Leaving Blue Hills Road: The Suicide of Deborah Digges

“The suicide doesn’t go alone, he takes everybody with him,” wrote the novelist William Maxwell. When prizewinning poet and Tufts University professor Deborah Digges jumped from the upper bleachers of McGuirk Alumni Stadium at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst on April 10th, she took hundreds, perhaps thousands, with her: her children, brothers, sisters, ex-husbands, friends, students, colleagues, neighbors, and readers. She took the young women of Temple University’s Lacrosse Team who were practicing at the stadium that afternoon: they were the ones who called the police after finding her on the ground, badly injured, at the end of their practice. And she took me, a fellow writer and resident of the Pioneer Valley, who cannot pass McGuirk Stadium on Rocky Hill Road without grieving for her.

I never met Deborah Digges, though I was once invited to a dinner party years ago in Washington, D.C. where she and her second husband, poet Stanley Plumley, were to have been among the guests. The hostess was another writer, a fellow graduate student in the M.F.A. program at George Mason University in Virginia. I declined her invitation because I was feeling sorry for myself over a failed love affair and in no mood to make literary niceties. Now I am sorry I didn’t go, because if I had shared a meal with Deborah Digges, I might now possess some insight, however shadowy, into why she killed herself.

It had been a spectacular day, that Good Friday before Easter, unseasonably warm and sunny, more like mid-June than mid-April, with forsythia and magnolia coming into bloom, daffodils and crocuses sprouting up along the roadsides. As my husband and I inched east in bumper-to-bumper traffic along Route 9 to pick up our son, who had been let out of school early and was playing tennis at Amherst College, we noticed cells of college kids on lawns playing horseshoes, drinking beer, waving as we passed. Every other patch of muddy green seemed to host such a gathering—the boys shirtless, the girls in bikinis, everyone high on sunshine and the holiday (Passover and Easter came back-to-back this year).

Everyone except Deborah Digges, the 59-year-old widow in the driver’s seat of her VW Jetta, leaving the 1950s yellow Cape where she lived alone with her dogs and cat, passing the green mailbox she had painted herself, perched on its filigreed, white-painted stick like the welcoming smile of an old friend. The mail had already come, and she was driving to the end of Blue Hills Road, no husband in the passenger seat (her third husband, Dr. Frank Lowe, a former dean of the veterinary schools of Tufts and Cornell Universities, had died of cancer six years ago); no child in the back seat (her younger son, Stephen, was now a successful photo-journalist in Kenya; his brother, Charles, also a journalist, lived in Oslo and St. Petersburg); no one except a once-beautiful, gray-haired woman alone, turning left onto Amity Street, driving toward eternity.

But you’re a famous poet, I tell her in this strange, posthumous conversation I have been conducting over the past weeks. You have a great job; students who adore you; good health and dental coverage; a decent 401K retirement fund. You publish regularly in The New Yorker. (I know tenured professors with several books under their belts who will never be published in The New Yorker.) You have written four books of poetry, and your last, The Trapeze, is considered a “masterwork,” according to your obituary in The New York Times. You’ve published two acclaimed memoirs. (Last week, I checked out The Stardust Lounge from the Jones Library in Amherst, and inhaled it in three days, crying at the end when the 18-year-old Stephen Digges, after six years of drug addiction and delinquency, is delivered by his mother to college in New York City where he waves goodbye and says, “Thanks for a great childhood, Mom.”)

What’s more, you’re not some selfish, careerist poet boasting about your latest grants and publications, your most recent appearances at literary conferences in posh locations. You’re a good person; while your son was going through his crazy-making adolescence, you adopted a homeless boy, Trevor Clunes, and helped him negotiate Amherst Regional High School, helped him get his graduate equivalency degree. According to your biography at the Tufts University web site, you also volunteer at the Dakin Animal Shelter in Leverett, and travel frequently to East Africa to work with children at the Tumaini Orphanage near Mount Kenya.

I know you are still grieving the loss of your beloved Frank, whom you wrote about so movingly in “Seersucker Suit,” which your New York Times obituary quoted in full. When I read the lines, “O, the great ghost ships of his shoes,” I imagine you standing in Frank’s closet, smelling his trousers and suits and belts and shoes. I, too, have stared at my dead husband’s clothes, knowing I ought to give them away, and yet wanting to leave them right where they are because maybe he might come back, go to work among the living again. I know that mourning doesn’t follow some set pattern laid down in the grief books, doesn’t necessarily attenuate with time.

Still, how could you do it? How could you leave behind your own ghostly shoes for others to grieve? How could you leave those pretty, sweaty, big-boned girls in their goggles and headbands and red-lettered jerseys, girls who were looking forward to pizza and a good night’s sleep at the Econolodge, looking forward to playing UMass on Saturday afternoon, how could you leave them with images of your broken, bloody body, the wailing sirens of the Amherst Ambulance rushing to Cooley-Dickinson Hospital? How could you leave me, a middle-aged woman in blue jeans whom you never met, riding my bike slowly, at dusk, past your home on Blue Hills Road, wondering stupidly how I might have saved you?