(no subject)

One of my former English professors committed suicide this summer.  He was 42 and in the middle of writing a book on "utopia, environmentalism, and subjectivity in American science fiction writing."  I took his summer class, The Short Story, at UNL last summer to get rid of my literature requirement.  It was a good class, actually.  He was a good teacher.  My mother, who kept this from me until today and cried all the way through telling me about it while we were driving to the mall because she works at UNL and knew him, thinks it had to do with being separated from his wife and alone in the middle of the United States, the middle of nowhere.  It only came up after she told me that my uncle's second wife (whom I've never met), another English professor, possibly killed herself all those years ago, and she started mumbling, "There's something about English people... there's some other bad news I should tell you." 

My uncle is also an English professor, but he's never had the so-called Sylvia Plath Effect - he's got no passion for anything besides himself, and even though he's proud of how intellectual and educated he is, he doesn't have the intelligence and self-awareness required to get seriously depressed.  His thoughts and emotional experience are kiddie pool deep, and his neurosis is nil.  He's always been well-adjusted, the same mainstream contrast to my parents that my father's younger brother is (though he would never call himself mainstream, unlike my other uncle).  So no need to worry about him. 

And I came home and had a story acceptance waiting for me, for "On The Island", a story about continuous death and reincarnation.  (Poor "Intertropical Convergence Zone" never even got a mention here.)  This professor is the one that started me writing short stories and I'm not sure what to think now.  It's in his class that I read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "A Rose for Emily", "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "Bartleby the Scrivener" and "A Hunger Artist" and "Hills Like White Elephants".  I want to know how he did it, I want to know how they all did it, not because I want a hint but just because I want to know: Plath, head in the oven; Woolf, stones in the river; Hemingway, shotgun; Gilman, chloroform; Kafka basically stressed himself to death.  I also want to know why.  My knees have been shaking for the past eight hours.  I think I could handle it better if he had died of an illness, or in an accident.  I don't think the campus community in general even knows given it was in one measly, hidden obituary that it took me an hour to find, like they won't make even the death a public fact if it's a suicide.  I feel all weird, and bad.