How Can I Tell You?
There are a lot of men out there who, I think, are suffering. I was one of them.
He got out of bed and went to the living room and turned on one bulb in a table lamp. He lit a cigarette and took the first drag, but he let it go out. He was thirty years old, a good father, a good husband, and so well thought of that Mrs. Preston would make sure that he got credit for a sale. His sister had a good job, and his mother was taken care of. On the sales blackboard at the garage his name was always first or second, in two years had not been down to third. Nevertheless he went to the hall closet and got out his 20-gauge and broke it and inserted a shell.
He returned to his chair and re-lit the cigarette that had gone out, and this time he smoked rapidly. The shotgun rested with the butt on the floor, the barrel lying against his thigh, and he held the barrel loosely with the fingers of his left hand as he smoked. The cigarette was now down to an inch in length, and he crushed it carefully.
Her voice came softly. “Mark,” she said.
He looked at the carpet. “What?” he said.
“Don’t. Please?”
“I won’t,” he said.
This is the ending to a brilliant 1962 short story by John O’Hara called “How Can I Tell You?” O’Hara wasn’t as well known as some of his contemporaries, but this story is an example of why, when he was good, he was incredible.
I have known a number of men who have committed suicide. Statistically, one of the groups that is at the highest risk of taking their own lives are middle-aged white men. I’ve thought about it myself a couple of times over the years, particularly during a very dark period immediately after my divorce, and the ensuing separation from my daughters. Now it’s unthinkable – I’m in a different life. But once upon a time …
Welcome to this week’s Specific.
Over the weekend I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal by one Rachel Zimmerman. It had the attention-getting headline A Decade Ago, My Husband Killed Himself. Could I Have Stopped It?
Her answer (paraphrased): “No, and I’m doing great now. In fact, I replaced him.”
My answer (paraphrased): “Maybe, but either he couldn’t tell you, or you couldn’t hear him.”
The piece tells the terrible story of Ms. Zimmerman’s late husband, a robotics professor at MIT named Seth Teller. He and Rachel had been married for over fifteen years. He was apparently doing fine. She had no idea there was any problem with him. He even had a nice 50th birthday party.
And then, a month later, he decided to walk off the Tobin Bridge, in Boston. The 250-foot drop killed him with what the coroner described as “blunt force trauma” – a scientific way of describing what happens when a human body hits water from that height. TL/DR: it’s like hitting granite. He left behind his wife and two daughters. Said ex-wife has now written a book about all this, and has been the subject of the Journal piece, a Washington Post piece and so on.
Read a little more critically, Ms. Zimmerman’s piece is actually in two parts, broadly speaking. The first part is her explaining, in detail, how normal everything seemed, how surprised she was, how despite sleeping next to her husband for fifteen years, she had no idea, none, that he was in such anguish that he preferred not to be alive anymore.
The second, shorter, part is about how everything’s fine now, including a photo of her with her new husband, and a description of how well the daughters are doing, how bright and charming they are. Seth, of course, being dead, has nothing to say about any of this. But I do.
Here’s my thesis: a lot of men in this culture are walking around carrying much more anguish than anyone suspects. Seth Teller is the tip of a massive iceberg.
Here’s my second thesis: the reason nobody suspects isn’t that men aren’t capable of communicating their feelings and needs. It’s that nobody wants to hear it. I mean, they REALLY don’t want to hear it.
It is, of course, easy and perhaps not incorrect to write off my point of view as that of an out-of-touch Boomer, a white male heading into old age who is sort of a dinosaur. You might be right. But as Ted Lasso, and certain Buddhists remind us, try to remain curious, and keep an open mind.
When my marriage ended fifteen-ish years ago, my entire world fell apart. That’s not really an accurate metaphor. It actually sort of caved in, buried me. Think of one of those videos where a railroad tank car suddenly implodes, like a beer can. That was me. The pain was so intense that a big, successful day was one in which I did a load of laundry – and folded it! I’ll spare the gory specifics, but every single thing in an adult life that’s any indicator of any kind of ability to function disappeared. I became a kind of ghost.
The nights were the worst. For a long time, over a year, I was literally afraid to go to sleep because of the dreams I knew I was going to have. It’s noteworthy that during the last few weeks of Seth Teller’s life, he was only sleeping an hour or two a night. Been there.
But in the middle of it all, I learned something. This is perhaps just my own experience, but I suspect otherwise. Anyway, I learned that if you are a middle-aged white man, and you tell someone, or even allude to the possibility, that you are in real, serious emotional trouble, they cannot get away fast enough. People not only shy like ponies, they run like racehorses. This may happen to everyone — I don’t know. But I do know what happened to me.
It takes all kinds of different forms. Sometimes people simply mumble platitudes – “I’m sorry to hear that”. Or whatever. Sometimes they change the subject. Sometimes they just look at you. But regardless of the immediate reaction, it’s very clear that the entire concept makes them intensely uncomfortable. It is a conversation they really, really do not want to have. You have gone a step too far, revealed too much. Acknowledging that you’re having problems isn’t easy to begin with, and the abrupt realization that nobody wants to hear it makes it impossible.
I wonder if this is at least part of what caused Seth Teller to walk off that bridge. At least one of the online commenters on the Journal story thought the same thing. He wrote:
As an armchair student of the human condition, I have a theory. Men are supposed to be strong and have solutions, not questions. Conversations with women that do not include solutions turn into arguments that end up leaving a man feel worse than he did before. Women withdraw. They cry. They no longer feel secure and it manifests itself in a number of ways. Particularly physical intimacy. You learn to keep it inside and avoid the extra pressure of having a disappointed spouse...who, down deep has lost some respect for you, especially if the problem is really bad. Hope whatever it is blows over or maybe come up with a solution and never have to have that conversation with the wife. Some men can throw off the pressure or have that rare male friend to which they can reveal themselves. Seth evidently was not that sort. There are millions like him.
I am NOT blaming this situation on women. I’m blaming it, at least in part, on our culture.
We men are odd creatures. We’re at least as emotional as our female counterparts, but we tend to be more extreme about it, more fundamentally loony in some ways. We get lost in our own heads, without the tempering socialization women have to be agreeable, perhaps. We also always think we’re being logical and making sense. Which, of course, we often don’t. With sometimes tragic or horrifying results.
The Wall Street Journal piece describes Teller as a guy who, from every external attribute, was doing brilliantly. He lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had degrees from Wesleyan and Cal. He was on the faculty at MIT in a hot specialty. He had the appropriate two daughters. He did all the right stuff, checked all the right boxes, and received the appropriate attaboys from his upper middle-class, bourgeois friends and family.
Yet – and again, I’m just guessing – in the midst of this promotional video of a life, apparently he started asking the hard, undeniable questions about what the hell it all added up to. I don’t know, of course. But I wonder. Men ask themselves these questions – we really do. If you base your beliefs about what we’re like on the media, all we think about is money, sex, beer and cars. Guess what? That’s not true.
And questions about meaning and purpose come with their nasty counterparts, which are observations and conclusions. Such as realizing that all the ridiculous, toxic and pointless competitive bullshit that goes along with being on the faculty at a place like MIT is part of your life, and will be forever. At 50, with tenure, Teller was looking at spending hundreds, thousands of future hours dealing with petty squabbles, Machiavellian maneuvering, sitting in conference rooms while yet another assortment of hypercompetitive geniuses fight over status and grant money.
Or maybe realizing that his setup in Cambridge – this house, this woman, these children – are what he gets from this life. There probably won’t be anything different or better, or if there is, it will come with a life-destroying price tag. He’ll never live in a cottage on the Irish coast, or in Hong Kong, or on a sailboat. His wife will always, to some degree, perhaps prefer gardening or being with her daughters to spending time with him or whatever. Cambridge can be pretty awful in some ways – ugly, freezing in the winter, and home to some of the most obnoxious soulless people in the universe. And it was going to be his home, forever. Maybe that was hard.
Or simply realizing that he’s getting older. Fifty is not 30, and as the Journal article details, Teller was beginning to grapple with the ugly realities of aging, and the inevitable road ahead. He started to have back problems. Sleep became a challenge. Being the opposite of stupid, he unquestionably understood where these currently minor inconveniences would eventually take him.
All this stuff presents real, scary and ultimately undeniable questions. They’re frightening, limits. So are losses. So is mortality. Your life isn’t a movie, or a book. You can’t put it down, and the ending won’t necessarily be happy. You’re in it. It’s real. You’re real. Very bad things can happen for no reason whatsoever, and if you have a coronary in a parking garage some evening in April, there may well be no help for you at all.
And, again, nobody wants to hear about it.
So on a summer day in Boston, Teller drove to the bridge, got out of his car, and stood there for a minute, I suppose. Did he look down? He thought, he felt, he weighed all the things that must have been churning through him for months, years. And then made his final decision, the irreversible one. He climbed over the railing, and let go. The rest, of course, took care of itself.
DEI, feminism and social change are all well and good, and make sense. However, human beings are still not that removed from our simian ancestors and our traditional roles. As a species, we can be pretty primitive. And in that limbic-brain setting, if not in reality, men are the ones who keep the forces of darkness at bay. We’re the ones who run the show, the defenders and providers, who sleep closest to the cave entrance to protect everyone else. This isn’t hyperbole — I’ve dated highly educated, progressive women who wanted me to sleep closest to the door so if something bad came through it, I could kill it. Men are the ones who are supposed to know what we’re doing, who keep it together, who everyone depends on.
Teller was neck-deep in all that authority. He was on the faculty at MIT for crying out loud. He was a father. He was the guy with the answers, the knowledge, the responsible one, the foundation. And when you’re that guy, if you run into a problem that puts your ability to deliver the goods at risk, at the most primitive level, people completely lose their minds. They can’t say it – especially in a hyperprogressive Disneyland like Cambridge, even alluding to ancient gender-based behavior expectations will get you instantly voted off the island. They guy who is supposed to have his shit together can’t ever discuss what he’s afraid of, or why he’s so sad.
But I think it’s true. I think that among his friends, family and particularly his wife, he felt, probably correctly, that the big, scary midlife questions that were rearing up in front of him were not to be talked about, or even acknowledged. This, of course, makes getting help impossible. Remarkably, Ms. Zimmerman alludes to this in her article when she describes taking him to a psychiatrist the day before he killed himself:
After the appointment, Seth’s mood seemed to lift. He was eager to pick up his new prescription. Maybe it would be that simple, I thought. In the car, though, I grew annoyed. “You have to take your health seriously,” I said. I wanted Seth to pay attention to his dark feelings, not deny them, as usual. But nagging Seth never worked. Later, I would wish that I’d pulled over, held him tenderly and whispered, “It’s going to be all right, I’ve got you.”
I know lots of men who are in blind alleys like Teller may have been. I know someone who suffered undiagnosed traumatic brain injury from high school football, and has now lost his wife, his kids, and his fortune, and lives alone. Men who were faithful stewards of the family until their wives filed for divorce because they were bored. Who contain and manage brutal childhood trauma until it finally becomes too much. Who are deep in the closet and can’t come out. Who are providing for sick wives, elderly mothers, and kids and are running out of hope.
I’ll bet you know them, too. You just don’t know it.
Thanks, man
Peter, I always enjoy your pieces. This one hits particularly close to home. I've known seven people who have taken their own lives, six men and one woman. You know two of them, too, two law firm CMOs, and I had dealings with both of them. One was a Stanford grad who married into what passes for old money on the SF Peninsula, the other was based in the Midwest. Three were my classmates. One was a friend and former co-worker whom I'd known for 35 years. The seventh was a nice man from SoCal whose wife badmouthed him repeatedly behind his back. He lost friends, clients, people would avoid him at synagogue.
All tragedies. And you're right...no one wants to hear it, not really. And they're generally not set up to be able to help someone who is prepared to use a short-term solution to a long-term set of problems.