This is a picture of my father, François Perdigon, who died by taking his own life this week 26 years ago. The plump, wide-eyed puppy sitting on his lap is me at the age of 0. I’m posting this here, including the manner of his death, for two reasons. One is that this year, now, is the last year that I pass this anniversary while still younger than he was when he decided to end his life — next year I will remember the manner of his death as the choice of a relative ever younger than I am — and there is an overwhelming sense of impending transformation, and vertigo (and a bit of fear) that goes with that, of a life-threshold for me, not unlike other life-passages (weddings, graduations, etc.) which are made more real, including to ourselves, through being ritually shared with others, on the web amongst other places. I’m remembering Hannah, too: “Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life — the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the mind, the delights of the senses — lead an uncertain, shadowy existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized and desindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance.” The other reason is that, frankly, as I’m reaching this old age, I am also growing tired and impatient with the etiquette of silence surrounding suicide within kinship, or the assumption that only traumatic or traumatized discourse can happen in its wake. Making it visible as I’m doing now is brutal, but keeping silent about it is brutal too, and not just for the one who keeps silent. So here is a small experiment, in mourning and remembering. Surely there should be a way to celebrate the natality and passage through the world of even those whose final act speaks poorly of natality, of the world, and perhaps of themselves, the possibility of an effort to make them, still, ancestors rather than ghosts.

I still apologize if you found this post brutal. (It’s good, at least, that I have this space to do that, rather than being tempted to write one of those ghastly French papa-maman novels that Deleuze abhorred so much.)