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TriptychApril 09, 2010 Three things to braid, twine, blend together -- Thirty-four years ago today Phil Ochs committed suicide. He was 35. Phil looms large on the soundtrack of my life. I remember being smooshed into a friend's tiny Fiat with several antiwar colleagues, en route to a meeting somewhere near Capitol Hill, listening to Tape from California, which was new or nearly new at the time. It probably wasn't the first time I heard Ochs, or an Ochs song, but it was such a perfect way to hear Ochs that it's imprinted in memory as My First Time. I wish Phil could know how well his songs have held up over time. OK, partly it's depressing that "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and "There But for Fortune" are still current, and that "The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo" is news to some people, but Macbeth and Hamlet aren't dated either and they're a few centuries older. I listen to "The Marines Have Landed" and "Changes" and "The Crucifixion" and "Hands" (as sung by Pat Humphries -- I don't think Phil ever recorded it) and think how beautiful and moving they are, how I've been listening to them for years and years and still hear something new each time. This morning my favorite radio station, WUMB-FM, played Billy Bragg singing "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night," to the tune of the similarly named song about Joe Hill. You can find it on YouTube, among other places. It's about words, music, and work living on, and it was very good to hear. In the Boston Globe this morning was another story about Phoebe Prince. She's the second part of my triptych. Like Phil she committed suicide. She was 15, and according to the story that's emerged so far she was ruthlessly bullied by some of her high school classmates and could see no way out. The administrators at South Hadley High, in Massachusetts, claimed at first that they knew nothing about it, but as more and more evidence comes to light -- thanks mainly to the district attorney's office that is prosecuting several of the students involved -- the ground the school officials are standing on has been looking shakier and shakier. I ache for this girl. Her family had just moved to Massachusetts from Ireland; she started at South Hadley High last September. To have been caught in this miserable situation, to have sought help and not found enough, to have seen no way out -- the worst kind of nightmare, because there should have been a way out. "There but for fortune go you or I," sang Phil Ochs, and I doubt I'm the only female former teenager who's been thinking that about Phoebe Prince. During high school I often wanted to be dead; I thought plenty about suicide but didn't know how to do it or have the nerve to find out. I probably saved my own life by getting fat instead. A few years later, I was sitting on a floor at Georgetown University's Healy Building along with several sister students, and one of them said, "Every day I thank God that I wasn't born beautiful." Yeah. I and most of the young women I knew in college knew that we were survivors, that we'd managed to get through adolescence not pregnant and with our brains intact.. The last part of the triptych is Nancy Luedeman. Nancy died last Sunday night, age 89, which means she must have been about 65 when I first met her 24 years ago. She was Mary Payne's partner and deeply involved in island theater. She was a friend of Bill W.'s by the time I met her, and remained so for the rest of her life, so you know that she was sunk pretty deep in the swamp but managed to work her way out of it. She worked as a paralegal and was well-known and -respected around the courthouse; at age 70 or so she went off to law school. She didn't finish, but her chutzpah in giving it a try was inspiring. Mary died in 1996, the same year as my mother and Gerry Kelly, my Martha's Vineyard Times colleague. I went to Nancy's memorial service at Grace Episcopal Church on Wednesday. The papers hadn't yet come out with news of her death, but word got around and the place was packed. The service was high-churchy -- it even included communion -- and Nancy was more in evidence in the pews than around the altar, but that was OK. I particularly liked it that some of those present had to be about 60 years younger than Nancy was, so her name will be remembered for a good long time.
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