Requiem for a Dream

Jason Arday is dead.

We don’t know yet how he died, but everything about the statements English police and his family have made suggests suicide.

Whatever your religious views on the subject, suicide is a tragedy — particularly for a 41-year-old man with two children whose greatest failing seems to have been puffery. The lies Arday told were absurd and childish and obvious (nine marathons on a broken leg!). They are the sure sign of a man desperate to prove he is worthy when he knows he isn’t. It is not his fault he was promoted far past his talents; should he have turned down the University of Cambridge when it offered him a professorship?

In any case, his body is not yet cold.

I don’t believe we should never speak ill of the dead; some humans cast a shadow that leaves the rest of us cold even when they are gone. But they are few and far between, and as far as we know Jason Arday was not one of them.

I offer this reader letter as a more fitting eulogy.

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First, I am unbelievably sad to hear that Prof. Arday, by all accounts, took his own life. Every life is precious. Is it so sad that he could not see, or had no one to tell him, that there is always a path to redemption. One of Prof. Arday’s own countrymen is an example of this. John Profumo, a British brigadier general, member of Parliament, and Italian baron, lost everything in the early 1960s after he cheated on his wife with someone loosely connected to Soviet Intelligence, lied about it, and was expelled from the House of Commons. (The book Bringing the House Down is a good account of this.)

Profumo was drummed out of public life, completely disgraced, but slowly earned redemption by quietly volunteering and then fundraising at a mental institution. Some twenty-plus years after his disgrace, he was knighted and dined with the Queen, later dying with his reputation restored and almost nothing but accolades for how he had lived and contributed to society after the scandal.

I wish I could say this to every person contemplating self-harm: There is always a way back. It will take work, but it’s worth it. You are worth it.

At the same time, I can’t say I am surprised. The ideology with which Prof. Arday aligned himself, benefited from, and (by some accounts) wielded against others, is one that does not admit of such subtleties. As a clergyman whom I don’t terribly respect (but hey, a broken clock can be right twice a day) said, “Woke is all judgment and no redemption.”

Born White (or worse, White and Jewish)? You’re a racist and oppressor; you don’t even know you are; and if you try to defend yourself, that is just proof of your disease. Born almost anything else? You’re a victim - pure, innocent, and blameless - even if you stab a classmate to death at a track meet for asking you to leave a tent.

All judgment, and no redemption.

May God welcome Jason into His company and give him the peace he clearly did not have -- for the fabulist is the best example of the “peaceless person” running from the world and himself -- and may God save us from the quasi-religion that contributed so much to his fall.

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Amen.