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Christopher Lukas
Publisher: Doubleday
Pub. Date: September 16, 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0385525206
272pp
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Stephen King once wrote that suicide “slithers
like a snake off the tongue.” Say the word aloud and hear its venomous
hiss. In his 1938 masterwork on the subject, “Man Against
Himself,” Karl Menninger spoke of suicide’s stigma in
polite society, “So great is the taboo on suicide that some people will not say
the word…a taboo related to strongly repressed emotions. People do not
like to think seriously and factually about suicide”. Should Menninger’s comments describe your perspective on this
difficult topic, then Christopher Lukas’ beautifully written, heartbreaking
memoir, Blue Genes may not be for
you. I didn’t think it was for me at first, but to my surprise,
discovered as the pages sped past, and I began relating to so much
of Lukas' intertwined, complexly enmeshed relationships and their
complicated baggage of emotions, how much it truly was. Christopher
Lukas, in Blue Genes, has somehow,
with his poignant pen, transformed the carbon from the most unbelievably
painful, reoccurring events in the history of his seemingly doomed-from-the-start
family, into diamonds resplendent with hope and cautious optimism, despite all
he’s suffered and tragically lost.
Christopher Lukas lost a lot early in
life. At the age of six, circa 1941, his mother, Elizabeth, long-time
battler against depression and a then undiagnosed Bipolar disorder, after a
couple of hospitalizations involving risky coma-inducing insulin therapy of all
things, succumbed to her mental illnesses and committed suicide. She was
33, attractive, talented, an aspiring actress, though admittedly, not able to
provide the consistent emotional support her sons, Lukas and Anthony,
especially needed. Nonetheless, her death would reverberate forever in
the lives she left behind, even if no one in the family talked about her death for
the first decade following it. Lukas and Anthony, in fact, did
not even learn that their mother had taken her own life until the respective
ages of 16 and 18. The silence, the taboo of suicide, ate away at the
family like cancer. Only Lukas, through psychotherapy, creative
enterprises in television, theatre, literature (he authored “Silent Grief” for
suicide survivors), and the amazing love of his understanding wife, and
unconditional acceptance of his adoring daughters, would ultimately resolve
(mostly resolve) and work through his lifelong grief. Lifelong because
the others in his family of origin, one by one – alcoholic father, meddling
grandmother, steady uncle, eccentric aunts, and perhaps the worst and final
blow of all, his older brother, J. Anthony Lukas, acclaimed NY Times
journalist, two-time Pulitzer prize winning author of “Common Ground” and “Big
Trouble” – would eventually commit suicide, leaving Lukas alone yet again,
distraught and despairing.
Will Christopher Lukas one day die of
natural causes, or obey the cruel and merciless dictates of the “blue genes”
inherited from his family and die by his own hand? Not really my
question, but one Lukas has asked himself over and over again, even now, in his
seventies.
“There are days – too many of them – when
I ponder,” Lukas concludes, “whether I would prefer to be dead and famous
rather than alive and ‘just another striver’ in the world of arts and
crafts. Had my brother shown me a way out of the pain of never quite
achieving a grander status, or had he shown me what happens when you do achieve
that status and it’s not enough?
“Still, with full confidence, I know that I will never go into a room at the
end of a day and kill myself.
“Too many deaths in my family, too many suicides.
“I will not follow suit”.
Book Review Grade
A
Book Review Posted: October 29, 2008 (Book Review by Brent
Higgins)
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