Six months had passed since my brother had gassed himself, and still I could not write a word. And then, one day, that click – as Brick says in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, “the click in my head that makes me feel peaceful” – and the words poured from me.
The result is The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, my most intense and unifying work. It touches me in the way no other writing of mine does, if only because it is my core truth: the truth of my brother’s life, and that of his death; what it was to be his sister and what it is to have lost him; and how in losing him, I found myself.
I still receive communications from survivors and from the suicidal, telling me that they have come to a new understanding of the desire for suicide, and that this has led to the profound experience of forgiveness – both of themselves and those they lost.
If I sound too much like the Dalai Lama here, know this: my wrath can be borderless, serpentine, as far from forgiveness as hate is to art. But even so, I know what it is to forgive, and the experience is something like having a slab of granite lifted from your breast, and from the source of life itself.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke is a novelist and journalist. She has worked for The Australian, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Harpers Bazaar, HQ, The Independent on Sunday, Playboy, The Sydney Morning Herald, The South China Morning Post and others.
Antonella’s website can be found at www.antonellagambotto.com
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