is Painless was composed by Johnny Mandel, with lyrics by Michael “Mike” Altman, for Robert Altman’s 1970 film M*A*S*H. A vocal version appears in the film and on its soundtrack, while instrumental arrangements of the melody were used as the theme for the television series that began in 1972.
2. One Way Ticket was written by Jeff’s son, Justin Banks. Further details concerning its date, recording and performance history are to be confirmed before publication.