I have only just moved to this small coastal town. A couple of months ago I saw a notice in the local Bulletin. It said that this person had some CDs of the music of MR to share for free, if there was anyone who had known her and was interested. I rang the number, explained that MR's suicide was basically the core motivation for my current thesis and sent her an e-mail of the blurb below. Today I finally got my hands on the demo CD she did in 2001, which was possibly not too long before her suicide. And I listened to the voice of a ghost.
I posted a slightly different version of this previously, but this is the prologue to my thesis. I am re-posting it because I just had to share the irony. It was surreal hearing not only MRs beautiful singing voice, but the words she had written; one song called the Sea of Love and others about angels, trees and an imagined future conversation with a child she never had. I can't explain the feeling, it was just so strange. Singing about a sea into which she had finally jumped voluntarily, at the site pictured above. And all the while this ghost was singing, an image in my mind that has haunted me for so many years now:
I hardly knew her - an artist - like me. Since her death she looms larger in my memory than ever she should have. The manner of her dying dramatic, poetic - like her. Drowned in the deep and wild primordial cauldron of the sea. Beautiful. Perfect. Shit.
I couldn’t go to the Gap for months after her suicide. At last when I let my gaze fall to the beckoning crevasse I saw her struggling, saw myself there. I was afraid she would pull me in, the mirage of her desperation wavering in my own.
She had tried many times to end her life. This time the slab-stone sentinel guarded the way out - the deep chasm held her. Cruel Mother-sea swallowed her silently, whole. Into the void.
In shredded anecdotes the story unfolded, bit by bit. An image formed. She had woven, hurried, between the omnipresent tourists, threatening to knock them down in her drugged and drunken haste, staggered with resolve towards the gaping wound in the granite. No one saw her leap but they looked down to see where she had gone.
And they saw her trying to swim.
She swam for 28 exhausting minutes in the heaving maelstrom - from the time the call went out, until, only just too late, someone leaned from the rescue boat to grasp a handful of long red-floating locks. But they had already turned to seaweed.
I still pray her movements were the final desperate remnants of instinct, that she hadn’t really changed her mind. If I had been there and known the outcome, I would have uttered that other silent prayer for the seventh wave to take her down quickly.
I can't imagine her final thoughts, I can only imagine what mine might have been.
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