Rick Ouston

A few months before Rosemary died on 9 December 2020, I was reading in bed. She was at my bedside. I was alternating in reading four books. They were Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, and two poetry books by Argentine poets Alejandra Pizarnik and Alfonsina Storni.

I was suddenly struck by a salient fact about these four. I told Rosemary, “I am reading four books by four women who committed suicide.”

Since then I have been increasingly interested in the subject of offing oneself. It all came to head on Thursday.

I went to visit an old friend at the Neuropsychiatry section of the UBC Hospital. She has advanced Parkinson’s and is hallucinating. We chatted for an hour and I was astounded at her positive outlook on life and her cheerfulness. She was far more cheerful that I am.

Back at home I received a phone call from a family member. It became patently obvious to me, that I was like a milk carton with best before notification, no longer a valid one. I felt that I have lost my utility to people while alive. My usefulness will be the money inherited by my family once I have met my oblivion. Statistically that will be soon.

My melancholia on Thursday night took me to thinking of a Vancouver Sun writer I admired called Rick Ouston. He was a sad man who came a couple of times to our Thursday Railway Club meetings at noon. In bad taste, we discussed a few times (when Ouston was not present), that if we would lock him in a room with another melancholic man called Mark Budgen, who would commit suicide first?

Rick Ouston wrote an essay for the Vancouver Sun (allowed to publish it by a good Editor-in-Chief John Cruickshank) when Robin Williams died of suicide. Ouston defended the idea of voluntary euthanasia and wrote how he had bungled his one attempt. Ouston died in September 2020. How he died has been left in doubt. 

Rick Ouston's Personal Take on the Choice of Death

In my past I have sat down with people who died of suicide. One was jazz trombonist J.J. Johnson. We had drinks in New York City. Johnson developed a critical cancer and he did himself in.

My friend Abraham Rogatnick died 28 August 2009 at age 86. A couple of months before he died in bed he told me he was pulling the plug on treating his prostate cancer. While it was not a suicide he did choose to die. Is suicide a version of that?

Because I met Rogatnick when I was 54, now it seems that in observing how he lived, it prepared me to go my own way in his footsteps. I am now 82. He told me how he lost his sense of taste and had special wires sticking out of his car so he could park correctly. He was losing his peripheral vision. In short he helped in paving the way for me to become old.

In that last century I felt useful. I worked for magazines and newspapers. I was even paid for writing. In this century, all that has ceased, and I find that my usefulness is limited to feeding my cats, reacting to their affection, and weather permitting, taking Niño for a walk around the block. The rest of my day is reduced to the menialities of cleaning and cooking to feed myself.

I am overwhelmed by all the many framed photographs on the walls. Will anybody want them?

Diane Arbus had a big show. The evening after the opening, she went home and went to sleep. When she woke up the next day the world, her world, had not changed. She swallowed a bottle of barbiturates, slit her wrists and got into her tub. I have felt those blues which I call after-opening-blues in my shows in that last century.

I am far from doing the Arbus solution. And there is a reason.

My male cat Niño looked like he was in his last legs a year ago. After spending lots of money with tests, a good vet told me that Niño had lymphatic cancer of the intestines. He prescribed Niño a human cancer pill I administer every other day. Niño is back to normal.

On the bed with my two cats, Niño will stare at me and I can imagine that he is thinking, “Alex, don’t die before I do. Who will take care of me and Niña?”

And so I persist with my life knowing that for two cats I am useful.  

Six minutes before Rosemary died in bed, she asked us, "Am I dying?" There is no way of knowing how that feels if your are lucky(?) to be aware of that. Both she and I had a certainty that we would never see each other again. I miss her presence. Nothing can make me forget that.  But I do know that in her stability (he presence for 52 years was my stability) she would find solutions to our family problems. At the very least I know she would approve on how I take care of our cats. They are still hers as her absent presence confirms that to me.