'The journey is over. Love to all'

What did you think about Carolyn Heilbrun's suicide?" The question came like a bolt from the blue. I was at the University of Vermont Library, combing through a tattered Baedeker in an attempt to understand my great-grand-mother's early life from the places she lived in Upper Austria. The question was asked by the archivist who was helping me, a woman I hardly knew. "I learned from her books about how to make my way as a woman in academia," she told me.

I knew what she meant. Heilbrun, an English professor at Columbia University for many years and (as Amanda Cross) the author of a series of popular detective novels, was a star of contemporary feminism and a hero to me and many other women. I had read Writing a Woman's Life, a historical examination of the suppression of female identity. Heilbrun's argument that "women must tell their own story" became sort of a creed for me. When I heard about her suicide, I was shocked, and like many, I felt more than a little betrayed.

Heilbrun died in her Manhattan apartment in October of last year. On the morning of her death she took a long walk in Central Park, as she did every week for twenty-six years with Mary Ann Caws, a literary critic and historian. After the walk Heilbrun went home, read her e-mail, swallowed a handful of pills, and put a plastic bag over her head. She left a note: "The journey is over. Love to all." Friends told reporters that the weeks before her suicide were "perfectly ordinary." According to one report, "there was reading, and writing, and endless reorganizing of her apartment with her husband." Heilbrun was seventy-seven, evidently in excellent health.

A friend sent me Vanessa Grigorladis's article from New York magazine about Heilbrun's suicide, titled "A Death of One's Own" (December 3, 2003). Judging from the piece, Heilbrun resolutely believed in "telling her own story." Her oldest friend, theologian Tom Driver, said after her death, "Carol had a strong ethical sense, as strong as anyone I've ever known." He saw her suicide as the result of a desire not to become a "useless person." If that's true, then it seems that Heilbrun saw being useless as some sort of moral lapse. If you are determined to "tell your own useful story," you want to write the ending, not let the tale dribble off into inconsequence.

Heilbrun is one of the reasons that I'm a feminist, though I feel compelled to add that I'm a Catholic feminist. The qualifier makes me suspect in feminist circles, and I confess that there have been times when being "Catholic" has been a burden. I chaired the Commission on Women in the Diocese of Rochester, New York, when the U.S. bishops were working on a pastoral on women. The commission's task was to conduct listening sessions to encourage Catholic women to tell their stories. In church basements and school halls we listened to house-wives, vowed religious, singles, lesbians, prostitutes, the divorced, the faithful, the angry, the disenchanted. We came to believe that all these stories belonged in the church. It was not to be. After two drafts the effort was abandoned by the bishops--presumably because of an admonition from Rome.

What can a Catholic feminist say about Carolyn Heilbrun? Heilbrun was determined to tell her own story right through to the ending. A Catholic feminist believes that her own story is inextricably bound up with other stories with other endings. Mary Ann Caws was "stunned" by Heilbrun's suicide: "Carolyn would ask me at the end of every walk, 'Will you be here next Tuesday?'" Heilbrun wrote not only the end of her own story, but the end of her friendship with Caws. Her suicide also ended her relationship with her daughter, Margaret, with whom she seemed close. Margaret was hoping to write a detective story with her mother, but she never had the chance.

It may have been a moment of grace that I was asked about Heilbrun's death while I was researching my family history. My great-grandmother's story is bound up with my own, even though she died before I was born, in a country thousands of miles away. This is something that Heilbrun did not see, or at least did not fully understand. If suicide is a sin, it is because we believe that our story is caught up in other stories, in what we call "the communion of saints." The Women's Commission spent long hours listening to women because we believed their stories were essential parts of the church's story--a story usually told by and for men.

As Catholics, we finally believe that our story is part of God's story, and therefore reject the notion that any human form or state of life is useless. Christians are directed to those who are all too easily regarded as useless: the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the dying. We can never regard the other as useless. Nor can we ever regard ourselves as useless. Heilbrun's work deserves the honor it has received. She was right to demand that women tell their own story. Yet in the end, we can't write the last chapter. A Christian never has "a death of one's own."

Judith Johnson O'Brien lives in Middlebury, Vermont.

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