The chattering classes have been all agog and aghast over the suicide of Charlotte Dawson. We did not know her. We never followed her career. We suppose it's fair to characterise that career--what we know of it--as being one of a semi-celeb, a media personality. It is a part of modern society's interests that we find desperately narcissistic and as deep as a puddle in a parking lot.
However, that is not to say that Dawson herself was narcissistic or shallow. We just don't know. We do know, however, that constantly needing to self-promote and "stay in the public eye" so media contracts come along must be a depressing slog for anyone. Friends have said they knew her to be warm, funny, intelligent and generous. She also battled with depression, eventually losing not just the battle, but the war. Now the chattering classes are trying to use her death to make common cause against cyber bullying--all of which seems a bit mercantile and tawdry, the wickedness of bullying notwithstanding.
But for us the really, really sad part is highlighted by columnist, Miranda Devine, writing in The Daily Telegraph
Fred Nile was quoting Charlotte Dawson’s own words
Miranda DevineQuite. But upon knowing this it seems to us the tragedy has deepened exponentially--both the tragedy for an unknown and unnamed child, and for the mother who was irreparably damaged. And all for the sake of the husband's immediate career prospects, we understand.
The Daily Telegraph
February 26, 2014
WHEN Rev Fred Nile posted a comment about Charlotte Dawson on his Christian Democratic Party’s Facebook page after her suicide last week, the reaction was ferocious. Nile wrote that Dawson’s death “highlights how depression and self-harm can affect anyone” but “left unmentioned in many obituaries, is the poignant story faced by Charlotte in 1999. [She] revealed in her autobiography how she aborted her child with swimmer Scott Miller because he didn’t want any distractions in the lead-up to the Sydney Olympics … After the procedure, Charlotte went home and tried to behave as though nothing had happened, but says something had changed forever.”
‘“I felt a shift,’ she says. ‘Maybe it was hormonal, but I felt the early tinges of what I can now identify as my first experience with depression.’”
Twitter erupted with condemnation of Nile, with an outraged female PhD student writing an “open letter” expressing her “disgust” at the “bullying of Charlotte Dawson after her tragic death”. But Nile’s post had been gentle and respectful.
These were Dawson’s own words written in her Air Kiss And Tell autobiography: “I considered the possibility that I might end up a childless woman which was a very frustrating and demoralising prospect for me as I very much wanted to be a mother. What if I couldn’t have another child? What if I’d blown my only chance at motherhood by sacrificing this one?”
She wrote “something inside me completely broke” when her marriage ended.
So for people to ignore the courage she mustered to describe the profound impact of that abortion does a disservice to her memory and to women who are looking at her life for lessons. Abortion is not without emotional consequences and it is a cruel confidence trick to pretend it is.
As a woman who was never afraid to speak her own mind, no one should be putting words in Dawson’s mouth. She would not want to be the poster child for anyone’s cause. But neither should her words be airbrushed away.
We are reminded Thomas Stearns Eliot's sad requiem for our lost civilisation:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men. . . .
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow . . . .
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
We are also reminded of the words of the Saviour of the world: "Come unto me all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." That efficacious, gracious, and gentle invitation needs to be proclaimed and heard now more than ever it would seem.
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