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This post is a review of Grief Is For People. By Sloane Crosley. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 191 pp. $27.
On July 27, 2019, Russell Perrault, Executive Director of Publicity at Vintage Books, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., took his dogs for a walk, checked on his beloved chickens, returned to his farmhouse in Connecticut, watched some television, walked to the barn and took his own life. According to Sloane Crosley, who worked for Perrault at Vintage Books and considered him her closest friend, the 52-year-old man had no history of depression. A year earlier, she recalls, after she had broken up with a boyfriend and a colleague at Knopf had died by suicide, Russell had texted her: “Let’s make a deal. No killing yourself without my approval first. I’ll do the same.” Crosley knew Russell had faced allegations of sexual harassment, was disillusioned with office life, and may have become estranged from his partner. She could identify no evidence, however, that he had given up on life.
In Grief Is For People, Crosley, the author of two novels and three collections of essays, provides a beautifully written, illuminating, mordant and moving meditation on her experience of loss and its aftermath.
Disgusted by “the universal truths of grief, by the platitudes,” Crosley doesn’t want to go through “its stages.” Because Russell was not her relative and she had not slept with him, Crosley learns, people she knows expect her grief to subside. Initially manageable, however, it soon “colonizes” her entire personality. She fantasizes about going to Connecticut and seeing Russell on the train platform. Therapy “seems futile, as does travel, nature, sleep, television, music, comedy, theater, art, cooking, exercise, reading, and sex.” When friends suggest she take up a hobby, she maintains she already has one: “drilling down to the core of Russell’s suicide.”
Crosley attributes her “grief overload” to a coincidence. A month before Russell killed himself, a thief broke into her apartment, stole jewelry that once belonged to her grandmother, and stole her sense of security. Put in the category of a smashed car windshield, jewelry heists, she points out, are often dismissed entirely. And unlike a suicide, a burglary has a villain and the possibility of restitution. But she tells herself that if she can get the jewelry back, she can get her friend back as well: “I would sooner be separated from this logic than from my own skin.” Nor can she ever think about the jewelry without seeing Russell holding it.
When the pandemic hit New York City, Crosley writes, she should have been prepared “to deal with the phantasmagoria of the missing. Missing objects. Missing people.” But “the catch” was that, at the outset, “nothing was actually gone. Not yet.” Anxiety, she suggests, involves “mourning what isn’t gone yet.” COVID-19 stimulated relief that Russell had been spared the experience, but also frustration at being robbed of his reaction to it. Told “no one knows how to behave,” Crosley imagines, Russell would have replied, “Have they ever?” and returned to his book.
These days, it appears, Crosley understands, with George Sand, “that we cannot tear a single page from our lives, but we can burn the whole book.” And with Albert Camus, that “there is only one liberty, to come to terms with death. After which everything is possible.” Crosley now says she has come to terms. But “the years have done nothing to dull the missing.” Nor has she completely stopped trying to treat the suicide “as a freak accident,” robbing Russell of control when she really wanted to absolve him from blame. And, perhaps, assuage resentment she may feel for his failure to confide in her. Most of all, Crosley continues to ponder “the biggest riddle of all”: how to keep her friend buried and with her at the same time.
If you or someone you love is contemplating suicide, seek help immediately. For help 24/7 dial 988 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
