'The Journey is over.Love to all'
O'Brien, Judith Johnson
°THE JOURNEY IS OVER. LOVE TO ALL' Judith Johnson O'Brien hat did you think about Carolyn Heilbrun's suicide?" The question came like a bolt from the blue. I was at the University of Vermont...
...It may have been a moment of grace that I was asked about Heilbrun's death while I was researching my family history...
...Heilbrun's work deserves the honor it has received...
...We can never regard the other as useless...
...It was not to be...
...According to one report, "there was reading, and writing, and endless reorganizing of her apartment with her husband...
...A friend sent me Vanessa Grigorladis'sarticle from New York magazine about Heilbrun's suicide, titled "A Death of One's Own" (December 3, 2003...
...We came to believe that all these stories belonged in the church...
...The commission's task was to conduct listening sessions to encourage Catholic women to tell their stories...
...The qualifier makes me suspect in feminist circles, and I confess that there have been times when being "Catholic" has been a burden...
...Heilbrun was seventy-seven, evidently in excellent health...
...Margaret was hoping to write a detective story with her mother, but she never had the chance...
...As Catholics, we finally believe that our story is part of God's story, and therefore reject the notion that any human form or state of life is useless...
...This is some-thing that Heilbrun did not see, or at least did not fully understand...
...I was at the University of Vermont Library, combing through a tattered Baedeker in an attempt to understand my great-grandmother's early life from the places she lived in Upper Austria...
...Mary Ann Caws was "stunned" by Heilbrun's suicide: "Carolyn would ask me at the end of every walk, 'Will you be here next Tuesday?'" Heilbrun wrote not only the end of her own story, but the end of her friendship with Caws...
...If suicide is a sin, it is because we believe that our story is caught up in other stories, in what we call "the communion of saints...
...I knew what she meant...
...A Christian never has "a death of one's own...
...He saw her suicide as the result of a desire not to become a "use-less person...
...After the walk Heilbrun went home, read her e-mail, swallowed a handful of pills, and put a plastic bag over her head...
...A Catholic feminist believes that her own story is inextricably commonwealmagazine.org bound up with other stories with other endings...
...Nor can we ever regard ourselves as useless...
...Her oldest friend, theologian Tom Driver, said after her death, "Carol had a strong ethical sense, as strong as anyone I've ever known...
...What can a Catholic feminist say about Carolyn Heilbrun...
...On the morning of her death she took a long walk in Central Park, as she did every week for twenty-six years with Mary Ann Caws, a literary critic and historian...
...Heilbrun, an English professor at Columbia University for many years and (as Amanda Cross) the author of a series of popular detective novels, was a star of contemporary feminism and a hero to me and many other women...
...bishops were working on a pastoral on women...
...After two drafts the effort was abandoned by the bishops—presumably because of an ad-monition from Rome...
...Her suicide also ended her relationship with her daughter, Margaret, with whom she seemed close...
...Judging from the piece, Heilbrun resolutely believed in "telling her own story...
...Commonweal 3 I February 27, 2004...
...I learned from her books about how to make my way as a woman in academia," she told me...
...Heilbrun's argument that "women must tell their own story" became sort of a creed for me...
...Judith Johnson O'Brien lives in Middle-bury, Vermont...
...When I heard about her suicide, I was shocked, and like many, I felt more than a little betrayed...
...If that's true, then it seems that Heilbrun saw being useless as some sort of moral lapse...
...Heilbrun died in her Manhattan apartment in October of last year...
...She was right to demand that women tell their own story...
...Heilbrun was deter-mined to tell her own story right through to the ending...
...Heilbrun is one of the reasons that I'm a feminist, though I feel compelled to add that I'm a Catholic feminist...
...In church basements and school halls we listened to house-wives, vowed religious, singles, lesbians, prostitutes, the divorced, the faithful, the angry, the disenchanted...
...Friends told reporters that the weeks before her suicide were "perfectly ordinary...
...The question was asked by the archivist who was helping me, a woman I hardly knew...
...The Women's Commission spent long hours listening to women because we believed their stories were essential parts of the church's story—a story usually told by and for men...
...She left a note: "The journey is over...
...My great-grandmother's story is bound up with my own, even though she died before I was born, in a country thousands of miles away...
...Christians are directed to those who are all too easily regarded as useless: the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the dying...
...I chaired the Commission on Women in the Diocese of Rochester, New York, when the U.S...
...I had read Writing a Woman's Life, a historical examination of the suppression of female identity...
...If you are determined to "tell your own useful story," you want to write the ending, not let the tale dribble off into inconsequence...
...Love to all...
...Yet in the end, we can't write the last chapter...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 4
