PLEASE!!!

The NY Times writing about DFW’s goddamned memorial service concludes with a quote from Donald Antrim about how David had called him out of the blue at the suggestion of a mutual friend and had given him a word of advice about how to medicate the depression that Antrim had begun to be treated for:

“I understood that he had given me a gift. The gift was courage. He told me to not be afraid.”

OK. Look, I’m a relatively normal person. There’s only so much I can take. I don’t know why the NYT has to fuck with me. Why does THIS have to be the last sentence??? Why does it have to be a word on courage from a man who HUNG HIMSELF while his wife was out? Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE him, still. I miss him more than ever. I feel totally different about his writing now that he’s dead than I did before knowing that there is a limit to it; that one could actually come to the end of the Wallace oeuvre now that his collected work has found a finite limit.

I’m not agonizing about the death as much as the loss of future work, and of the loss of his presence as an artist in this world—his part to the larger whole; his example to a 1,000 other writers struggling to find their voice in the collective writer’s soul.