Oliver Sacks' The Catastrophe

++The April 27th New Yorker has a piece by Oliver Sacks that helps explain Spalding Gray's "mysterious" suicide.

++Sacks met with Gray and his wife many times over the last few years of his life, beginning after the time Spalding Gray was in a car accident in Ireland and its belatedly discovered he suffered a brain injury as well as the breaking of his hip.. 

++He became fixated on selling his old home in Sag Harbor, New York and believed its sale was the beginning of his misfortune. Sacks found that Gray got this because his mother also had become obsessed with selling her house and then sinking into a deep depression. Later she too would commit suicide.

++Sacks chronicles all the times Grey in his last years had to be kept in various psychiatric units and how he and his wife tried to find the appropriate treatment. 

++Spalding started enacting "creative suicides'" once diving of a boat only to hang on. He would leave suicide notes in the house and scan the horizon for the proper place to end his life. At the end he would ride the Staten Island ferry endlessly as a rehearsal to the event. Finally, he left no note and his body was found in the East River.

++Oliver Sacks' description of the process from the car accident to the end is another example of his writing prowess.He talks about how anesthesia seem to normalize Gray and he would spring back to form after surgery. He would scribble his new monologues into notebooks by his bed and be articulate and reflective in his post-operative days. Then within days he would be in a deep depression and his answers would be almost monosyllabic. 

++Prior to his front-lobe injury, Spalding always responded to talk therapy and a little lithium. But now he seem to trip into near-psuchotic states haunted by hallucinatory images of his mother's suicide. 

++He took his children to Tim Burton's "Big Fish" in which a dying father passes on his stories and then returns to the river where he dies. That evening Spalding left home and never returned.