Life is like a mosaic, a decoration made by inlaying small pieces of variously colored material. We never know what the final picture is going to look like.
Some people see a definite pattern that makes sense to them; others, like me, keep trying to understand it but find a randomness that is maddening.
Everyone you ever met or who just influenced you is part of your own personal mosaic. All of our life experiences affect us to one extent or another. Some people are just a tiny, almost indistinguishable part of the pattern, while some are so important that without them the mosaic would be incomplete.
The Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life will be shown again next month, as it is around every Christmas holiday. Capra was an incurable optimist. His film supports the thesis that we all have self-worth; we all have indelibly touched the lives of those around us to one extent or another.
In case you have forgotten the plot, George Bailey, played by James Stewart, believes he no longer has a reason to live and is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge on Christmas Eve. He is visited by an angel who proceeds to show him how miserable life would have been for his loved ones if he had never existed. The result is that Bailey realizes his death would diminish those who love him and he comes to his senses, and Capra has another uplifting ending.
Oh, that life imitated Capra films. Unfortunately, we are about to enter the holiday season — when the number of suicides increases dramatically. No angel is able to stay the hand of self-inflicted death for these people.
I thought about the film when I heard about the suicide of a friend recently. I had lost track of him in recent years, a practice that is unfortunately common to relationships in the 21st century. He was a quiet, soft-spoken man, the kind of person you might see teaching English at a university.
We shared some common interests: a love of language and books, a passion for sports (he loved hockey) and the music played on WXPN. He loved the music so much that he purposely never tuned to the station at work because he said that he couldn’t focus on other things while it was playing. The music is that good, he would say.
His political liberalism tended more to the Oliver Stone school of conspiracy than mine does. I wonder how much the first four years of George W. Bush fed his paranoia. He was suspicious of authority and all those who wielded power. His discussions with me were always held in soft conspiratorial tones, and when he had made his point, an almost imperceptible wry grin would cross his face. His great joy and passion was his son, and it is for his son and his wife, whom I only met briefly once, for whom I grieve at the news of his death.
I only recently found out that he had suffered from bouts of depression, but I am not surprised. Depression seems to be a disease of the intelligent mind. I saw it up close and personal with my mother, watched her helplessly suffer its pain, sat with her in complete darkness, smelled its putrid odor in her apartment.
A person who is depressed is in a different place from us, a darker place where the sun never shines and there are no happy endings. The depression paralyzes them, makes it sometimes impossible to get out of bed and take a shower and even feed themselves. My mother used to get frustrated because some of her loved ones didn’t understand that you just can’t will yourself out of a depression. It is not a moral weakness or a desire to suffer. The pain is as palpable as the kind one suffers from any physical ailment, only even more debilitating.
My mother survived it and eventually, with the help of medication, learned to live with it in a milder form. My brother-in-law was not so lucky and died by his own hand, alone in a rain-spattered alley one December a long time ago, with none of us around to tell him how much we loved him.
I have learned that love, in all of its manifestations and permutations, is what binds the mosaic of our lives. There are so many more kinds of love of which we human beings are capable but are only dimly aware. In youth all love equates to sex, but then we grow older only to discover that some intimacies don’t require as much as a peck on the cheek.
The self-inflicted death of a friend jars the neat pattern of the mosaic, makes us wish we were like the angel who showed up in time to rescue George Bailey. Makes us wish the holidays were like a Frank Capra film. Makes us wish that a wife and a son had not been left without their loved one as the holidays approach, threatening not to bring joy but a torturous reminder of better times.
