The Book of Grief and Hamburgers by Stuart Ross

Author:Stuart Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

Is the death of one person…

* * *

Is the death of one person the thing that launches grief? What about two people? Or three or four? What happens when your entire family is gone?

So many members of my family disappeared in the Holocaust. How can I even complain about anything?

Am I mistaking self-pity for grief?

Yesterday, we learned that…

* * *

Yesterday, we learned that Richard Vaughan’s body has been found by the Fredericton police. Richard went missing on the evening of Thanksgiving. My first fear on hearing that he’d gone missing was that he’d been murdered by gay-bashers. My second fear was that Richard had killed himself. Suicide is not always the best choice, but it is a choice.

Perhaps we all feared that Richard — who wrote poetry, plays, and essays, and made and performed art under the name R. M. Vaughan — would never be found and we would never know what happened to him.

The American poet Weldon Kees disappeared in 1955, on the day that would four years later be my birthday, July 18. His empty car was discovered the next day near the Golden Gate Bridge.

Many years after I was in high school, one of the teachers at the school disappeared. Her car was discovered near the Niagara River. She wrote children’s books.

So far as I know, Richard Vaughan didn’t have a car. I don’t know if he even had a driver’s licence.

He and I launched our first poetry books together in 1996. He had the idea that we would each begin by reading a poem by the other. It was a beautiful idea. We read aloud poems we had never read before, to the audience gathered for the ECW Press poetry launch. Then we launched our respective second books of poetry together in 1999. I remember less about that launch.

Richard and I were friends, but never close friends. But his death hits me in a visceral way. Perhaps because I related so much to him. Perhaps because I have thought about walking into the lake.

Yesterday I wrote to my therapist, who is an existentialist, and asked for a non-scheduled meeting. I want to talk with him about antidepressants. I took Wellbutrin for about a year in 2006. I didn’t like it, though I think it helped. It made me feel like I was a mechanical device.

Everything tasted like tin.

I think I’d like to take it again, even though I don’t want to take it again.

Richard was fifty-five years old. Six years younger than me. We both worked in the literary world. We once worked together at eye Weekly in Toronto. We both suffered from insomnia. In fact, one time I stayed up all night in a small hotel room in Montreal above a sex shop copy-editing a book-length essay he wrote about insomnia.

I find that maybe I am grieving Richard’s death more fully than I have been able to grieve my brother’s death four months earlier. My relationship with Richard was much less complicated. And, like I say, I identified with Richard.

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