Including reviews of two of her books:
Sanity and Grace: A Journey of Suicide, Survival, and Strength
and
The Seven T’s: Finding Hope and Healing in the Wake of Tragedy
Like many Judy Collins fans, I was first taken with her voice. She never reaches for a note, she hits each one like a finely-tuned instrument: on pitch, on key. She can hit them in a whisper or a close to a full Ethel Merman bravura, as she did in the song that launched her career, Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides, Now.” People of all religions seem to love her largely a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace,” the song she sings with her audience at the end of her concerts.
Long before I associated Judy Collins with suicide, which I’ll discuss later, I had noted her discovery of talented songwriters with names such as Eric Andersen, Fred Neil, Ian Tyson, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Robin Williamson and Richard Fariña. Perhaps her most famous such find was Leonard Cohen—in “Closing Time: The Canadian arts community remembers Leonard Cohen,” published in The Globe and Mail, Canada, November 11, 2016, Judy wrote about Cohen:
“And then he played me ‘Suzanne’ . . . I said, ‘Leonard, you must come with me to this big fundraiser I’m doing’. . . Jimi Hendrix was on it. He’d never sung [in front of a large audience] before then. He got out on stage and started singing. Everybody was going crazy—they loved it. And he stopped about halfway through and walked off the stage. Everybody went nuts. . . They demanded that he come back. And I demanded; I said, ‘I’ll go out with you.’ So we went out, and we sang it. And of course, that was the beginning . . .”
Judy also recorded songs by more-famous names such as Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Two favorites are “Send in the Clowns,” by Sondheim and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” by Bob Dylan. When she championed Stephen Sondheim—whose work I’d been introduced to by my musical-theater-composer son, who had followed Sondheim into his profession—and recorded a CD and a DVD as tributes to Sondheim, I sought out her performances and sent the disks to many of my friends.
But I didn’t reach super-fandom until I contemplated her remarkable composure on her Sondheim DVD. Judy, at the age of seventy-eight, performed the Sondheim special without breaks and without mistakes. Many septuagenarians have a hard time mastering a short conversation without some slip-ups, while Judy held the spotlight for an hour.
Judy once said, to sing other people’s work, she ultimately must “make it into a Judy Collins song.” I’m glad she does. She also shows a little of her personality in her on stage asides, such as her pride that Sondheim thanked her for his only hit. I like the way she works Sondheim’s brilliance into “You Are Not Alone:” Just remember/ Someone is on your side/ Someone else is not/ While we’re seeing our side/ Maybe we forgot/ They are not alone/ No one is alone.” That’s not precisely how he had it in Into the Woods, where the lines were shared by multiple actors, but close enough that I doubt he’d complain.
Meanwhile I’d learned that her son had committed suicide, possibly the worst thing that can happen to a parent. Even though that had happened a decade earlier, the way she successfully worked through that tragedy made me even more in awe of her ability to hold a spotlight without error for an hour. Thant’s when I searched out her two books on suicide. Before I react to them, I must hazard that her own attempted suicide at the age of fourteen gave her deep levels of empathy on the subject.
A Brief Review of Sanity and Grace by Judy Collins
Early in Sanity and Grace, Judy describes how her blind father had pushed her, hard, in her piano studies. Her father was a radio personality who also produced shows, where he would have his daughter give recitals. When he gave her an assignment to learn a complex piano piece—La Campenella by Franz Liszt— for a show he was doing a month later, she became increasingly depressed. She realized she couldn’t master it in that time, so she rationalized her own suicide:
“Suddenly that day, out of the blue, as they say, I thought about suicide, not as the plot in a novel and not as the solution taken by a stranger, but as the only way out. I thought about my death. It would be easy. I would take a bottle of aspirin; that would do it.”
Later in the book, when she quoted Freud about how suicide can be a misplaced homicide, she conceded she may have wanted to kill her father. Another take-away from the event, one she didn’t write about, was that it was a performance she was running from. The thought of failing in a performance had to be on her mind, too.
Thank goodness throwing up was the worst outcome from consuming dozens of aspirin. What we all would have missed! Here are my reviews of her two suicide books, books that should be as many suicide survivors as possible.
Collins’ convincing attempts to normalize suicide in this memoir put her in conflict with traditional thoughts about suicide, particularly from organized religions. Collins criticizes Jews, Muslims, Evangelical Christians, and Catholics for demonizing what Collins sees as a very human act. Here’s the Catholic version:
“After the death of my son, a woman whose father had been a Catholic shared with me that when her father had taken his own life, the priest told her mother that her husband could be buried in the cemetery, but he could not be borne in the hearse through the entrance in the customary manner; instead, he would have to be carried in his casket over the closed gates.”
Later in Sanity and Grace, Judy finds a silver lining to her son’s death:
“My son’s gift to me, I would find, would be myself. Myself grieving, myself lifting the weights of life, the heavy burdens that come with getting up out of bed when you want to lie down and die with your lost loved one—the weights that make us search for music, for poetry, for our own creativity, to find our way . . .
I went out on the road, fighting to work, to survive, singing in all the places that I sing, traveling and trying to bring pleasure to myself and other people with my music. I felt the work was healing me. I knew the strength that was in the songs I sang, and the words I wrote.”
But suicide, like divorce, is a gift that keeps on giving. Judy goes deeply into the start/stop of her self-forgiveness:
“I want to scream and shout and cry and throw things, but I don’t. I have done that already, made my peace with Clark’s choice.
“Or so I think, from time to time. Until the arrow lodges in my heart again. Until the next dream in which he comes to me so powerfully, as though he were in the room with me. Until I see a mother with a little boy, redheaded, walking in a park or a mall or an airport, see her bend down to wipe his nose or straighten his little jacket. Then my heart breaks, again and again. How many times can your heart break? Forever, your heart can break forever. Letting in the sorrow, and letting out the rage. Break, my heart, till all the tears are gone. Break, my heart, till all the hope is restored. Break, till all the days that he is not here are over; break until he returns.”
Judy is specific about the astounding numbers of suicides and attempted suicides:
“According to many recent statistics I have read about suicide, there are approximately 600,000 people who try to take their own lives in this country each year. And according to Sharon Rose Blauner, whose book, How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me, came out in 2002, the figure is even higher—750,000. The Los Angeles Times, in a May 2002 article about suicide, says that most of the self-inflicted wounds of people who find their way to emergency rooms are the result of failed suicide attempts. If hundreds of thousands of people in America try to kill themselves every year, as the statistics tell us, then since the publication of Alvarez’s book, 18 million Americans can also call themselves failed suicides.”
A Brief Review of The Seven T’s:
Finding Hope and Healing in the Wake of Tragedy
After Judy Collins published Sanity and Grace, she was asked to speak at many recovery events. This book nets out her recommendations to those who seek healing. Because I read this on the heels of the more comprehensive memoir, I missed the depth of the first book, but many people find these seven T’s to be helpful. They are:
- Truth—Regardless of how terrible the facts may be and how hard it is to talk about it, Judy is absolutely against hiding the truth about how you lost the person you loved. The only exception she makes is if the truth will hurt others.
- Trust—This builds on #1—making sure you tell the truth not only to yourself and the public, but specifically to your friends. If they cannot support you, find people who can.
- Therapy—Judy encourages people to seek help, be it through traditional talk therapy, art, and/or meditation—whatever method or combination of those methods—but get the help you need.
- Treasure—Judy doesn’t want to let the horrible events leading to a suicide wash away all the things that were good and beautiful about that person’s life.
- Treat—with Temperance and Tenacity—Judy implores people under this kind of pressure to take care of their bodies and minds with exercise and other relaxation-producing activities. She points out that a healthy physical life can alter chemical imbalances.
- Thrive—Judy wants people to keep living with their eyes wide open, to resist the temptations of alcohol or other addictive substances to blunt or blur their sadness.
- Transcend—Judy wants people to enjoy a life of joy, abundance, and forgiveness.
Judy Collins’s Lyrics
As I learned more about her, I began to study her songs. One of her songs seemed almost comically trivial when I first heard it—worrying about Snow Angels getting home before they melt, conflating that with a lover turning into a mere friend with the dawn. I knew she’d written a good song titled Sanity and Grace as well, but that song had never resonated with me—she may have needed prose to tackle suicide, which she did so well in articles. Little-known “Angels in the Snow” is my favorite Judy Collins song, a rich metaphor for the challenges we all face and how redemption occurs through love. Like the surety of Sondheim’s “You Are Not Alone,” Judy finds no solace in questioning outcomes. She underscores her faith by stating unequivocally that “Angels will (not might, not try to) find their way home again.”
“Angels in the Snow” by Judy Collins
Angels in the snow have their own song
A song in the dark of night to fight the coming of the dawn
Safe in the shadows from the cold and rain
I was a stranger till you opened up and let me in
Caught in the wild angels in the wind
Silhouettes harmonize as the darkness takes them in
The song has no words,
Just a sweet surprise,
Hearts that can hear it know
The only chains are to the skies
So hold me—stay with me and know me
Hold me till the morning is
Chaining a lover for a friend
So let me be a part of you now
Hear your body singing
Till heaven is breaking apart
Angels will find their way home again
. . .
Angels draw their wings in the snow
Hiding for a while
Before they fly where they must go
Angels they seek the dark and silent night
Running from the dawn and the coming of the light
Footsteps and shadows slowly passing by
What can they see when the evening light is in their eye
Angels are in the snow—there’s no escape
They know when springtime comes
They’ll disappear without a trace
So hold me
Stay with me and know me
Hold me till the morning is chaining
A lover for a friend
And let me be a part of you now
Hear your body singing till heaven is breaking apart
Angels will find their way home again
They must find their way back home again
Angels will find their way home again
They must find their way back home again
Angels Angels
Angels will find their way home again
Angels
I’m not 100% sure I have the word ‘chaining’ correct. I expected her to sing ‘changing,” but ‘chaining’ fits with, “The only chains are to the skies.”
I’m honored to be on the same planet with Judy Collins at the same time. I’m set now—by uploading Judy’s CDs, I’ve taught “Alexa” to pull up most of her songs, and have tickets to see five of her concerts this year. May that continue for many years.
