‘Stranger’ by Mike Nagel​​

Content warning: suicide

I don’t like calling him a jumper although I have called him that before. Jumper is a convenient term. It helps you know what I mean. But I don’t want you to know what I mean.

This week I have a creative non-fiction essay written by Mike Nagel and published in Spry Literary on suicide, memory, recollection, and the fragile, ever-shifting ties we have to one another. In this essay, Nagel reflects on witnessing a stranger’s suicide, and how to come to terms with having had some part in a story that is ultimately not his to tell; the nature of which is ultimately unknowable due to circumstances.

I wish I knew what it is that I’m trying to tell you.

Nagel addresses the human tendency to create stories, to build connecting lines between event and cause, the whys and the hows. Just as the writer seeks to know more, to understand better the person on the other side of the encounter, there is already a predetermined notion of the unknowable. That, even despite collecting these facts and details, laying out the events that followed, there is something irretrievable about understanding what happened. We see this even in the mother who wants to know whether her son reached back for the railing at the last minute.

There is a sense of finality beyond our own control, the nature of stories that write themselves, events that happen regardless of structure, of where we thought things were headed, and leave us relentlessly seeking reason. How to rationalize, how to understand, how we learn to accept the things beyond our knowing.

I thought I’d have more to say about all this. I thought that’s what I got out of the deal. Something to say. How far will I go to infuse a random event with literary significance? How far will I go to make a piece?

Spry Literary