To an aesthete dying young

In 1989, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and I told friends, and they told other friends, and I don’t entirely remember how Terry knew, but I remember a kind letter he wrote to me. In the summer of 1990, my parents went on what was to be their last trip to Europe, and I got a call from my mother. She and my father had been walking through the Borghese Gardens, and she suddenly heard someone calling her name, and turned around, and there was Terry Kirk. He had given them a little tour through the gardens and explained things about the architecture, and my parents had invited him to join them for dinner that night. “You have such nice friends,” my mother said to me. “Look at all the worlds you’ve opened up to me.” I remember being so grateful to Terry, that he could give my mother even a little slice of happiness when she was so close to dying. Ten months later, my first book was being published, and my mother and I had planned a wonderful party in New York for the publication and, though we did not acknowledge it, for her to say goodbye to the world. Before most of my local friends had acknowledged the invitation, Terry had announced that he was going to fly back from Rome for the event. The party was on Wednesday; because he was in from out of town, he came by my parents’ apartment the next weekend for a brief visit. He was the last of my friends to see my mother alive. When he learned that my mother had died, Terry extended his stay in New York and embraced me at the funeral.

In the years that followed, I thought Terry had life figured out. He had a few Italian boyfriends before he settled down with Marcello, whom he loved and whom everyone else loves, too, a charming, intellectually accomplished, kind man, gentle and wise. Terry had a job teaching at the American University of Rome, and he took many of his students for walks through the Eternal City, much as he had taken my parents through the Borghese Gardens, and he was wildly beloved of his students, his classes always oversubscribed, his enthusiasm almost violently contagious. He wrote a book on Italian architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and published it with Princeton Architectural Press. I was floundering for much of this time, not yet married, writing well but usually out of a place of darkness, living ambivalently in New York. I saw Terry a couple of times a year. I couldn’t tell him so much about my depression because I thought he wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. I was often needy, and I had surrounded myself with needy people, who were in some ways more relaxing for me, and Terry seemed not to be needy, and so I had trouble needing him. I didn’t feel that I was crucial to him, only that he was always glad to see me. He commented about my depression book that he hoped next time I would write about something that didn’t cut so close to the bone. The problem with aphoristic habits is that they make it too easy to parse authentic communication as wit. Everyone I knew who was happy had ribbed me about writing a fat tome about depression. Terry, too.

Then I met John, and life was OK for me, too. When John and I decided to get married in England in 2007, Terry announced that he had plans for that particular day and wouldn’t be able to come, and as John and I were trying to winnow down the guest list, I was relieved. I wish I had pressed him about it; I wish I had told him that I desperately wanted to have him there. I didn’t think that he might have produced such plans to preempt the possibility that he wouldn’t be asked; it didn’t occur to me that he would ever imagine not being asked. The next time he came to New York, he brought us a wedding present, a photograph of the construction of the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Fair, an image that connected in various ways to my own first book. A thoughtful, Terry-like present.

The last time I saw Terry, he was staying at our house on a visit to New York, autumn of 2008. He thought he should look at jobs at American universities because they had tenure systems, and the university where he was teaching in Rome did not. I told him he was crazy. He was writing his books; he lived with Marcello; he was in the most beautiful city in the world, surrounded by the art that was his professional topic. He was visiting New York at that very moment in order to do a guest lecture at NYU to a packed house. Why on earth would he want to be junior faculty in an obscure Midwestern college? Then he said that he felt his book hadn’t had the critical reception he’d hoped for, and I said it was a gorgeous book and very brilliant and that academic publishing takes time. He was worried about the precarious finances of the American University of Rome and thought he might lose his job—but I reminded him that he was the most popular faculty member there, and that Marcello could deal with their economic needs if need be. Terry was restless and discontent, but then, Terry-like, he brushed aside his own anxieties, and when I expressed concern about what was going on with him insisted that everything was really fine. I was at that point rather newly married and a father and distracted by my own life, and I accepted his reassurances. One gets into patterns in very old friendships, and I have some friends who have been fine for thirty years but about whom I still worry, because our initial pattern involved worrying, and my pattern with Terry was that I didn’t have to worry about him, so I didn’t.

A few weeks later, he wrote to me about how he felt he was a bad friend, dwelling particularly on the fact that he should have made the effort to come to our wedding. He wrote, “I think of how I have stayed on the sidelines for so many crucial moments those people I have called my friends have gone through. I have had a rather rattling summer, a deep taking-of-stock of a lot of things, fears, illusions, and the beginning of therapy, at last. Marcello has also been enormously supportive as I readjust this arrogant and frightened thing that is my self. He has taught me what love is, and my eyes are opened to what real friendship is as I see it working around me.” I said that we’d have loved to have him at the wedding, but if he weren’t engaged in real friendship, we wouldn’t have been real friends so very long. Three months later, he wrote, “I’m rather flabbergasted at the huge messy person I have inside me I’ve never been brave enough to take seriously. Marcello has been a rock. And you, your really kind words back in September to me. In this moment of looking back and looking forward as the new year bids, I wanted to express the warmth I feel for you and the gift of friendship you have offered me. I want to learn how to unwrap the gift better.” Depression expert that I had liked to think I was, I didn’t think to be alarmed by any of this. I thought the therapy he’d started sounded like just the right thing for him to be doing, and that that work, supported by reassurances from the many people who loved him, would resolve whatever was causing anxiety.

My father and stepmother and my brother and his family were all going to Rome the next June, 2009, and I suggested that they have dinner with Terry, an idea about which everyone was enthusiastic. In his last e-mail to me, Terry wrote, “We all met up for a relaxing summer dinner outdoors in the piazza of Santa Maria del Popolo. The boys ran enthusiastically into the church while we explored the antipasti of artichoke hearts. Although a brief evening, it was a real charge for me. I must not have been the greatest company, actually, as I felt myself being picked out of a funk that has descended on me in this economically challenging time (to the institution I work for). Marcello has been a real help, with strategic hugs when I need them and a calm stable presence. And I’m not always sure how much of my unease right now is due to the economic uncertainty and how much to do with my poorly timed interior journey. Riding a roller coaster during an earthquake. Ach, I am a bit tired. Off to dance class, when approached right it is usually sustaining for me. Again, thanks for getting me together with your family, and thanks for being there, as you always are, in spirit. Terry.”

Preoccupied with my own life, I wrote to him a month later in a cheery and chatty way. He didn’t write back, but life is busy, and people often don’t write back.

Terry’s journals indicate that he started to think seriously of suicide on July 30, 2009. He wrote that he had no friends; his career was a failure; he was afraid he would be fired; he was completely alone in life. He had had an article he had submitted returned to him for revisions, with queries. This is standard practice at academic journals, and the revisions were all things Terry could readily do. But he apparently experienced it as a profound rejection and was miserable about it. “I had to remind him all the time of his accomplishments,” Marcello later told me. “His books, his articles, his students who loved him, his friends, and so on.” In his last journal entry, Terry wrote, “Nothing attaches me to the world except Marcello. The rest is a total failure.”

On Monday, October 12, Terry came to his therapist in terrible shape, shaking and barely able to speak. He had almost made a suicide attempt that day, and then stopped himself at the last minute because he was afraid of the effect it would have on Marcello. The therapist gave him some kind of tranquilizing medication, and he calmed down, and she asked whether he was sure he was OK, and he said that his mind was now clear. Terry was always a good actor, and with the wisdom of hindsight, one has to wonder about the nature of that clarity. Terry went from her office to a meeting with the architect who was to fix up the apartment he and Marcello had recently bought, and talked to him for two hours about various construction details, with an air of composure. The therapist, meanwhile, did not call Marcello, who was in Berlin on business, because she did not want to violate patient confidentiality.

Depression is a disease of loneliness, and the privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity; it is a prison. Therapists can be perilously naïve about this. Marcello and all of us who loved Terry were locked out by the same privacy that kept him locked in. Privacy is a fashionable value in the twenty-first century, an overrated and often destructive one; it was Terry’s gravest misfortune. The unknowable in him, which I thought was just a kind of static, was actually his heart.

That night, Terry called Marcello to talk about his new book project, and said he was going to collaborate with a colleague. Marcello replied that Terry was really able to do such a book on his own, and that the colleague in question probably would not be much help. Terry was adamant. Then Terry told Marcello, “I love you very much,” and got off the phone. Those were the last words Marcello ever heard him say.

On Wednesday, Terry Rossi Kirk, 48 years old, drove two hours to an unimaginably beautiful spot in the countryside, parked his car, climbed up to 2000 meters, where he would not be seen or found, and slit his wrists.

When he did not show up for therapy on Wednesday, his psychiatrist called the police, and the police went to the apartment and broke in, and they called to tell Marcello about the note they had found, which said, “I can no longer live. I’ve gone to Switzerland. I’m sorry, Marcello.” Because there is assisted suicide in Switzerland, Terry and Marcello had long before agreed that if either one got to be old and senile, the other would “take him to Switzerland.” So Marcello knew at once what this meant. The police asked Marcello if he knew where exactly Terry might be, and Marcello said, “It’s not the real Switzerland.”

Terry had always wanted intimacy and became depressed when he and Marcello were apart, but he also wanted independence and complained that he was over-reliant on a single emotional support. In late 2008, Marcello had said to Terry that he loved him; that he would support him financially and in other ways; that they were buying two beautiful houses (an apartment in Rome and a country place in Umbria) that they could live in well; and that Terry should take advantage of the good time to sort things out. “Ten years ago, I was insecure and unhappy,” Marcello said, “and I couldn’t have been your support then, because I was in those problems myself, but now I can. I am here for whatever you need, and you can resolve these anxieties.” It was Marcello who had encouraged him to try psychotherapy. Terry said, in his upbeat way, that he thought he’d sort everything out in six months, and Marcello said, “You’d be lucky to do it in six years, Terry, because psychoanalysis is a deep and painful process, but I admire you for undertaking it, and I will take care of everything else while you take care of yourself. We have enough strength, we together.”

After Terry died, Marcello said to me, “His lack of self-esteem was like a black hole; nothing could ever fill it up. No one could ever pay enough attention to Terry. He had a consuming need for attention, from his friends and from me and from his field and from the world. He was unsatisfied and frustrated; there was something inside him that didn’t work. I think he could have fixed it, that we could have fixed it, but now we will not have the chance.” Then he said, “Terry was really two people. One of them was the performer, the charming Terry, the cheerful Terry. The other part was this dark Terry, who was almost another person, this Terry with no respect for himself, no love for himself, no self-esteem. This lonely Terry. They were both real, both parts of him. Even the people who knew only the performer knew a real Terry.”

Our friend James wrote to me, “Do you remember how, one early morning, we came upon each other, the three of us, under Harkness Tower at the entrance to the Old Campus? I had had a bad night and there were you and Terry—he in a cape of course—standing there like angels. How lucky to come upon you two at that moment, at that place. Life is rarely so elegant.” Our friend Tizzy wrote, “My first dance party at Yale with the cast of Grease. Terry and I went rogue, a virtual Wang Chung Fred and Ginger. We did flips, we did splits, we climbed tables and walls. We were so outrageous, an entire dining hall full of Yalies broke into applause when Terry dropped me on my head. Terry hates that I tell that story. But I hate that Terry is dead, so we’re even. You haven’t lived ’til you’ve been awakened by that joyous, open face so full of possibilities for the day. This is what I have. When all is said and done, I guess it’s a lot. But it was supposed to be more.” Maggie wrote, “I was in a room, in Branford? in the dark? semi-light? with you? Paul? dancing a lot, to “Thriller,” when Terry came home. He batted not an eyelash, just dropped his coat on a chair and started dancing too. It’s so sad that Terry killed himself. It’s sad that Terry would ever die at all.”