Impossible Math

On a fine spring day in 2017, my brother-in-law pulled off a busy thoroughfare and came to a stop under a non-descript bridge. I’ve been to the spot, since then. The road feels like it’s about to break free of the city and the vehicles whip by at highway speed. He found a refuge just a few feet away from the traffic. It’s an ugly spot, but one of those places you’d be thankful for if you had a flat tire or needed cover in a storm.

It was a Friday and Bruce had a ten o’clock tee time. It had rained lightly in the night, but the day was bright. By late afternoon, he and my sister would be on their way to visit my husband and me, at our acreage. But he didn’t even make it to golf. The details are hard to piece together.

His phone lay on the passenger seat, unused; he’d missed his exit to the golf course. All we really know is what the dash cam on the semi-truck tells us: he stepped out of his grey Toyota and ran straight into traffic. Footage from the news that night zooms in on his Birkenstock, a classic news technique—to drive home the loss—one I might have considered using myself back in my journalism days.

The police report said he died from blunt force trauma. But, eight months later, the chief medical examiner made the final ruling, what we already knew to be true—adult male, age 49, suicide. Suicide—just one little word, a word that I’ve now pulled apart and teased to bits.

Webster-Merriam’s dictionary states suicide is the act or an instance of taking one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally. Bruce was one of 4157 people in Canada whose death fit this definition in 2017. Accepting that a loved one is never to be seen again is hard enough. But I was about to learn that looking for signs of a voluntary or intentional death was a special kind of torture.

A police officer arrived at my sister’s front step by late morning. My niece hadn’t left for work yet. Over a hundred miles away, I got the call at my desk. The officer had the right inflection in his voice, his words as kind as the horrific scene could allow. Despite that, his training didn’t stand up to the wailing in the background. Eventually, I snapped at him. “Pass the phone to my sister.”

Her voice seemed to hit the ground, and all she managed was a small, “Oh Mish.”

From the beginning, the therapists discouraged re-enacting the days leading up to Bruce’s death. “The trauma’s going to make you want to keep revisiting what happened,” they said, “but you’ll never know why, and it won’t bring Bruce back.” They were right, of course, but it didn’t stop me. I thought persistence could reveal Bruce’s intention, make the definition of suicide fit.

As early as elementary school, I ordered my world with stories. With one leg dangling over the metal bar that attached desk to seat, I secretly gave numbers character traits: in my imaginings the number three had been the villain, two and four, smart identical twins, while six was the hero—and eight, no one liked eight. Eight had been the bully. With my number people, I’d weaved adventures and circumnavigated the dry mechanics of math. I was terrible at math and continued to be terrible at math. But until Bruce died, I’d thought words were more reliable, that I could organize them into something resembling perfection.

One of the first calls we made was to Bruce’s therapist to cancel his upcoming appointment. He’d been seeing her regularly and a medication review with a psychiatrist had still been a month away. Secretly, I’d hoped she’d say, “yes, it’s terribly sad but I can explain it to you.” But she didn’t say anything like that. Instead, she’d disintegrated into apologies, genuinely shocked. Bruce had slipped through her net of experience. The emergency room hadn’t caught it either, when Bruce had tried to get his medications looked at sooner. Collectively, the professionals had swung and missed: it’s easy enough to do when depression is estimated to be a risk factor for 90-95% of suicides, but only 20% of people with depression ever consider ending their life, and even fewer attempt it.

The experts couldn’t point to Bruce’s intention to die, so like a fool, I went looking for it. 

I started at the beginning.

My sister and I had known Bruce since elementary days. We grew up with a slew of kids, a homogenous and unruly gang of professors', doctors’, and artists’ children who, in between piano lessons, hockey or swim practices, ran wild through our university neighbourhood. We rode BMX bikes and stole Dutch potato chips from Sunlight Foodland. We travelled in packs to the forbidden tobogganing hill, the one with the deadly wooden fence at the bottom. Later, the spot doubled as a good place to try smoking and putting our hands down each other’s pants. If any of us had childhood scars, our middle-class privilege had encased them well.

After I’d scoured the past, I dissected the months leading up to Bruce’s death. Could I piece together if Bruce had been one of the 48% who spend less than ten minutes between the time they think of acting and attempting a suicide? But I came up empty. There was no smoking gun. No note. No trail of crumbs to disaster. Almost a year in, I was more lost than ever.

Three days after the anniversary of Bruce’s suicide, on what would have been Bruce’s 50th birthday, Kate Spade hanged herself. Three days later, Anthony Bourdain missed dinner and then breakfast at his hotel in France. The coroner ruled his hanging “an impulsive act.” How did the coroner know this? No one had given us the gift of certainty.

I was glued to the analysis as media tried to reconcile the immense appetites, curiosities, talents and privilege of these celebrities with their intention to die. They didn’t ask, but the question was never far away. How could the bad have outweighed the good?

This is the refrain of suicide, even for regular folks. “But they had such….” Fill in the blanks. Try to do the math. But the math never adds up. For those left behind, the bad never outweighs the good. Suicide forces us into this impossible math, this balance sheet in the sky, because the definition tells us that someone made a choice to leave us, and that even if that choice was fleeting, it was a choice. Because without intentionality, what would suicide be—just another kind of accident?

Sometimes I look at the twitter message the city police issued that morning: Stoney Tr SE is closed at Chapparral Blvd while we investigate a serious collision. Expect major delays in area. A serious collision—oh, how many times I have wished, for my sister and the girls that, if Bruce had to die, it could have been an accident. This could have spared them the deep unknowing.

In recent years, there have been efforts to acknowledge some of the harm in the language of suicide. There’s a slow moving away from the Christian-Judeo harshness of the term “committing suicide”—it’s association with sin. But we should also reject how loudly it speaks to intent. I accept it’s a familiar old marble that rolls from our mouths so easily. But commitment is a strong word. One we normally reserve for marriage, crimes and adultery, things that arguably require consequences to be weighed and hotel rooms to be booked. Many suicides don’t meet this bar. And when someone rejects what comes so easily in favor of “died by suicide” or even “took his own life,” I find myself spared the trial of looking for Bruce’s intention.

As a seasoned English teacher, Bruce appreciated a good grading system. He didn’t oppose pointing out who did well, and who did badly. But, even so, my head spins when I think about how if Bruce had somehow survived, he may have heard at his bedside that he’d had a “failed attempt.” And, mind-bogglingly, some now give him the dubious label of a “successful attempt.” I think it’s safe to say Bruce would have steered us toward the use of the more neutral options of fatal and non-fatal attempts.

I don’t need the vocabulary of suicide to be perfectly curated, and I’m used to seeing people struggle to reach this impossible standard when they speak to me. Most of the time, I can cringe and move on when oversimplifications and speculation are loosely slung around me. And when I hear someone make an honest effort, even a fumbling poorly executed one, it feels as if they have hooked a towrope onto my broken car. It's welcome relief, in a terrible mess.

In the end, a story saved me from my own terrible mess—a mess where Bruce was becoming obscured, his humanity wiped out, under the glare of my spotlight; a mess where knowing Bruce’s past, or his history with depression and anxiety, wasn’t ever going to help me understand his acute crisis. For this, I needed to tell myself a story:

In my bedroom, flames lick up the walls; great tongues of heat rise and forcibly find their way down my throat. My hair singes and curls at the ends, turning my head into an acrid ball of fern fronds. I can’t get to the door. For a split second, I freeze. It’s flight or fight time. In two swift leaps, I go from burning in the room to jumping out the window. The flames chase me. I think of no one and nothing except for the heat. I die on impact. I don’t burn.

Through the lens of the story, I now see Bruce’s suicide not as an act of intention, but rather, as a crisis of self-preservation. I believe Bruce would have felt he was running not towards danger, but towards safety. And, as grim as it sounds, I believe if you are unlucky enough to be trapped in a fire, you will also jump. If you get caught in this moment, there will be no place for remembering, weighing consequences, seeing a future, or appreciating the greatness in your life. Choice will have long since passed you by—and you won’t even know this. You will only live if help or luck intervenes.

Before Bruce left through the attached garage, he did what we’ve all done a thousand times: cursory goodbyes for his wife and daughter, then out the door. He would have put his golf bag in the trunk, knowing his oldest daughter also had a bag packed, and was about to get on a ferry to meet up with friends and celebrate her acceptance to medical school. There weren’t any last-minute calls or texts for his daughters. This is the intensity of fire.

Even children don’t get proper goodbyes in a fire.

The last time I saw Bruce was two months before he died. We were staying the night to pick up our son from an early morning flight. We’d had an appropriately boring mid-week evening watching the Oilers botch another hockey game, and then over coffee the next morning, Bruce asked me about what books I was reading. It was our connection—the English teacher turned vice-principal, and the journalist turned wannabe writer. I can still see Bruce reaching for his book and showing me the title, but I hadn’t been listening and I still can’t recall it. Excited to see our son, I said my cursory goodbye and went to the airport.

I don’t do the impossible math anymore. I see it for what it is: reductive and speculative. Instead, I listen for new words, words that are full, complex and kind. Words that speak to a kind of math that works—a math that is inherently about Bruce.  

a man who loved others + a man who was loved = a life that is > than how he died

Michelle Spencer spent over twenty years working as a broadcast journalist and digital storytelling facilitator. Recent publications include Flash Fiction Magazine, Marathon Literary Review and The Write Launch. In 2021, her work was long listed for the 2021 CBC Non-Fiction Prize, as well as the 2021 Peter Hinchcliffe Award. Michelle writes from her home in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada.