The article linked below is about Dr. Jaime Shanks, who is both a medical doctor and a "shrink" or so described in the article. She looks very much like me twenty years ago when I came back to the HighLine, the part that is also East Slope of the Rockies, which makes life easier than in Glendive but close enough that our high school teams sometimes play each other. The idea of the article is that suicide rates are very high up this way, but there aren't enough shrinks to address the problem.
I am my own best raw evidence, but my evidence is almost sixty years old. (I'm nearly 80.) With that much research -- because I never stopped trying to understand what happened and why -- I have acquired opinions. Also, society has radically changed. Read elsewhere about the economics of the Montana HighLine. This is about a young person, me, probably over-influenced by books. This thread is about the rhetoric of suicide.
The concept of suicide has always been there since I was a child. I think because of my mother struggling with the death from cancer of her own mother for which she was blamed. This was when people thought strong emotions caused cancer. We never talked about suicide. One of her basic convictions was that she always had to be there for her children, but she was pretty depressed. It didn't help that my father's job meant he was on the road.
In high school I got the idea that it was wrong to kill yourself unless it was FOR something and my college education reinforced that. Going to Browning to teach was being boxed in something like Dr. Jaime Shanks, with too few resources and too many demands. One of the demands I felt more than others was the distress of the tribal people who were just emerging from a kind of mania over the discovery of oil. It wasn't as deadly as it was for the Oklahoma tribes, but the same schizophrenia courting/control dynamics were operating. And then the desperate despair when the boom ran out.
Falling in love with Bob Scriver was complex. His daughter was a year older than me and quite a bit like me, except that she never had my advantages. I didn't realize the nature of all his previous intimate women -- wives and lovers going back to the Thirties -- or understand that an age gap of decades amounts to the same kind of difference as between two countries -- say Italy vs. Sweden. Our rhetorics -- our concepts and ways of expressing them -- did not match except that we both thought that tabletop-sized bronzes on Western subjects like Cowboys and Indians were brilliant and expressed universal aesthetics.
Bob grew up reading about the big public monuments between World Wars -- mostly military on horseback -- but he was also influenced by Malvina Hoffman's 'Hall of Man" at the Field Museum in Chicago where he went for grad school music training. I grew up in Portland, OR, where Boston-origin men sponsored the same kind of monumental bronzes around town and I was deeply influenced by the same "Hall of Man" when I got my BS at Northwestern University.
I was a concientious church-goer who drifted away. Bob had been the chaplain at the Masonic Lodge where he was thrown out because of sexual misadventure. We both turned to the traditional Blackfeet ceremonies about the Pipe Bundles, under guidance from people born in 1880. Very few people paid any attention.
Bob's reputation and status was interpreted as major success by the people around us. Some are still impressed that I was married to Bob Scriver and still consider the peak to being on "To Tell the Truth" game show in NYC. The real peak was closer to the sale of the series of very large rodeo event portraits that sold as a group to the Calgary Stampede. My book about Bob was also published in Canada and that helped to stunt his subsequent career since most of the muscle of the Western art cabal came out of the SW. The 49th parallel can be a wall.
By the time that major collection was almost through being created and cast, we -- and I include our Blackfeet crew -- were exhausted. The work was so strenuous and dangerous that no other women wanted a part of it, but they enjoyed flirting with an artist. The public thinks of sculptors in particular in terms of Rodin: powerful, lusting, incendiary. They thought of me as an adjunct. That was our rhetoric of marriage: brilliance justifying devotion.
By the time that major collection was almost through being created and cast, we -- and I include our Blackfeet crew -- were exhausted. The work was so strenuous and dangerous that no other women wanted a part of it, but they enjoyed flirting with an artist. The public thinks of sculptors in particular in terms of Rodin: powerful, lusting, incendiary. They thought of me as an adjunct. That was our rhetoric of marriage: brilliance justifying devotion.
The closest to a contrasting rhetorical construct was care for livestock and domestic animals. But I didn't quite qualify to be a cow, so I had to take care of myself. I was wild, on the verge of savage. I went around to all the older stable women I knew to ask for them for clues. They had none. They were either single or taking care of "their" man. The idea that the men were obligated to share with them and comfort them was only present in the lives of a few women in the community and they weren't part of our world. We thought they were stodgy.
When Bob's daughter died of cancer, I could not comfort him. His mother had never approved of the girl, who was conceived out of wedlock. His father was so old he only observed, never acted. We partly took her children for the summer but the idea was that I would be the substitute care-giver, not Bob. In fact, he had little idea what to do anyway aside from renting shetland ponies for each kid and taking us all swimming. I was not much more than a kid in my own psychology and I starved for care. I left but came back because I was key to operations at the Studio.
Finally the forces lined up into so many double-binds that I just went to bed and stayed there. Suicide had entered the picture several times. We had gone to a psychiatrist in Great Falls, me separately at first ("something is WRONG with you!") and later as a couple. The shrink said he wouldn't work with me unless I admitted the suicide attempts. ("You scared the bejeesus out of Bob!") I didn't even remember they had happened.
I thought about it for a few months and asked for a divorce, but he was so worried about money that I suggested he be the complainant. The fact that I'd been to a shrink was enough justification. He paid all costs, both our lawyers, and the short hospital stay in Canada where the handsome Scots shrink laughed and laughed at us. It really helped. Who would have predicted that? Suicide and divorce were not supposed to be funny!
I thought about it for a few months and asked for a divorce, but he was so worried about money that I suggested he be the complainant. The fact that I'd been to a shrink was enough justification. He paid all costs, both our lawyers, and the short hospital stay in Canada where the handsome Scots shrink laughed and laughed at us. It really helped. Who would have predicted that? Suicide and divorce were not supposed to be funny!
I did not know he was about to come into a huge amount of money from the rodeo bronzes. He did. He knew that if I had a proper lawyer and trial, he would lose a LOT of money. He couldn't "get" that I didn't give a damn about money because to him the meaning of "success" was wealth.
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