David Sedaris writes about the suicide of his 50-year-old sister.

He seems to have practically no information about why she did it, and the story is very much about the diminishment of the (still large) family. The sister, Tiffany, had been estranged from the rest for years. (She left a will: "In it, she decreed that we, her family, could not have her body or attend her memorial service.") So this is about the permanent loss of someone who really already wasn't there.

Each of us had pulled away from the family at some point in our lives—we’d had to in order to forge our own identities, to go from being a Sedaris to being our own specific Sedaris. Tiffany, though, stayed away....

“Why do you think she did it?”...  How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else. It’s an archaic belief, one that I haven’t seriously reconsidered since my late teens, but still I hold it. Ours is the only club I’d ever wanted to be a member of, so I couldn’t imagine quitting. Backing off for a year or two was understandable, but to want out so badly that you’d take your own life?

“I don’t know that it had anything to do with us,” my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

I'm impressed by Sedaris's willingness to go ahead and say — in so many words — how could you do this to me? I'd like to think that in some circumstances, it could help the would-be suicide to see things from a different point of view. This is about my family... my ancient tribe.

"The only thing I ever walked out of was ‘Dr. Doolittle’ with Eddie Murphy. It’s remarkable what I’ll sit through — it really is."

Said David Sedaris, in this article that collects his comments on his favorite movies. One is "Planet of the Apes," about which he said (making me laugh out loud):

Charlton Heston has been in that pod for however many years — a long time — and he’s got a cigar stub in his mouth. They land on this new planet, and he lights this cigar stub. They’re walking through the desert, and it looks like the entire planet is going to be like this — a horrible desert. Someone calls to him, and says, “Quick, come here!” and he throws the cigar butt on the ground. And I thought: if that’s your last cigar — and he’s got like a good two inches left — are you really going to throw it out just because someone called your name? I got so hung up on that. I thought about it for the rest of the movie. I couldn’t believe anyone had let that pass. If someone had said, “Come here!” and they were holding a box of cigars, I could understand him throwing it down. But they weren’t.

"I wish that gay people would get the right to marry, and then not a-one of them would do it."

"I wish they'd say, 'Fuck you! We don't need your stupid marriage!' You need to listen to me: Nobody wants to go to your wedding. Nobody does. People will give you double gifts if you elope, I guarantee it! Your wedding is not going to be fun. It's just going to be another wedding, and nobody wants to go."

ADDED: I remember, back when the gay marriage issue first emerged, a former student of mine — a gay man —  confessed to indecision over the issue. Antagonism to the conventional institution of marriage might be the better alternative. I compared it to a golf club that discriminates against women. I don't need to want to play golf to oppose the discrimination. The message of exclusion hurts even those who, given the choice, would not enter.

"Try eating a couple of raisins."

A tip from a list of tips. Guess what the goal to be achieved is before you click through.

ADDED: David in the comments guesses longevity, which is wrong. I don't think commenter David is David Sedaris, but in the new David Sedaris book, Sedaris describes his father's formula for longevity:

The secret, he tells me, is to eat seven gin-soaked raisins a day.

“Blond or dark?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Could I possibly cut out the gin part? Marinate them in, I don’t know, coffee or something.”

“Do you want to live or don’t you?” he asked.

When I told my father about Dan’s prophecy [that the first person who’ll reach the age of two hundred has already been born], he said, “Aw, baloney. A twenty-year-old kid in Holland, what does he know?”

“He learned it in school.”

“No, he didn’t,” my father said. “The guy was just pulling your leg.” He had a similar opinion of the plastic bags hanging in Francine’s doorway [for keeping the flies away]. “It’s just a load of BS.”

“As opposed to seven gin-soaked raisins keeping you alive until you’re eighty-nine?”

“Hey,” he said, “those raisins work!”

"Call me naive, but I seem to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and stare at a screen until your eyes cross."

"My father saw it coming, but this was a future that took me completely by surprise. There were no computers in my high school, and the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their shoes when the numbers got above ten. I wasn’t really aware of computers until the mid-1980s. For some reason, I seemed to know quite a few graphic designers whose homes and offices pleasantly stank of Spray Mount. Their floors were always collaged with stray bits of paper, and trapped flies waved for help from the gummy killing fields of their tabletops. I had always counted on these friends to loan me the adhesive of my choice, but then, seemingly overnight, their Scotch tape and rubber cement were gone, replaced with odorless computers and spongy mouse pads. They had nothing left that I wanted to borrow, and so I dropped them and fell in with a group of typesetters who ultimately betrayed me as well."

David Sedaris — whose father worked for IBM — in "Me Talk Pretty One Day" (published in 2000), which I listened to, partly while asleep, last night.

"But English people throw everything out their car window, and the roadsides are carpeted with rubbish.."

"... so that's what I do with my life now: I pick up rubbish on the side of the road. I do it on my bike. I do it on foot. The local council has given me an outfit and a grabber."

Says David Sedaris, who now lives in West Sussex, in a "Fresh Air" interview, promoting his new book "Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls."

From the book:

When I mentioned the trash to the neighbors, they agreed that it was a disgrace. “It wasn’t like this thirty years ago,” said the woman in the house to the right of ours. She couldn’t tell me why things had changed. It was just part of a general decline. In that regard it was like graffiti, something that had inexorably spread until people lost the will to fight against it. Then, to make themselves feel less powerless, they decided it was art. I tried looking at the trash that way: Oh, how the light plays off that vodka bottle! Look at the bright blue candy wrapper, so vivid against the fallen brown leaves. It didn’t work, though.