Without An Ending to his Monologue, For Spalding Gray, Suicide Was Inevitable

I was moved to read in the April 27 issue of The New Yorker, The Catastrophe, Oliver Sacks' account of Spalding Gray’s demise including the likely medical causes of his suicide. I met Spalding during the time right after his accident and worked with him for three weeks as part of a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. The Spalding I knew was a brilliant teacher, but also quite distracted as Sacks describes — obsessed with his mother’s death, selling his house, and the idea of committing suicide. He was also afraid of odd things like recycling plants. And most memorable to me, he was obsessed with the idea that he could find no ending to his monologue about his accident and that’s another reason he was worried he would kill himself.  He had always been able to find both humor in the upsetting events of his life and an ending to stories about those events. Without an ending, there could be no closure and therefore no going on.

I agree that brain damage was likely, but I’m not sure that changes how I experienced him. The more I read about depression, the more I think there’s always a physical component. Regardless, I was a big fan of his work and am still sad that he’s gone and I wonder what if that accident hadn’t happened. What would the Spalding I knew have been like?  Would he still be here today, making himself and others laugh? Would he be watching his young son grow up (that’s the part I find the saddest)? Would he be finding many happy and humorous endings to would-be depressing events? Anyway, sad. 

Thanks to Olive Sacks for this piece.  I will be thinking about it. And of course thinking about it in the context of Sacks’ own medical condition.  

David E. Tolchinsky

PS I wrote about my experiences with Spalding in my essay, Where’s the Rest of Me?, published in Paraphilia Magazine, and in my play by the same name.  An aspect of both those works is my grappling with being told by Spalding that I could deliver monologues for a living, that “David, you could be me,” and then finding out he had killed himself.