In Suicide's Wake, She Looks At Life From Both Sides Now

Looking svelte in a chic black pantsuit, her champagne-colored hair flowing and famously blue eyes sparkling, Judy Collins sweeps into a Seattle restaurant, smiling warmly.

She sits down, orders a cup of decaf coffee with a shot of espresso, and in a disarmingly open, unaffected way, starts talking about suicide.

It isn't a subject most people want to discuss so candidly, with total strangers - even in this time of ubiquitous mass-media venting.

But Collins is determined to raise the issue. Six years after her son Clark Taylor took his own life at age 33, she has written "Singing Lessons," a memoir that delves deeply into an experience that is most parents' worst nightmare. And she wants to keep talking about it.

"To become a suicide survivor means you take on the whole mantle society thrusts on you," says Collins, in the silvery voice that's made her one of the most popular, enduring singers from the '60s folk era.

"There's the guilt, the remorse, the wondering did I cause this, the agony of people avoiding the subject because they don't know how to talk about it. I wanted to write this to help other people break through and address it more honestly."

"Singing Lessons" (Pocket Books; $25) is her sixth book, including the novel "Shameless." It doesn't just focus on the single destructive act that devastated Collins and her close-knit family. It also evokes Collins' childhood in Seattle and Colorado, her budding musical career, her own struggles with depression and alcoholism, her early first marriage (to Clark's father), her encounters with an inspiring singing teacher, and her friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

But she concentrates most on painting a self-portrait of a very human mother trying hard to save a beloved child - then dealing with his suicide.

"It's a terrible thing to have happen to you," Collins says bluntly. "It's also very important to not feel guilty, because there are no guilts in suicide. It's not about, `Could I have stopped it? What did I do wrong?' "

Nor, she believes, is it about blaming her son's trouble with drugs on her own problems with alcohol - which got so bad that, as a teenager, Clark once found her sipping straight booze from a coffee cup one morning.

"Alcoholism is a disease," Collins emphasizes. "To blame would be like saying if Clark had cancer, he got it from me. That's a hopeless and useless exercise."

While finally getting sober herself, Collins kept trying to rescue her adolescent son, who was tumbling into drug abuse. She sent him to therapy and special schools, indulged him and practiced tough love.

In his early 20s, Clark finally checked himself into a rehab program at the Hazelden Pioneer House in Plymouth, Minn. To Collins' great relief, he went into recovery, married and fathered a daughter, Hollis.

Keeping in close touch from her New York home, Collins believed in January 1992 that Clark was fairly stable.

"Yes, he was in therapy and having trouble in his marriage. But A. Alvarez, who has written a lot about suicide, says that everyone has a reason to kill themselves. At some point or another, each of us may slip into that state of mind, but most of us don't complete the act."

When she learned Clark had gone into his St. Paul garage, run a hose from the exhaust into his idling car and breathed the deadly fumes, Collins went into shock.

It was a car she had given him. In a final note he wrote, "Mom, I love you, and you have tried so hard with me, and I'm so sorry."

Collins later learned Clark had just spent another week in rehab, and was released while still very depressed. But she doesn't blame his therapists: "I think we're learning more now about suicide and depression. And Clark was an adult; they couldn't legally hold him. I know it's a delusion to think you can keep an adult from doing what they bloody well want to do."

Where she has more control, Collins believes, is in her own response as a "survivor."

"I really needed to understand more about what suicide is. I talked about it, went to groups, went to a catastrophic-grief counselor. She said, `Look, this is a great opportunity. If you can get through it, you can live your life in a different way.' "

For Collins, that's meant writing the book and elegiac psalms dotting it. It's meant marrying her longtime partner, designer Louis Nelson, in 1993. It's meant living in the present, seeking spiritual support and holistic remedies, traveling as an ambassador for UNICEF.

It's also meant speaking openly to her granddaughter Hollis, now 11, about Clark's life and death.

"If there is one regret I have, it's that I didn't talk a great deal to Clark about my own suicide attempt as a young person, and another suicide in his family," she says.

Collins also keeps writing new songs, and performing. She'll soon release the first half of a double collection of folk songs and Broadway tunes. She plays 50 concerts a year, including a recent show in Seattle.

"This whole process of grief and recovery has been very, very meaningful in resurrecting and almost re-creating the whole reason for my work, my singing," she tells you.

"Why was I so passionate about music? Why has it been the bridge between my own darkness and illumination? It has a purpose. It's saved my own life, and people tell me it's been very meaningful for them at certain times to hear my songs. I've got to keep singing."