Since our conversation about whether or not we thought that the father in Fun Home committed suicide I've been trying to decide whether or not I think it was suicide or an accident. And I've come to the conclusion that I think his death was accidental. Now, I'm no expert and I certainly never met Bruce Bechdel, but from what I gather from the book he seems like a control freak. A neat, orderly control freak. And to kill himself by jumping in front of a truck just doesn't strike me as something that a control freak would do. Not to mention he was a funeral home director. If he was going to kill himself I have to imagine he wouldn't want to be a mess that could potentially need a lot of reconstruction to have an open casket at the funeral. Throwing himself in front of a truck risked having major damage done to his body and who would fix him up since he was the funeral director? They'd have to outsource. I'm not even sure how that would work.
I also think that he left way too many loose ends. There were too many things he left unfinished. Though I suppose with the impending divorce he could have decided to just end it all but he didn't seem like someone to make rash decisions and jumping out in front of a truck is just so... unplanned. I mean, death is messy, but there are varying degrees of messy.
Anyway, I thought way too much about this. And I also found this link: http://www.webrary.org/rs/flbklists/literarysuicides.html which is a compiled list of authors that have committed suicide. Some of them I knew and some of them I didn't, and a couple sort of surprised me. The guy who committed seppeku... wow. The whole thing is fairly macabre but interesting.
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oh you mean mishimi or whoever? That's the coolest story ever. There's a film about it.
Of course, it could be any number of Japanese authors. A few of them committed seppuku but Mishimi's was the best.
Even Akira Kurosawa tried to kill himself in the early seventies.
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