The last days of David Foster Wallace (Salon)

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TL;DR

Robert Ito's Salon feature (September 26, 2008), the first detailed contemporaneous account of Wallace's final weeks, reported from primary family sources — his father James Wallace, his mother, and his agent Bonnie Nadell. It is biographical testimony, not a reading of Infinite Jest: it lays out the medication crisis, the failed treatments, and the parents' final visit that would later be retold at length by D.T. Max and David Lipsky. It advances no theory about the novel; its value is as the earliest reported "last days" chronology, plus a kindness/teaching reception thread. Alongside the medical chronology it closes on the family's private remembrances — Wallace as brother-in-law and "magical uncle", his marriage to the painter Karen Green, and his sister's reflection that there is no anger in the grief, only the missing of him.

Key claims

The frame: following Wallace's suicide on September 12, fans, colleagues, and friends paid tribute "in countless articles and blog posts", using words like "virtuoso" and "genius"; the "common thread" running through the tributes was shock, because Wallace was "a very quiet one" who "found much of the fame... embarrassing and uncomfortable."
The medical chronology, per his father James Donald Wallace: "Wallace had suffered from clinical depression for the past two decades", managed for years by "powerful anti-depression medication" that "had allowed him to work and write". When the drug developed serious side effects, "In June of 2007, Wallace and his doctor decided that they would have to try" another course of treatment. Going off it was "just catastrophic," his father remembers: "Severe depression" "came back. They tried all kinds of things. He was hospitalized twice." Over the summer he "had a series of electro-convulsive therapy treatments, which just really left him very" shaky and fragile and unable to sleep.
Wallace became "unable to write" — his father: "I don't" "think he'd been able to write for more than a year". He told Pomona he could not teach in the fall and took a medical leave. Nadell: "My job was just to keep" "everyone and everything away from him."
The final visit: on August 18, Wallace's parents came to Claremont; "Wallace's wife of" "four years, Karen Green, had been called away on an urgent family matter," and Wallace "did not want to be left alone." He was "exhausted and gaunt" — his mother: "He weighed about 140 pounds, so I immediately started to try" to feed him up. They walked his two dogs, Werner and Bella; "He did tell me that he was glad I was his mom."
Reception/kindness thread: Gourmet editor Jocelyn Zuckerman on the loss — people "are really sad for all the books" "we're not going to get to read"; Nadell's anecdote of Wallace standing in line at FedEx before Christmas to mail a fan an autographed book ("a really sweet person"); Pomona student Amanda Shapiro, who got "five pages of notes on a six-page story," with "little smiley faces and notes and corrections."
The family's grief, and the "we're not angry" resolution. His sister Amy described emotions "ranging from disbelief to sadness to acceptance, of a sort": "Inevitably our thought was, if only he could have held on a little bit longer," she said. And then the counter-realization — that he had held on: "How many extra weeks had he hung in there when he just couldn't bear it? So we're not angry at him. Not at all. We just miss him." (This closing reflection is Amy's, not — as a partial early reading of the piece had it — his father's.)
The private remembrances. Amy on the "magical uncle" who "wasn't so big on kids, but adored his two nieces" and once took them to Disneyland despite hating the crowds; his mother on the marriage — Wallace met the painter and mixed-media artist Karen Green (of the Claremont gallery Beautiful Crap) through a mutual friend and married her on December 27, 2004, in the Champaign County Courthouse in Urbana — "The happiest he had ever been in his life was being married to Karen," his mother says.

Themes

Biography and depression (the medication crisis, ECT, the final weeks); the private man vs. the public reputation; kindness as teacher and correspondent. No Infinite Jest interpretation is engaged.

Cross-references

memorial-rollingstone-lipsky-lost-years-last-days-2008 (sibling-A draft) — Lipsky's longer Rolling Stone "last days" account; this Salon feature is the earlier (Sept 26) and more compressed first version of the same final-weeks chronology, reported from the same family circle. Delta: distinct source, earlier date, less detail; corroborates the medication-change → collapse sequence.
No IJ scene mappings — the piece reads no passage of the novel.

Notable passages

James Wallace: "Going off the medication was just catastrophic," and severe depression "came back. They tried all kinds of things. He was hospitalized twice."
James Wallace, on the ECT: Wallace "had a series of electro-convulsive therapy treatments, which just really left him very" shaky and fragile.
James Wallace: "I don't" / "think he'd been able to write for more than a year,".
Bonnie Nadell: "My job was just to keep" / "everyone and everything away from him."
His mother: "He did tell me that he was glad I was his mom."
Amanda Shapiro (student): "five pages of notes on a six-page story,".
Sister Amy, on the resolution of the family's grief: "So we're not angry at him. Not at all. We just miss him."
His mother, on the marriage: "The happiest he had ever been in his life was being married to Karen,".