Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide

By Concetta Principe

Stars Need Counting meditates on questions of suicide in the mode of A. Alvarez, when he says, in A Savage God, that there are no answers to these questions, because suicide is a “closed world” – so closed that it's not our place to judge or cast shame. These essays explore the quality of what is closed about this world, bring it close enough to scrape the shame off the act, and for both those who have passed and those who survive, offer peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gordon Hill Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781774220252

Concetta Principe

Concetta Principe is an award-winning poet and a scholar. Her most recent book is Stars Need Counting: Essays on Suicide, published by Gordon Hill Press in 2021. Her first poetry collection, Interference (Guernica Editions, 1999), won the Bressani Award for poetry in 2000, and This Real, published by Pedlar Press, was long-listed for the Raymond Souster Award in 2017. She teaches at Trent University.

Book preview

CASE STUDY – MY FIRST SUICIDE

I was nine years old. Even at that age, I knew it was important that he was alone.

It was called an accident. We were in Grade 5 and sometimes saw each other on our way to school. I can’t remember what he looked like or how we were together: was he the one who kept making jokes about Dick that made us all giggle? Or was he the shy one who chewed his pencils? Did we play tag? Did I have a thing about his owl project? I remember walking home from school with him, and he was carrying his flute. His name that I kept with me for so long is gone now, but when I think of him I am filled with the same confusion and grief I felt then, when I’d heard why he hadn’t been at school for a while.

It was an accident the chair broke under him, they said. He and his brother had set up a homemade noose in the rafter of the garage as part of a game of war. He was playing alone when the chair broke.

Why would he play a game of war, alone? I ask the house whenever I walk by it, which has not been often these four decades. But the façade gives nothing away. I peer in behind the house, at the end of the drive to the garage, to see if something remains. But if anything is there, it is animated by a silence that resists answer. There, in that garage, something happened.

This boy took his last thoughts with him, and that has disturbed me ever since. Why didn’t he leave a note explaining why he did it? Without a message, there is no way to know definitively what happened. The fact is, mental health workers explain, more often than would be expected, that people who commit suicide do not leave a message to explain themselves. Maybe they can’t explain this thing they feel; maybe they fear that giving it words would make it more dangerous; or maybe their action is carried out, unconsciously. It could take decades to understand suicide’s inexplicable message: even if there are words left behind, more questions pile up, and so any answer isn’t enough, which is why we can’t move on. The impassability of suicide.

HERKIE’S CHAIR

Slicing the air with the razor to show how thin. She told me, in confidence, that she’d bought a pack of them on a whim. That was the tension: experimenting with danger. She showed me what she had and I asked her for them. No, she said. Call me before you use them, then. Okay, she said. The pact was made. I did not wait. I walked out of the room, worried, but sure of myself. That I’d be there and would save her.

But why did I find it necessary to ask her to give them to me? Where did that come from, that idea I would be better with them? Where did I get this notion I would save her? Why did I suppose she needed saving or that I could save her, as if I were my mother, who confronted crises like this during her time as a psychiatric social