Literature is a kind of intercourse, and we crave a closer communion with the writers who send those shivers up our spines. Grieving the death of a favorite writer is not so different from mourning the death of a friend: there's the same sense of frustration and impotence, of loss and loneliness. What was really going on? Where do we put the blame? What do we do with our grief? With our guilt? Murder and disease and acts of God give us something concrete on which to focus our rage and grief, but suicide thumps us over the head with the ugly truth about human mortality. Even in a case like Tom's, where a number of negative factors clearly contributed, the survivors are left to wonder. The man whom The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction called "perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers" had lost his partner of more than thirty years after a long and expensive and painful illness, and was fighting a losing battle to remain in their rent-controlled apartment-all while crippled by sciatica, diabetes, and severe depression. Disch shot himself on the Fourth of July. Disch at South Street Seaport Museum, New York City, to read from The Word of God: June 3, 2008.
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