In Memorium

Musician, poet, and cartoonist David Berman died August 7 at age 52. An anonymous law enforcement official told the New York Times that Berman was found Wednesday in an apartment in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood and pronounced dead at the scene. A spokeswoman for the city’s medical examiner confirmed Berman’s cause of death as suicide.

Man, there have been so many deaths lately.  I can't say that Berman's death is any more tragic than any of the victims in El Paso, Dayton, or Gilroy, or Parkland, Sandy Hook, or even Columbine for that matter, but it saddens me greatly.  I didn't know him, but due to the confessional nature of his songs, it felt like I did.

Berman was best known for his band Silver Jews.  Formed in 1989, he disbanded Silver Jews in 2009 and for a decade was absent from music altogether.  But just this year, he announced a new band, Purple Mountains, and released one fine album that sounded as if Silver Jews had never disbanded. A North American tour to support the album was to have begun three days after his death.

There's no getting around it: he wrote sad songs, often full of self-deprecating but at the same time wryly humorous lyrics.  As Mark Richardson wrote in Pitchfork,

To be a fan of his work was to worry about him. He’d had serious problems with dangerous drugs and he’d attempted suicide, and in 2009, when he ended Silver Jews, he wrote an open letter in which he revealed, with shame, that his father was Richard Berman, a lobbyist who David said 'led campaigns against animal rights, trade unions, and even opposed anti-drunk-driving groups.' In interviews, he talked about how he often had little money. More recently, he described himself as someone suffering from 'treatment-resistant depression,' and he mentioned that he and his wife Cassie no longer lived together. It was a lot for anyone to handle. Even if we didn’t know him personally, we worried.

The short disclaimer for the video Darkness and Cold states that the characters are fictitious and any resemblance etc., but give that he had just separated from his wife, you have to wonder how many nights he did sit home alone, thinking "The light of my life is going out tonight with someone she just met," as the lyric goes.  And then, before it gets too depressing or maudlin, he injects the video with his characteristic quirky humor, and it momentarily feels like everything's really okay.  How depressed can he really be if he's using a shower head for a microphone?

But the eponymous Purple Mountains LP includes song titles like All My Happiness is Gone, That's Just the Way That I Feel, Snow is Falling in Manhattan, and She's Making Friends, I'm Turning Stranger.  You have to wonder if the songs were all part of an elaborate suicide note.

And you have to wonder if the humor, which seems to say, no, really, I'm okay, ha ha, was the saddest part of all - his depression was so deep that he didn't feel he deserved our sympathy or our concern.

Impermanence is swift; life-and-death is the great matter.  We don't need faith, philosophy, or art to recognize what we can clearly see before us: that which was here today is gone tomorrow.  

RIP, Mr. Berman.  Your suffering is over.