1 1It was the first warm day after a particularly cold and brutal winter. As the bus maneuvered its way through the midtown traffic, I stared out the window at the office workers enjoying the sunshine on their lunchtime break. I recognized him immediately, striding decisively among the slower-walking pedestrians. His expensive gray suit was similar to the one he had worn to the monthly meetings. He was carrying the same brown leather briefcase—I could picture how he would set it upright by his side as soon as he sat down, its very presence proclaiming order and routine in the middle of our circle of chaos.
He prided himself on his resolve. “I am getting on with my life,” he would announce to the rest of us, his grief-clouded eyes betraying his words. “Things are settling back to normal and I’ve started moving forward,” he would repeat, as if having memorized a speech someone else had written for him.
This ordinary-looking businessman and I had been brought together years before by a shared anguish: the suicide of someone we loved. Twice a month, for more than a year, we met with five or ten or twenty other strangers in the basement of a church, trying to make some sense of our unthinkable tragedies, hoping to feel less alone with our feelings of craziness and disorientation. We walked into those meetings rudderless, not knowing what had hit us. We were survivors of a shipwreck, consumed by guilt for having failed to save the dearest people in our lives and ashamed at being alive and abandoned. We were dazed by our helplessness, confused by the anger that laced through our mourning.
He quickly disappeared into the noonday crowd, merging into the steady stream of people filling the vibrant street. I wished I could have spoken to him, to find out how he had fared over these past years. Had he truly been able to put his life back together after the piercing horror of his daughter’s suicide? Was he still married? Did he reconcile with his son? Had the nightmare of finding his daughter’s motionless body in a blood-filled bathtub dimmed enough to allow him some moments of peace? Had he forgiven himself?
And what about me? I looked at the spindly trees lining the avenue, their buds bravely welcoming another year of urban hazards. I thought about the flowers planted near Harry’s grave in a small Massachusetts cemetery. Were they also beginning to bloom? I wondered. Had they survived the fierce ice storms and snow blasts of these past months?
On December 16, 1989, my husband had been unable to survive a similarly harsh winter, killing himself in the waning light of a late Saturday afternoon. My once-familiar world exploded with his suicide; in an instant, the life we had built together during our marriage of twenty-one years ended, without discussion or time for goodbyes.
I remembered the bus ride I took to my first meeting of the support group, one month after Harry’s suicide. It was January 12, 1990, Harry’s forty-fourth birthday. I felt as if I had not slept since the moment I discovered him dead in his medical office, the intravenous tube that delivered a lethal dose of Thiopental, a powerful anesthetic, still attached to the crook of his arm. The horrific events of that past month were like a dream; nothing seemed quite real to me. I was unable to cry, as if my tears would somehow confirm that he was really gone.
I had found him lying on his examining table, covered with blood. The room was a mess. Empty bottles of Thiopental were strewn on the floor, along with discarded needle packets, plastic tubing, and several Milky Way wrappers. The IV pole was upright, tethered to Harry’s waist by his black leather belt.
Harry was wearing his favorite pink shirt, with both sleeves rolled up. Draped around his neck was the green woolen scarf his mother in Colombia had knitted for him to use during the cold New York winters; he had treasured the scarf most among all his possessions, considering it a talisman that would protect him against unforeseen dangers.
Both the shirt and the scarf were soaked with blood. For days afterward, I obsessed about the blood. It was as if, by solving the riddle of his blood, I would somehow be able to understand the logic of his suicide. Did he try to pull the IV tube out of his arm at the last minute and rip an artery? Had an intruder knocked him on the head and arranged his death to look like a suicide? Had he somehow managed to shoot himself after he injected the Thiopental? I finally found the courage to telephone the medical examiner, who told me that blood had leaked from Harry’s nose and mouth as a result of an anticoagulant he had taken so his veins would not become blocked and impede the flow of the Thiopental. “As a physician, your husband had it all figured out,” he said. The medical examiner’s tone conveyed his professional admiration, as if the logic of Harry’s actions was more a testimonial to his medical acumen than a terrifying window into his desperate state of mind.
The medical examiner also told me that it had been an extremely peaceful death. “He was asleep in seconds, dead in minutes,” he estimated, adding that this was the first death from Thiopental he had seen in New York City. “The drug is used as a pre-anesthetic, to sedate patients before surgery,” he explained. “Your husband didn’t suffer, if that’s any comfort.”
There would be no comfort. I knew this as soon as I discovered the gruesome scene in Harry’s office. How could he have left me like this? Why hadn’t he turned to me for help? What if I had come to his office an hour earlier? Why did I allow him to convince me that he didn’t need professional counseling for his growing depression after the deaths of his mother and father in the past year? What if I had been more insistent about our going out to dinner together the night before—maybe if we had been together in our favorite Chinese restaurant, soothed by the safe and familiar setting, sipping our lukewarm green tea, he would have told me about his plan.
I dialed 911 as if I were in a movie. The person I thought I knew better than anyone else in the world was dead by his own hand, and I had been unable to stop it. Complicit in his murder, I was equally drenched in his blood.
A month later, recalling that scene in the office filled me with such dread that I rushed off the bus twenty blocks before I got to the church where the support group was meeting. How could I talk about the grisly details of Harry’s death to people I had never met? As it was, I was lying about the circumstances to all but my immediate family and a few close friends. I told everyone that Harry’s sudden death was caused by a massive heart attack. Why did his colleagues, our neighbors, his patients have to know what really happened? I knew they would ask me why Harry, an accomplished physician and medical researcher in the prime of his career, had decided to end his life, and I had no answers for their need to understand. I did not have the stomach to face their real or imagined accusations, blaming me—or blaming him—for his death. I had entered into a surreal world where accepted forms of mourning did not apply.
As I walked to the church, I felt faint and nauseous. I pictured a room filled with crazy people, the kind you see nodding and weaving in the streets. I imagined a revival meeting, with people boasting about salvation and forcing me, somehow, to embrace it. I was already ten minutes late when I spotted the sign, A SAFE PLACE, on the basement door of the church. I was cemented to the sidewalk, unable to move, when a silver-haired woman in a sleek fur coat came up behind me. “Are you here for the meeting?” she asked gently. I nodded and she guided me in, as if I were a blind person. I assumed she was the group’s leader but soon found out she was a survivor like myself: One year before, during a Friday night dinner, her husband left the table, went into their bedroom, and shot himself with a pistol he kept in his night table. After calling the police, she sat calmly over their half-eaten meal, unable to believe what had just occurred.
We entered a small room with people sipping coffee from paper cups and eating cookies held on napkins. I was convinced that I was at the wrong place; everyone looked so normal. So ordinary. Many of them had come directly from work or school, and briefcases and book bags leaned casually against the wall. People seemed to know one another, laughing as they exchanged pleasantries.
Laughing! Small talk! Such modest luxuries seemed forever out of my reach. I was consumed with Harry’s death, exhausted from replaying the details of his last days and final minutes over and over in my mind. I had spent hours obsessively searching for overlooked clues that might explain his reasons for ending his life. I was plagued by questions that only he could answer. Why? Why? Why? buzzed inside my brain like a swarm of bees, threatening to destroy whatever sanity I had left.
Since Harry’s suicide, I felt increasingly isolated from my friends and family. They had no idea what I was going through, all their well-intentioned advice and words of comfort seeming ignorant at best and tinged with cruelty at worst. Yet, here I was with others who had supposedly experienced the nightmare of suicide, and I still felt alone and unconnected. Trapped and claustrophobic, I started to leave without even removing my coat.
“Please stay here with us,” the man who suddenly appeared at my side said in a French-tinged accent. I later found out he was Jean-Claude Deshauteurs, the facilitator of the group and a volunteer at Samaritans, the suicide prevention group that sponsored these free meetings twice each month. I felt raw and exposed, and I had the startled look of a newcomer to a strange world. “You’re among friends,” he said.
He gently steered me to the adjoining room, where folding metal chairs had been set up in a large circle. There were no windows in this bleak basement, and the cheerful posters on the walls only served to call attention to the starkness of the space. I still refused to take off my coat, even though I sat down in the chair he offered me next to his. Slowly, the circle began to fill with normal, everyday people—a typical New York crowd that blended ages, ethnic backgrounds, and economic classes.
I was in a daze as Jean-Claude welcomed us to the meeting. Tension now filled the air, choking out the seemingly casual mood of minutes before. We were getting down to business. Jean-Claude thanked us for coming and asked us to state our first name, our relationship to the person who had committed suicide, and how and when they had killed themselves. After the introductions, he explained, there would be an open discussion.
The woman to my right started sobbing; I was stunned. Had all the people in this room—these “normal” people—really been through a suicide? Did they all feel as guilty as I? Were their lives, too, shredded beyond recognition? The kindly woman who had led me into the meeting, the athletic young man in his college sweatshirt, the businessman whose booming laugh so inappropriately filled the room as he had passed around the plate of cookies? I willed myself to concentrate, an ability I was convinced I had lost forever with Harry’s death.
Jean-Claude turned to the man sitting on his other side, motioning him to begin. “My name is Ray,” he said. “My brother hung himself two years ago at Bear Mountain State Park. He was thirty-six, my younger brother.”
“My name is Elizabeth. My father shot himself last year on Thanksgiving Day. It was two hours before we were going to eat. My family had gathered together from all across the country in our childhood home in Iowa. We spent the holiday scrubbing his brains off the dining room wall.”
Elizabeth began sobbing. A box of tissues was passed around the circle to her. Like the children’s game Hot Potato, the tissues would end up on the lap of the person who was crying the hardest. “I’m sorry, this is my first meeting and I’m terrified,” she apologized. “I didn’t have the courage to come before now.”
“I’m Ivan. My son jumped in front of the subway four months, two weeks, and three days ago. He had just entered his sophomore year of high school and was returning from class.”
“My name is Cheryl. My mother took an overdose of pills on her seventy-fifth birthday. It was six weeks ago. She left a note saying that she didn’t want to be a burden to her children in her old age. She had been dead two days before I found her.”
It did not stop. There were aunts and boyfriends, wives and grandfathers, best friends and fathers.
“Hi, I’m Victoria. My husband was one of the most prominent heart surgeons in the country. Three years ago, he jumped from the window of our Park Avenue apartment. A policeman called me at our country home in Connecticut. ‘I’m sorry to tell you,’ he said, ‘but your husband has taken his life.’ ‘Taken it where?’ I demanded to know. ‘No, you don’t understand, ma’am. He took his life. You know, death.’ I yelled at him, ‘You sick son of a bitch,’ and slammed down the phone. He called back immediately. If it wasn’t so insane, it would have been funny.”
“My name is Hal. I found my fourteen-year-old daughter in the bathtub with her wrists slit on July 8, 1989, six months ago. I was devastated at first but now I’m getting on with my life. I’m moving on and trying not to dwell on it.”
“I’m Kevin. I was eleven when my father shot himself in our basement. It was the day before he was to retire as a New York City police detective. I found him when I came home from school. That was nine years ago—I’m now a junior at college—and all of a sudden I want to talk about it. You see, my father was my hero. He was always getting medals for bravery and I wanted to be just like him. But he left my mother and my six brothers and sisters alone to clean up after his shit. Now I think he’s a fucking coward.” An animal-like cry, combining fury and agony, erupted from deep in his chest. The tissues started making their way over to him, but he waved them away.
“Kevin, we’ll come back to you when we’re finished with the introductions,” Jean-Claude spoke calmly.
“I am Bernice. I am here today because my therapist suggested that it might help. I came home from work last April and found my lover with a bag on his head and a bunch of pills by his side. He had lung cancer and was in a lot of pain. I am worried because I don’t feel anything—sadness, anger, fear—nothing. I think that I will never feel anything again.”
“My name is Joe. My father jumped off the roof of his apartment building two years ago last September. My mother had died the month before after suffering from a debilitating stroke for three years. They were married forty-six years, and my father had taken care of her day and night. After he killed himself, I tried going to a psychiatrist to figure it all out. He told me that my father was ‘success-oriented.’ I swear. He told me that my father had made up his mind to kill himself and he had accomplished his goal. Spare me, Doctor. If he’s such a success, why is he six feet under?”
Laughter rippled through the room, relieving some of the pressure.
“I’d rather not say my name. My twin sister strangled herself five months ago. She tied her sheets to the bedpost and then crawled along the floor. I didn’t even know you could kill yourself that way. She was in a psychiatric hospital upstate—under suicide watch, no less. I had her committed because she was repeatedly threatening to kill herself. I guess you can’t save them if they won’t let you.”
“My name is Earl. My wife killed herself one year ago yesterday. She turned on the car in the garage and died from the carbon monoxide fumes. My two kids and I were asleep in the house, so I don’t know what she was thinking. She once told me she wanted to be cremated, have her ashes thrown in our garden. Do you know there are bone fragments in that stuff? The wind kept blowing them back in my face.”
“My name is Carla, and this is my first meeting. It’s my husband’s birthday today; he would have been forty-four. He killed himself four weeks ago. He was a doctor, so he injected himself intravenously with some heavy-duty anesthetic. Up until tonight, I didn’t know there were so many other people who could understand what I was talking about.” The box of tissues was on my lap before I realized that tears were streaming down my face. The crying in the room assured me that I was not alone.
I suddenly remembered that I was still wearing my coat and began struggling to remove it. Jean-Claude leaned over to help me.
“I’m glad you’ve decided to stay, Carla,” he said.
Seeing Hal from that bus window brought back vivid recollections of this first meeting. I thought about the singular bond suicide survivors share with one another. Even though each of our situations is unique, we all experience similar stages in our grieving. When we meet someone else who has been there, it makes our personal chaos and isolated secrecy seem a little less frightening.
Suicide is different from other deaths. We who are left behind cannot direct our anger at the unfairness of a deadly disease or a random accident or a murderous stranger. Instead, we grieve for the very person who has taken our loved one’s life. Before we can even begin to accept our loss, we must deal with the reasons for it—and the gradual recognition that we might never know what happened or why.
According to the book Suicide and Its Aftermath: Understanding and Counseling the Survivors, edited by Edward Dunne, John McIntosh, and Karen Dunne-Maxim, the attention of the mental health profession focuses on those who commit suicide and rarely addresses what happens to people who have survived the suicide of someone close to them. The authors cite studies showing that people who lose a loved one to suicide feel more guilt, more often search for an understanding of the death, and appear to experience less social support than those who lose a loved one to other causes.
In addition, the authors write, suicide survivors experience feelings of intentional rejection and deliberate abandonment, which separate them from others who are mourning the death of a loved one. They state: “This difference may explain why survivors of suicide who have attended grief groups for survivors of deaths by other causes report feeling different from other grievers and tend to drop out of these groups.”
Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death in the United States and the third leading cause of death among young people ages fifteen to thirty-four. The American Association of Suicidology estimates that for each of the 32,000 Americans who kill themselves each year, there are six survivors. According to the association, there are approximately 4 million people in the United States who have lost a loved one to suicide, with the number increasing annually by almost 200,000 persons.
Yet, most of us who have experienced the suicide of a loved one feel separate and apart. At the time my husband killed himself, it seemed inconceivable that I would ever emerge from the isolation created by his death. Even in my self-exile, however, I knew that there must be others who understood what I was going through. I searched fruitlessly in the literature for books and articles containing stories similar to mine. Instead, I found medical texts analyzing why people kill themselves, manuals on suicide prevention, articles on the link between creativity and suicide, essays on the moral and philosophical implications of suicide, even guidebooks on how to kill yourself; those of us who were left behind seemed forgotten, overshadowed by the drama and mystery that suicide leaves as its legacy.
I am writing this book because I do not want our stories to go untold. The grieving process of suicide survivors is often shrouded by stigma and silenced by shame. By exchanging the unthinkable details about our mother’s swallowing an overdose of pain medication, our son’s shooting himself with a hunting rifle, our brother’s jumping from an office window, our wife’s poisoning herself with carbon monoxide fumes, we will come to realize that we are neither crazy nor alone.
Since my husband’s death, I have spoken with more than one hundred women and men throughout the country who are struggling to find meaning from their loved one’s suicide. They have revealed their most carefully guarded personal histories to me in the hope that their stories might help ease the pain of others in similar circumstances. I have changed their names and some of the details of their stories because I believe that privacy and secrecy are two separate entities: We can own and protect our privacy without being made to feel that we are hiding some dark, shameful secret. In addition, I have interviewed a number of mental health professionals and others who specialize in the field of suicide survivors.
It is my hope that by sharing our experiences, the loneliness of mourning our loved one’s self-inflicted death will begin to diminish. As instant comrades-in-arms in a common struggle, we can identify with the stages and patterns of our similar journeys. We will see that, ever so slowly, the pain does ease. Gradually, there will be minutes, then hours, then longer chunks of time when the suicide is not the focus of our lives. Even though we have entered a looking-glass existence, where everything we once held dear has been transformed beyond recognition, we will come to believe that eventually we will emerge. And survive.
“I refuse to make two tragedies out of this,” says Carol, a woman whose husband drowned himself when she was nine months pregnant. “As much as I want to die, I know I want to live. The choice is as simple as that.”
I have worked hard to overcome the gripping shame that continues to cloud my acceptance of Harry’s decision to die: Seven years after his suicide, the words “he killed himself” are still uncomfortable for me to say when I am asked about the cause of his death at the age of forty-three. Yet, as I start to talk about it more openly, what most surprises me is the reaction to my decision to tell the truth: “My sister killed herself in her freshman year of college,” a neighbor confides. “My uncle drove his motorcycle into a tree,” the dental assistant reveals. “My father shot himself,” the woman sitting next to me on the flight to Miami whispers.
I hope this book will help penetrate the isolation that surrounds the mourning process of those of us who have lost a loved one to suicide. As we begin to tell our stories, the stigma associated with the memories of our mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, lovers and friends, relatives and coworkers, will be lifted. With the support of others who have been there, we will be able to let go of the silence and start to make sense of the chaos that suicide leaves behind.