The morning James Taylor learned his friend Suzanne Schnerr was dead, she had already been dead for six months. This fact sits at the center of one of the most enduring songs in American popular music, though you might not know it from listening.
The lyrics of “Fire and Rain” are cryptic enough that people believed Suzanne was Taylor’s girlfriend who died in a plane crash, a rumor so persistent that Taylor has spent fifty years debunking it. The truth is stranger and, in its way, more interesting. His friends Richard, Joel, and Margaret, all of whom had been close to Suzanne, made a collective decision not to tell him she had taken her own life. He was in London, recording his debut album for Apple Records, and they were excited for him. They didn’t want to shake him up.
It sounds reasonable. Kind, even. It’s the sort of reasoning that occurs to people who love someone and who have information that will cause that person pain, and who find themselves, through no fault of their own, in possession of a terrible power: the power to decide when someone else’s reality changes.
We do this constantly, of course. Parents do it with children. Doctors do it with patients. Friends do it with friends. We hold the news, we time the telling, we calibrate. We ask ourselves questions like: Can they handle this right now? Is this the right moment? Will telling them now serve any purpose, or will it only make things worse? These questions feel practical, even ethical. They are also, if you think about them for more than a few seconds, impossible to answer with any confidence. We are not, it turns out, very good at predicting what other people can bear. We are not even particularly good at predicting what we ourselves can bear. But we make the calculations anyway, because the alternative is to simply hand over information the moment we receive it, and that feels irresponsible, or cruel, or at minimum unsophisticated.
We are not, it turns out, very good at predicting what other people can bear. We are not even particularly good at predicting what we ourselves can bear.
The thing is, Taylor’s friends were probably right. In the narrow sense that he did finish the album. He did get his big break. He did not, in the winter of 1968, have a breakdown in a London recording studio. The plan worked. And yet the song he wrote about it, which he began in London after they finally told him and finished while institutionalized at Austin Riggs in Massachusetts, is not a song about gratitude for their discretion. It is a song about dislocation, about the strange violence of learning that the world you have been living in was not the world that actually existed. For six months, he had been walking around in a reality where Suzanne was alive. He had perhaps thought of her, wondered how she was doing, made vague plans to reconnect. And all of that thinking was, in a sense, fictional. She was already gone. He just didn’t know it yet.
This is the part that interests me, and I suspect it’s the part that interested Taylor, though I cannot claim to know his mind. The question of whether his friends made the right call is almost beside the point. What the situation reveals is something about the nature of news itself, about the way information creates reality. Suzanne did not die twice. She died once, in New York, alone. But for James Taylor, she died again six months later, in London, in the form of words spoken by people who had been carrying those words around like a weight they were waiting to set down. The second death was the one he experienced. The first one happened without him.
Just yesterday mornin’, they let me know you were gone.
There is no clean lesson here. His friends were not villains. They were people who loved him and who made a decision that seemed reasonable at the time, based on the best information they had about what he could handle. They were wrong, perhaps, in the sense that he might have wanted to know, might have chosen to fly home for the funeral, might have had the chance to grieve in real time rather than in retrospect. But they could not have known that. They were doing what we all do, which is making decisions for other people based on incomplete models of their inner lives, hoping we get it close enough to right that the damage is minimal.
The plans they made. The plans we all make, constantly, to manage the flow of terrible information through the world, to decide who knows what and when. These plans are made with love, usually. They are made with the best intentions. And they work, in the sense that they achieve their immediate objectives. The album gets finished. The breakdown is averted. The reality we’ve constructed holds together for another day.
The cost is that someone, somewhere, is walking around in a world that no longer exists. And they won’t find out until we decide to tell them.