In Memoriam: Andrew King

This past Wednesday, I heard some sad news.

Andrew Rivan King was a colleague from my time in the M.F.A. program at Columbia. He was an enthusiastic writer who was working on a book about his experiences in Africa. This was the early Nineties: Mandela had been released, but apartheid was still in the process of being dismantled. The Battle of Mogadishu was news in the literal sense. The Rwandan genocide had not yet happened. Just about the only Africa memoir we could reference was Out of Africa and we all thought Andrew had a good thing going. Andrew’s pieces in the workshops were peppered with Kiswahili. Jambo (“Hello”). Mzuri (“I’m fine.”). Mzee (“Older man”).

Andrew, like me, was a part of large and unusually supportive group in the Nonfiction concentration at Columbia. There wasn’t a lot of competition between us or, if there was, it was kept far offstage. Most of us were writing memoirs and, as with Africa, this was relatively uncharted territory. We looked back to This Boy’s Life and The Woman Warrior. The Liar’s Club hadn’t been published yet. The Internet was new. So was Amazon.

We both finished at Columbia in 1995. He continued to write, like I did, as other colleagues from Columbia drifted away from writing and started families or had their first books published or both. He moved from his Morningside Heights apartment to Brooklyn, and then out to Bay Ridge. I hadn’t heard from him in a few years; the last time I saw him was sometime around 2002-2003. He was still writing and still working to break through.

Wednesday I received an e-mail from a Columbia colleague I hadn’t heard from in a while, and her note warned of unpleasant news. When I called, she told me that Andrew took his own life in the second week in May. The news was just filtering out. In our conversation, Catherine told me that Andrew had long suffered from mood swings and depression, which he seldom discussed. The moment she said it, I felt like I understood Andrew’s persistent positivity. I don’t suffer from chemical or other kinds of depression, but have experienced the havoc that a thyroid disorder can wreak with physical and emotional energy and stability. I have also experienced the despair that results from other kinds of untreated disease. There was a long period in my own life when I contacted people only when things were going well, or when I felt I could “sell” them (and myself) on the positive aspects of my life. In Andrew’s slow but progressive geographical dislocation from a place where he was happy (Columbia/Morningside Heights) to a place where I suspect he could hide his despair, I recognized a strategy I’d tried. Its futility became apparent to me as it would have become to Andrew, and that must have been painful for him—to have to admit that his efforts to stave off his despair were in vain. The despair would have been its own kind of pain and sorrow; the failed efforts to combat it another. Andrew must have also been discouraged by his failure as a writer, but I feel that I want to distinguish between his efforts and his expectations. Every minute of every day there is a person somewhere striving to fulfill his plans, his dreams, his ambitions, and necessarily doing so in isolation. We don’t see those efforts, but that doesn’t make them failures.

Kwaheri, mzee. Amani.