"The Wrestle"

On suicide and seven years without Frightened Rabbit's Scott Hutchison

Not long after Scott Hutchison killed himself in 2018, I started working on a long poem about the former Frightened Rabbit frontman and suicide that I called “The Wrestle.” I fiddled with it for about a year before abandoning it. Much of the writing was sentimental and overwrought, trying to pull in too many clever allusions to Hutchison’s songs,¹ but reading it back now I can see that the real issue was how much I wanted to wedge myself into the middle of the proceedings. I wrote about Scott, about friends of mine who had struggled with suicide, about sex and death—but I also flashed a lot of mostly stolen valour about burning myself with cigarettes and cutting, forms of self-harm that, in truth, I’ve only very briefly experimented with. The poem reflected what I was then: a callow young man who’d been moderately miserable much of his life, grasping for a means of ennobling his own pain. Pain cannot be directly observed or measured. We can only witness its effects—which is frustrating when you’re trying to figure out whether your suffering is enough to merit sympathy. At the time, people who’d attempted or committed suicide seemed to me to have a certain dignity because the reality of their pain had been proven, made concrete. If I wouldn’t or couldn’t be one of them, I at least wanted to be their Virgil, a poet tour-guide through the experience of despair. I wrote 12 or 15 pages of stuff, performed it live once, and then shoved it in a drawer.

In the time since I put “The Wrestle” away, I spent two years volunteering on a suicide line, or roughly 400 hours talking to anonymous callers in crisis.² Contrary to what callers often think, responders on the line do not have a “script.” But we do have certain questions we need to ask to help us understand the caller’s situation. We want to know whether they’ve ever tried to kill themselves before; if they’re thinking about it now; if the thoughts have persisted more than two months; if they’ve got a plan; if they’re in the midst of executing that plan. The answers to those questions help us sort out whether we need to call an ambulance (99% of the time we don’t), but not whether the caller gets their time to be heard. Everyone, save for the pranksters and the masturbators, gets that time. Often, the most haunting interactions were not with the sobbing callers who’d just guzzled a fistful of sleeping pills, but the people with no history or intention, sitting in their cars in their dark garages while their families slept in their houses, worn down to a whisper by years of hopelessness and grief. Though I remain far from an expert on the subject, the pressure of having to make so many quick assessments of callers’ likelihood of imminently harming themselves (versus those who “just” needed to talk to someone) did help me better understand what the experiences of suicidal ideation I’d been grappling with in my writing really were.

There have been extended periods in my life where I have felt so lost that if Life were a switch on the wall I could simply flick to OFF, I’d’ve flicked it. And I have had periods where my self-loathing has been so intense that I’ve had vivid daily fantasies of physically destroying my own body. I have been so tired of these feelings I’ve even reached out and called a line like the one I worked at. But my ideation has never moved from the realm of abstract desire to practical planning or, beyond that, to an attempt. This doesn’t mean that my pain hasn’t at times been as “real” and intense as that of some who have committed suicide.³ What it means is that, even at my lowest, I have been lucky in so many respects. That I experienced love and did not suffer abuse at a formative age; that I have nearly always had many supportive friends around me; that my socioeconomic circumstances have never truly crumbled, even when I’ve had little money; that my brain, while prone to gloom, does not seem chemically predisposed to trying to kill me.

I don’t know that I would’ve found my way to volunteering on the hotline if it hadn’t been for the way Scott’s friends and family reacted to his suicide. They had clearly lived with the possibility that this might be how he would die⁴ for long enough to educate themselves on what depression really is, and to understand, as much as anyone outside Scott’s head could, what he was struggling with. Despite their shattering grief, they understood that his was not an act of selfishness; they didn’t trot out any lines about how it made no sense for someone of his talent and relative fame to throw it all away so young; they didn’t try to spin it as an accident. They just talked about how sorry they were that no one had been able to reach him and hold him until this latest attack of his illness had passed. They treated his self-drowning as they would’ve a cardiac arrest in a man known to have a heart defect—the sort of condition even the most rigorous safety planning can’t guarantee won’t strike at the wrong moment. None of them were ashamed of him for doing what he did or of each other for failing him. They simply grieved him, and their sorrow was like a river and that river was love and it is that river that Scott is in now. Virtually from the moment his body was identified, if you were a Frightened Rabbit fan you were instantly immersed in this flood of fond recollections, funny stories, and tributes to his artistry, the way his music gave people the tools to deal with situations just like this one.

I have known and loved people who, like Scott, have lived with the presentiment of their own suicide for decades. Some I have lost. At times, it looms so large over them they can see nothing else. Other times, it hangs distantly over their horizon like a small grey sun, and though they catch sight of it each morning when they gaze out the window, it doesn’t prevent them from making what they can of their days. I hope for those still living that someday they look up and find that hard sun has disappeared completely. I feel fortunate to have known and learned from them.

These days, I feel okay. And if “The Wrestle” never ended up being a publishable poem, working on it was part of some thinking I needed to do. Maybe a few bits will find their way into something else I write. This bit from the end’s just about Scott though, and I’d like to leave it here for him.

Can you see in the dark? Can you see the look on your face?

In time, these bright lights
will all be turned off.
For a margin, however thin,
it will be in nearing death
as it was to near birth—
a world of closeness to the Self, of sound.

Wanting nothing, we will be denied
nothing.
Being seen no more, we will be seen to lack
nothing.
We will no more have to endure the reaching,
being sufficient in ourselves
to at least
this final purpose:
going.

From an outside perspective,
Scott’s body has been identified,
under the signs of the fists
which held him down
and beat him all his life,
which will be recorded
as having been his own,
by the marina, by the cold
Scottish water
from which emerged
his dreams of disappearance
and encounter.

The poets, they know nothing while they live—
and everything the instant they die.
Dry of eye and wet of lung,
Scott knows more now than I do,
more than any of us trying to wring meaning
from his sodden clothes.
What he knows is not in his body
but in the shape stirring beneath it,
that which quickens our blood
and promises no answers, only changes.

An earlier version of this piece was originally posted in 2023 as My Wife Left Me #333.

1. Its title, for example.

2. Weird piece of advice if you ever find yourself needing to call a suicide line: On my old line at least, it was generally better to call during the 15 minutes after the hour (e.g. 8:15) than the 15 minutes before the hour (e.g. 7:45). See, we were usually told not to pick up a call in the last 15 minutes of our shifts, as this could mean ending up on the phone with someone in crisis for like an hour after we were supposed to be off. (This often happens anyway.) The downside of this is that callers phoning us right before a shift-change tended to get stuck waiting in the queue for a while before the next shift started taking calls—which, when you’re freaking out, feels bad! (If you don’t have the luxury of waiting though, obviously just call when you must, and hang on.)

3. Some in the field these days discourage using the phrasing “committed suicide,” arguing that it emphasizes the illegality or transgression of the act (e.g. “committed murder,” “committed arson”). But the suggested replacements (like “completed suicide”) have a clinical sheen that I’ve found alienating to people who aren’t up on therapy speak. As soon as you drop a “have you known anybody who completed suicide?” on someone who’s not familiar with it you suddenly sound like an intake clerk. Being forbidden to say “commit suicide” on the line, I found the straightforwardmess of asking things like “have you ever tried to kill yourself?” was the best way to flag to callers that 1) we can talk like normal people here and 2) I’m taking your crisis seriously.

4. The band’s breakthrough, and most acclaimed, record The Midnight Organ Fight is a concept album about depression that has a song that essentially prophesizes Hutchison’s ultimate demise (“Floating in the Fourth”), and the rest of their catalogue has plenty of material in a similar vein.