13 13“Death by suicide is usually considered a newsworthy
event. Perhaps it is because the person who chooses to
respond to life’s vicissitudes in this way challenges our
usual attitudes toward life.”
—Karen Dunne-Maxim,
Suicide and Its Aftermath: Understanding and Counseling the Survivors
I am waiting at the supermarket checkout line when I feel my heart skip a beat. Facing me on the magazine display rack is a copy of New York magazine with a large white cat gazing upward and the splashing headline: IS YOUR CAT CONTEMPLATING SUICIDE? Oh, no, I think to myself. Now it’s even news when your pet dies? The article turns out to be about neurotic animals in New York City. Yet, the marketing people are on to something: Suicide sells.
Self-inflicted death both fascinates and repels. It is a mystery that can never be solved, a forbidden boundary that has defiantly been crossed. Rock stars, poets, politicians, police officers, millionaires—their suicides tap into the dark side of our personal and public psyche, reminding us of the fragile margin between the will to survive and the ultimate forsaking of hope.
The suicide of Vincent Foster, President Clinton’s close friend and former aide, touched a particularly raw nerve among those who have trouble accepting a person’s premeditated decision to die. Despite conclusive police evidence establishing that Mr. Foster committed suicide, congressional committees and members of the media continue to question the circumstances surrounding his death. Suggestions of a cover-up, ranging from accusations that his suicide note was forged to the alleged sighting of a mysterious assassin, have been offered as proof that Mr. Foster died against his will.
According to Karen Dunne-Maxim, the public’s reaction to celebrity suicides often mirrors the denial found in many families following the suicide of one of its members.
“In working with suicide families, one often finds that there is conflict among family members about the real cause of death,” she writes in Suicide and Its Aftermath: Understanding and Counseling the Survivors. “Sometimes even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (there may be a history of depression, psychiatric treatment and previous suicide attempts), some family members cling to the notion that the death was accidental or caused by foul play. This conflict is apparent in the controversy about the very public death of Marilyn Monroe. Many years later, the media is still used to express the opinion of those who feel the death was most certainly a suicide and by others who continue to search for the evidence that it was murder. This pattern so closely resembles what one observes in families after a suicide that one wonders if the public family is experiencing the same discordance over the suicide and ultimate rejection by this much idolized film star.”
The suicide of a prominent member of society exposes the myth that material and professional success ensures happiness and well-being. The noted American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson captured the disbelief of a small town at the suicide of one of its most prominent and envied citizens in “Richard Corey,” written in 1897:
Whenever Richard Corey went down town
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Corey, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Even more disquieting is the decision of a person to commit suicide despite having emerged triumphant from past suffering and pain. We are shaken and confused when Lewis Puller, Jr., the author of Fortunate Son, who lost half his body in the Vietnam War, shoots himself in the basement of his house after serving as an inspiration in courage to an entire generation of veterans. We try to make sense of the death of Tadeusz Borowski, the noted Polish writer who survived the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau, only to take his life five years later by turning on the gas valve in his apartment three days after the birth of his daughter. We look for meaning when the prominent Holocaust scholar Terrence Des Pres kills himself following the publication of his book The Survivor, which chronicles the nobility of the human spirit in the face of utter hopelessness and despair.
Public suicides are often portrayed as daringly heroic or romantically tragic. The press characterizes the death pact of a thirteen-year-old girl and a fourteen-year-old boy in Miami, who drowned together in a canal because her parents forbade the relationship, as a modern-day Romeo and Juliet story. Ernest Hemingway is lionized as a “real man” for having the courage to blow his brains out. The rock star Kurt Cobain becomes an instant icon after shooting himself in the head at the age of twenty-seven.
“One of the women in my college dorm was totally obsessed with Sylvia Plath,” says Esther, a twenty-five-year-old medical student from North Carolina. “She would talk almost mystically about how this brilliant, artistic woman had killed herself at the age of thirty-one by putting her head in the oven while her two young children were sleeping in the next room. She seemed more interested in her suicide than in her actual poetry. The summer before we graduated, she took an overdose of tranquilizers at her parents’ beach house. She left a copy of one of Sylvia Plath’s poems on the night table beside the empty pill bottles. I guess the whole thing seemed so dramatic to her. It just seemed stupid to me—and sad, very sad.”
Because a suicide is a murder with a known assailant but an indeterminate motive, its retelling is often accompanied by personal interpretation, conjecture, and a Rorschach-test set of individual responses. Press accounts frequently focus on sensational details and speculative theories, serving to compound the pain and surrealism of the ordeal for the survivor.
“The front page of the New York Post read LOVE SICK DOC IN SUICIDE LEAP,” recalls Victoria, a stylish woman in her mid-forties whose husband, one of the most prominent heart surgeons in the country, jumped to his death from their thirteenth-floor Park Avenue apartment eight years ago. “The reporter spoke to one of my neighbors, who said I used to spend weekends in our country home in Connecticut with my children from my first marriage. She just assumed Rob and I were having problems and told the press that. I was in a total state of shock but the story made it through to my consciousness: They were blaming me for my husband’s death because I had left him alone to spend time with my two young sons.
“My husband landed in the courtyard of the building, in full view of all the residents. It was ten o’clock on a Monday morning and the janitor was out there getting the trash. Rob’s body fell next to him. I still feel guilty about that janitor and would tip him extra at Christmas, as if it were somehow my fault. The doorman also saw the body fall and called 911.
“Rob killed himself on the third anniversary of his mother’s death. The doorman later told me that he had gone out at dawn, returning with a six-pack of beer. He never left for the hospital to make rounds, something he did every morning, seven days a week. I was still in Connecticut, getting ready to come to New York. I had gotten up early and thought about phoning him because I knew he would be sad about his mother. But then I just assumed he was in the operating room like he was every day at that time. I always wonder what would have happened if I had made that call. I can’t believe that while he was jumping out the window, I was in the shower thinking about what to make for that night’s dinner.
“The police telephoned me in Connecticut, advising me not to come home because they had to seal off the apartment to search for evidence. It took them eight hours to determine that his death was a suicide. His body lay in the courtyard the whole time, covered with a yellow tarpaulin that someone had thrown over him.
“The doorman eventually gave me all the details of what happened. He said that Rob’s right hand had been severed, his head split open. He was wearing a white dress shirt, gray trousers, socks, and no shoes. Rob always used to wear shoes in the house, and I later found them on the floor near the jump window.
“The news about my husband’s suicide appeared on television around one in the afternoon. The first report was on CNN—‘Prominent Park Avenue heart surgeon falls to his death.’ I started getting all these calls in Connecticut. Some were from people in the building, screaming at me to get the body out of the courtyard before their kids came home from school. My mother saw the broadcast in Florida and called me, hysterical. I was numb. I couldn’t believe that I was not also dead. I thought that the inside of me had died. Why was the outside of me moving when the inside of me was dead? It was impossible to believe that I could still be alive.
“I had to go to the city the next day to identify the body at the medical examiner’s office. There were reporters in front of the building, people were taking my picture. It seemed all part of one big dream. It felt as if I had to climb thousands of stairs to get into the front door; it was like going up a giant mountain. Two friends came with me. Back then, they made you look at the actual body instead of photographs like they do now. We were taken to an area that I thought was a holding room. I assumed someone would come greet us, because my husband was famous and there was a lot of press interest in his death.
“We were standing there for around ten minutes when I heard the sound of wheels on marble floors. All of a sudden, the doors to the room flew open and two people entered, rolling in a gurney with a body on it. It was wrapped from head to toe in a white sheet. They pulled the sheet off and it was Rob. He was totally exposed, even his genitalia. His bones were protruding from his body, his mouth and eyes were open, and he was covered with blood.
“I had no idea that they were going to show me the whole body. I imagined that it would be like the movies, where they pull out a shelf from the wall and you just look at the person’s face and say, ‘Yes, that’s him.’ I was standing in front of Rob’s missing right hand, his operating hand. I screamed, ‘Oh my God,’ and then I fainted. When I came to, my friends helped lead me out of the room.
“It took me five thousand dollars and six weeks to get a court order so I could enter my apartment. All this time, reporters were trying to get to me, to find out the ‘real’ reason why Rob had killed himself. There were several stories implying that he had a drinking problem. Even though I knew he was a fine surgeon, I felt at a loss to safeguard his reputation. First I had failed him as his wife; now I was failing him as his widow.
“I went into a terrible depression after my husband died. Even though people were shocked, I continued living in the apartment until just a year ago. There was a horrible feeling there, that was true. But it was all I had left. I could pour myself a glass of wine, put on the music, and think for one split second that maybe it didn’t happen. The feeling that my old world was intact, even for an instant, was worth it, worth living there.”
The public nature of suicide results in unsolicited commentary and instant analysis, infringing on a survivor’s intimate pain and introspection. “There is a total loss of privacy,” says Mark, a fifty-six-year-old mechanical engineer from Tennessee whose wife jumped from the roof of a Nashville office building in the middle of rush hour. “The newspapers wrote that my wife had recently been laid off from her job and was under treatment for depression. They also ran a picture of her body lying in the middle of the street. Her skirt was up around her neck and you could see her underpants. My wife’s anguish was splayed out for the world to see. All her dignity had been taken away, making her death even harder to accept.”
Some survivors try to hide the truth that their loved ones have killed themselves, only to see the details of their suicides recounted in the media. “I told everyone that my son had shot himself while playing Russian roulette,” says Nick, a forty-seven-year-old accountant from Rhode Island. “I had no idea the local paper would care enough about a sixteen-year-old boy to run a front-page story saying the coroner had ruled his death a suicide, not an accident. I had lied to everyone and now the whole world could see I had been unable to protect my own son.
“The article described how my son had shot himself with my pistol, quoted from his suicide note, and mentioned that he had recently had a minor mishap with the law. In addition, the reporter spoke to an expert in the field of teenage suicide, who advised parents to get professional help for their children if they seemed depressed and to avoid keeping guns in the house. How do you think that made me feel? It’s been almost a year but I’m thinking of selling my home and moving away. The whole town knows my business and it seems as if there’s no place to hide.”
Parents who have lost their teenage children to self-inflicted gunshot wounds often experience an intensified sense of responsibility because of the well-documented connection between the ready availability of firearms and suicide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people living in a household where a firearm is kept are nearly five times more likely to die by suicide than people who live in gun-free homes. The New England Journal of Medicine reports that the rate of suicide by firearms among adolescents and young people has more than doubled over the past twenty-five years, and warns: “Owners of firearms should weigh their reasons for keeping a gun in the home against the possibility that it might someday be used in a suicide.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also report that in the United States more people kill themselves with guns than by all other methods combined. Suicide by firearms accounts for 61 percent of all suicides, followed by hanging and strangulation (14.5 percent), gas poisoning (7.5 percent), other poisoning (10 percent), and other causes (7 percent). Nearly 80 percent of all firearm suicides are committed by white men, who account for 73 percent of all suicides in the country.
The phenomenon of murder-suicide, when a person commits homicide and shortly after commits suicide, accounts for one thousand to fifteen hundred combined suicide and homicide deaths in the United States each year. The Journal of the American Medical Association points out that while suicide occurs among men and women across all ages, murder-suicide is committed principally by young males with intense sexual jealousy, depressed mothers, or despairing elderly men with ailing wives. The principal victims of murder-suicide are female sexual partners or blood relatives, usually young children.
“I sometimes think, murder is murder: What’s the difference between killing another person or killing yourself?” says Mary, a thirty-seven-year-old St. Louis mother of three young children whose husband, a television anchorman, shot himself two years ago. “Gil’s suicide was covered as if it were the crime of the century. For one week, story after story speculated as to why he had ended his life in the prime of a successful career. One article even mentioned that Gil might have been depressed because our daughter suffers from cerebral palsy. I was used to my husband’s reporting the news, not being the focus of it. But his death was a hot story, there was nothing I could do about it.
“The night Gil killed himself, we had people over for dinner. He said I should go to sleep, that he would clean up. When the police called to tell me that Gil was dead, I remember looking at the sun coming up through the red curtains in our bedroom. The cops said he had shot himself in his office. I figured I was dreaming, that everything would be back to normal when I woke up. Then I heard my baby crying. Even though my husband was dead, my son still needed his morning bottle. Life was not stopping because Gil was no longer here.
“The reporters kept asking me if I had found a note. It seemed so important to them, as if it would unravel the riddle of Gil’s death. Two weeks after the funeral, I opened the drawer where I keep all my bills. I saw this ripped-up yellow legal paper with my husband’s handwriting on it compressed into a ball. At that moment, I thought I was having an out-of-body experience. I started searching frantically for something to piece the scraps of paper together but all I could find was thick black electrical tape—it made the note look even crazier than it was.
“I could barely understand what Gil had written. His words made no sense, something about loving me but having run out of choices. I called the police and they came over immediately. I didn’t know they would take the note away; if I had, I wouldn’t have given it to them. They didn’t even give me a photocopy. One of the reporters must have had a source in the police department because the next day there was a photograph of the note in the newspaper, electrical tape and all.
“After the initial press interest, Gil’s death was basically forgotten. People seem more interested in figuring out the reason for suicide, the logic of self-destruction, than in its consequences. Now, I only confront the truth in dark little corners. I obsess about Gil’s note, aching for the chance to convince him that he did have choices, that we could have worked something out. I take long showers, put the stereo on very loud, and cry. I do this to protect my children, so they won’t know the depth of my confusion and hurt.”
Suicide notes are written by approximately 25 percent of people who kill themselves, according to John McIntosh in Suicide and Its Aftermath: Understanding and Counseling the Survivors. Yet, like Mary, many survivors find these last messages from their loved ones to be more confusing than comforting. Because the notes are often composed during states of extreme agitation, their incoherent references and cryptic allusions usually bring about more uncertainty than resolution.
I searched for days for a note from Harry. Seven years after his suicide, there is still a part of me that hopes—and fears—that one day I will open one of his books or come across a forgotten audiotape that will contain his thoughts as he faced the last hours of his life. I, too, like the public and the press, crave a tidy explanation to the unfathomable act of choosing death over life. I would like nothing more than to have a sound-bite answer ready for the inevitable question of why my husband committed suicide, a one-sentence because that would serve as reassuring balm.
After Vincent Foster killed himself, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial declaring, “The American public is entitled to know if Mr. Foster’s death was somehow connected to his high office. If he was driven to take his life by purely personal despair, a serious investigation should share this conclusion so that he can be appropriately mourned.” (Emphasis added.)
Unfortunately, the newspaper fails to comprehend what survivors have come to accept: The torturous ambiguity that suicide leaves as its legacy allows no room for definitive closure or “appropriate” mourning. The challenge of surviving is to mourn without understanding; with pain and grief, yes, but with the awareness that we will never know why we have been left by those we have loved.