July 2 is sort of a sad anniversary., being the day, in 1961, that Ernest Hemingway killed himself.
He was physically debilitated and in continual pain as the result of two successive airplane crashes seven years before.
He was mentally ill, tortured by phobias that the doctors couldn’t help him get free of.
He was depressed, and the barbarous regimen of electric shock treatments that were supposed to help him, instead destroyed his memories.
He was old, and beat-up, and tired. A life led at double speed had made him old before his time. A series of concussions had done physical damage that was unrecognized at the time, leading to symptoms the doctors tried to cure with shock treatments, which (it was realized only long after Hemingway’s death) actually made things worse.
He could see that his writing career was over. His intense physical enjoyment of the world was over. This intensely sensory, intensely intuitive artist had run out of road.
July 2, 1961, is the day he finally succeeded in making what he used to call “the family exit.” He put a shotgun to his head and pulled the triggers, and his 3D life was over.
Oh, but what a ride it had been! I wrote about it in novelized form, as Papa’s Trial: Hemingway in the Afterlife. There is always a temptation to think of life as a tragedy because it ends in death. Hemingway himself thought that way. But there’s another way to look at it, that makes more sense to me. If every 3D life comes to an end, how can the fact that we have to die be a tragedy? It’s just part of the deal.
Over the past quarter-century, I came to feel particularly close to this remarkable man. I can’t think he was wrong to kill himself and get out of an impossible situation. It makes more sense, to me, to think of July 2 as the day he began the next phase in the unending life we all must live.
Happy re-birthday, Papa.