This is a story in three acts.
Unfortunately, for now, I can only share the first one.
The second is a little too raw and recent (plus I feel should ask a few permissions first since the experience is shared.)
And as for the third act, well…
While sometimes I do like to open in medias res, the ending for this one is so uncertain that I think I should wait.
So here’s what I can tell you.
I find things all the time when I’m out walking.
Books––often the exact book I need.
Sometimes art––both framed and not.
Even the red chair Vlad sits in while I teach.
Years ago, on a walk home, I saw movers perhaps abandoning it.
A few hours later, during my next walk with Belle, it was on my very corner, halfway down the block.
I like to think it followed me home.
Anyway, Act I begins on a drizzly day in May, in the still cold spring of 2019.
I found a postcard of a clever, stylish, and totally whimsical drawing and just the artist’s name––Charles Winthrop Norton––on the back.
I looked him up on Instagram and saw his portfolio.
I told him how much I liked his work.
He responded warmly.
I shared a link to my own visual art, something––despite my own gallery shows NYC, LA, and San Francisco––I’ve mostly kept on the back burner these last few years.
We continued texting, trying to set up a time to meet to talk about art and life.
A few attempts to schedule a meeting fail.
I more or less get busier and busier and benevolently move on, even though the postcard still lives directly in my peripheral vision in my office bookcase.
In fact, here it is:
One cold morning before sunrise in the winter of 2020, while trying to complete a project on a tight deadline, I distract myself with a few “Whatever happened to…” moments.
One them is with Charles.
I go to his Instagram.
Oddly, his account hadn’t changed at all in the year and a half since we last texted.
So I google him.
And, at 5 in the morning, I’m astonished to find out that he’s dead.
From the legacy accounts it’s implicitly clear that he had taken his own life, about two weeks after our last exchange trying to meet-up.
He was 24.
And now…Act II.
More than a year passes and I have a sudden impulse to google him again this January.
It turns out that there’s a show of his work at the High Line, all proceeds of which go to Project Healthy Minds, a charity addressing the growing mental health crisis.
The show is closing soon.
I try to go on the last weekend but the blizzard derails my plans.
Fortunately, the show is extended another month.
And so this Tuesday I went.
It was beautiful and bright and tragically full of promise.
And it was there (and right after) that a few things happened that took my breath away.
Moments that I wasn’t prepared for, things I’m not quite ready to write about.
At least, not just yet.
It’s strange to grieve a person you’ve technically never actually met.
The sense of loss is real but it’s the loss you feel whenever anything beautiful is crushed before its time.
There is less a sense of “I could have saved him” than a strange and lingering feeling of “What if…?”
I can never find the exact passage in Janet Malcolm’s work but there’s something I vividly remember reading years ago.
It’s about how while psychotherapy may not fix you, it can steer you a few degrees in one direction, and, as with a rocket ship, that tiny change in trajectory over many years leads you to an entirely different destination.
Perhaps even to another galaxy.
When you write about your life as I do––and as I’ve coached several people through successful memoir projects––there’s always an endless conversation of what you’re “allowed” to tell.
To encourage people to write honestly and freely, I often pull out the terrific Anne Lamott quote, one I keep rolled up my sleeve just for such occasions:
“You own everything that happened to you.
Tell your stories.
If people wanted you to write warmly about them,
they should’ve behaved better.”
And yet, it’s never quite that simple.
Blind Honesty often creates a lot of collateral damage.
There are exceptions, of course.
My two favorites are when Joan Didion was asked in the documentary The Center Will Not Hold about how her husband felt about her writing that their marriage was near collapse.
She responded simply, saying “Well, he edited the piece.”
Or, when Charles Busch created a difficult, complicated, and at times abrasive character in The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife based on his aunt, she was utterly unwounded.
In fact, apparently she would whisper to matinee-goers “That’s me up there!” delighted to see herself (warts and all) centerstage and in the spotlight.
The link between these thoughts is that while I’m holding back on the last parts of this story (just for a bit, probably), I’ve also thought a lot recently about other things I’m not sharing in my work and why.
(There’s also a great irony in that I tend not to write about people who aren’t even reading my work.)
And yet I can’t help but wonder how much of that is kindness and decency (and sometimes very rarely the desire to avoid potential lawsuits), and whether or not the withholding is damaging.
I wonder if such was the case with Charles.
If revealing more might have changed his course, or whether anything could have shifted his final decisions.
Anyway, I ended up buying one of the large prints of the postcard image I found on the street.
I honestly don’t know where I’m going to put it but it feels right to have it in my home.
It’s simultaneously witty and charming and also a poignant reminder of fragility and loss.
Wherever I hang it, I want it to be a constant touchstone of how absolutely vital it is that we reach out, and that, no matter what, we have to connect.
In the end, there’s nothing that’s more important.
Namaste for Now
P.S. I really do encourage you to check out Charles’ work.
Perhaps consider buying a print or some cards.
Or simply donate to Project Health Minds.
You can do all of that HERE.
