Jackie Danicki

I’ve been having lots of conversations lately with people about the importance of openness, the freedom that comes with shedding secrecy, and what happens to us when we tell our stories. I am more afraid of all that than one might guess from my blogging.

But as I followed the deeply sad story of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, two people I did not know personally but who were fiercely loved by mutual friends of ours, I couldn’t help but read with approval what Theresa quoted (from Reynolds Price) on her blog on the day she took her own life:

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens–second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

Jeremy’s body may have been found by a fisherman in New Jersey.

Filed under: Life