What I’m listening to right now.
Eleven years ago, this week, Michelle committed suicide. We were separated, but we hadn’t really figured out if we were divorcing or not. It was a hard time, obviously. I’d spent nearly two years away, first in Alaska and then in L.A. where my dad was, while Michelle and Jeffrey were still living in Lansdale, Pennsylvania. Our last phone conversation included the words, “Are we getting divorced?” to which the other of us answered, “I don’t know.” She also uttered the phrase, “There’s a better place for me than here.” I kind of knew where her mind was. But what could I do?
This piano piece by David Lanz was never really one of my favorites, but Michelle was deeply sentimental about it. She once told me, eerily, as we sat cuddled on the sofa in better times, “I hope I die to this music.” I could be misremembering, but I think this was, indeed, what she may have died to – it was in the CD player in the bedroom where she took her fatal collection of pills. This is hard information to dwell on. So I call this piece “Michelle’s Suicide Music.”
For a person who doesn’t believe in ghosts, I’ve accommodated Michelle’s ghost with a great deal of faithfulness and peculiar ritual behavior. Once I dreamed that she (her ghost) was stuck at the Incheon Airport, having come looking for me. One day shortly after that, I took the bus out there to show her where I was. And in the fall of 2009, when I had the chance to pass through Philly, I stopped by Quakertown, where she died, to see if her ghost was there.
Sometimes I feel as if she’s looking over my shoulder. I don’t feel she’s angry. More just tagging along, curious to see what I’m doing with myself. Other times I feel as if she has found her “better place” and still others, that she’s this seething knot of sadness and regret. I’m sure mostly these are all my own projections onto what was once her.
Picture: circa Christmas, 1994, visiting my father’s house where he used to live in Temple City (next door to the house he grew up in, in fact). Jeffrey was, perhaps, bored, but Michelle was really happy during those times – we’d exchanged our “secret vows” the preceding month, when I’d returned from my 6 months in Chile.
