Summary
In Part 5, we get the story of a girl who is mistakenly thought to be suicidal because she climbs up to the roof of her thirty-story apartment building. The speaker tells us that the girl was not, in fact, suicidal but was trying to escape the heat on an extremely hot day. She sits beneath the shadow of the water tower and hangs her legs off of the roof of the building. She shouts "Gift" by Czeslaw Milosz into the sky—a poem about happiness and humility. When the girl hears the ambulances, she assumes they are not for her. She does not notice a crowd forming on the street below her. The speaker tells us that if she knew she could be seen by others, she would have gone back inside.
Finally, a police officer goes out onto the roof with the girl and begins to talk to her in a soft tone. The police officer consoles the girl. While the girl is standing from the edge of the building, two other officers appear on the roof. Even though she is disoriented at their appearance because she was not actually trying to commit suicide, she is forced to go to the hospital. Before going to the hospital, the girl is brought to the police station for questioning. The sergeant asks her "What the hell do you think you were doing?" and the girl appreciates this question.
The speaker recounts a memory from the Museum of Emotions in London in Part 6. In the museum, there is a game that asks "yes" or "no" questions. One of the questions is about Princess Diana: "Were you terribly upset and did you find yourself weeping when Princess Diana died?" (39). When the speaker answered "NO," she was not allowed to continue the game, and a museum employee looked embarrassed when she stepped away. The speaker muses that the correct question should have been, "Was Princess Diana ever really alive?" (39). She then describes the collective mourning of the English people after Princess Diana's death. Following this, there is an image enclosed in a television screen of thousands of flowers placed by mourners in front of her palace. The speaker questions the motivation behind of this mourning, wondering if they were actually grieving their own mortality instead of Diana's.
Following the part about Princess Diana, the speaker moves into a scene with her mother. The speaker's mother wants the speaker to be materially successful more than she wants her to be happy. From the mother's point of view, she sacrificed a lot as a mother and wants to reap the benefits of that sacrifice through her children. Beneath this on the page, there is a drawing of four mouths, each in varying degrees of openness. The speaker's interaction with her mother causes her to question whether she is like her mother and whether there is anything wrong with her own brain.
Part 6 then moves into a scene between a father and son. The father tells his son that he regrets worrying so much in his life. Below this, there are two definitions of "Worry (noun)" in boldface. The first definition is a dog's action of biting prey in order to injure or kill it. The second definition is uneasiness or anxiety. The father then tells his son that his worrying was futile because things eventually ended up as they were meant to, whether or not he worried about them. Now, he is an old man with an attractive son. It is very apparent in the son's face that he resembles his mother. Following this, there is another bolded definition of "Worry," this time a verb meaning to cause mental distress in another person or to surrender to those emotions yourself. An unnamed man (it is unclear whether it is the father or the son in this scene) waits for his father to die after he has been taken off the ventilator in the hospital.
On the next page, the speaker reveals that the son from the previous scene is a friend of hers. This friend is severely depressed—he took a medical leave from his job and is unable to get out of his bed. He tells the speaker that he feels like an old person who is close to death. The speaker tells us that before her friend entered this depression, they would watch movies together over a bag of Doritos and a bottle of wine. After the friend's depression started, he no longer wished to see anyone and stopped answering her phone calls. After a while, he finally let her come visit him. He chose Herzog's Fitzcarraldo for them to watch. The friend turns down the glass of wine that the speaker poured for him and reveals it's because he is taking Lithium. There is an image of a prescription label for Lithium. The directions on the label read: "TAKE ONE CAPSULE BY MOUTH FOUR TIMES DAILY" (42). The friend cries while watching the movie which causes the speaker to decide that her friend is decidedly not okay. Part 6 closes with a picture enclosed in a TV screen of a man looking bewildered and holding a side of his face. His hat is off and he is holding it. A large boat seems to be tipping behind him.
Analysis
Part 5 is written in the third person. Because the scene is told in the third person, it is not easily associated with the speaker who appears in the majority of Don't Let Me Be Lonely. This character is introduced with an indistinct title—"a girl" rather than "the girl"; she could be anybody. As readers, we are able to assume that this girl is unknown to or separate from the speaker until the last line of Part 5: "In all our dreams his question is the question that stays" (36). In this line, the third person narration shifts into first person plural, suggesting that the speaker and the girl—and even the audience—are in fact connected, a collective "us." This scene also adds to the uncertainty that shrouds death throughout this work—the girl is understood as suicidal even though she is not.
The scene in Part 5 also introduces the theme of state-sanctioned authority doing more harm than good. Rather than listen to the girl's account, the police officers oblige her to go with them to be questioned and then to the hospital. They misread her situation and offer her very little choice. This scene mirrors the one in Part 1 about the suicide hotline when the speaker is told by the ambulance attendant that she has to go with him or he will be forced to restrain her. As it is, Part 5 is another instance of a woman being understood as suicidal and taken into custody against her will.
The theme of the gray area between life and death appears again in Part 6. The speaker thinks that the question she should have been asked at the Museum of Emotions in London regarding Princess Diana's death is, "Was Princess Diana ever really alive? I mean, alive to anyone outside of her friends and family—truly?" (39). The question that is raised here is whether living a life in the media gaze really means that one is alive. She goes on to suggest that the mass mourning that overtook England following Princess Diana's death was, in part, the people mourning for themselves: "Weren't they mourning the protection they felt she should have had? A protection they'll never have? Weren't they simply grieving the random inevitability of their own deaths?" (39). These questions emphasize the uncertainty and erraticness of death within the pages of Don't Let Me Be Lonely. The speaker is making the argument that the fear and grief generated by the public following Princess Diana's death was fear and grief for oneself. If Princess Diana was royalty and was still able to die, what would happen to them? If their death is as random and inevitable as Diana's, then aren't they themselves exisiting in a state that is close to death?
We get our first detailed description of physical death in Don't Let Me Be Lonely on page 41. It is the speaker's close friend watching his father die. This death scene surprises the son, as it are "nothing like the wind moving through the vacancy of a mind" (41). Instead, the father's death is "jerky and convulsive" (41).
There are several details that suggest that the setting of Part 6 is New York City. First, the speaker mentions that she walks "thirty-six" blocks to her friend's apartment when he finally agrees to see her. Additionally, the friend's medicine label is from Duane Reade, a pharmacy that is only found in New York City. The area code on the label is 212, New York City's area code. These details make the world around the events of Don't Let Me Be Lonely more vivid. We get the sense that we are existing in the City even if we have never been there before; even though we are never told this is where we are situated.
The prescription label in Part 6 also helps to construct the world around the events of Don't Let Me Be Lonely by making the events of the book feel more real. It is a photograph for a real prescription for Lithium. We are not told whether or not this is the friend's specific prescription or whether or not the friend actually exists at all. However, the insertion of this picture adds a visual element to the story of the friend and thus it makes it jump off the page. Additionally, this prescription label is not enclosed within a TV screen like so many of the other images in Don't Let Me Be Lonely. This further asserts the label's "realness."
