2 2“For me, being a survivor has made me a reluctant
participant/observer in my own inner struggle between
wanting that to be the most important fact of my life
and wanting it to be the least important.”
—Edward Dunne
In the days following my husband’s suicide, I remembered a documentary about cancer patients that I had seen several years before. A woman dying of leukemia spoke of her decision to wait twenty-four hours before telling her family and friends about her confirmed diagnosis.
“As soon as my doctor gave me the results of my blood test, I entered into another world,” she explained. “I knew that I would think of myself differently once I revealed that I was dying. I also knew I would be treated differently. For as long as I could, I wanted to be like everyone else.”
In my mourning, I, too, wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted my family and friends to comfort me, not to question me about why Harry had killed himself. I wanted to grieve my husband’s absence, not analyze his reasons for dying. I wanted to celebrate his kindness and friendship throughout our twenty-one years of marriage, not to rage at him for abandoning me in the prime of our lives.
The suicide of a loved one irrevocably transforms us. Our world explodes, and we are never the same. Most of us adapt; eventually learning to navigate on ground we no longer trust to be steady. We gradually come to accept that our questions will not be answered. We try not to torture ourselves for having failed to predict the coming catastrophe and preventing our loved ones from taking their lives.
“My crystal ball was cloudy that day,” says Eric, whose sister took an overdose of sleeping pills on her thirtieth birthday. “If I had known four years ago what I know now, maybe I could have stopped her suicide or at least postponed it. But I couldn’t see the future. I can’t keep blaming myself for her death if I am to begin to think about her life. And it is a life worth remembering.”
I, too, wished I could have seen the future and stopped my husband from killing himself. After Harry’s suicide, I repeatedly scrutinized the events leading up to it, turning every fact I could unearth on every side possible. I imbued myself with the most minute details of what I believed to be the chronological sequence of the last hours, minutes, and seconds of his life.
I continually fantasized different scenarios in order to create a different ending. I would say the right words, make the right gesture, enter the room at the right time. Then, as if in a movie, the frame would freeze and the action would stop. But no matter how many times I rewrote and rescripted, Harry always died. I would never know what he was thinking, how long he had planned for his death, why he had taken his life at this particular moment in time, and, most excruciating, what I might have done differently to save him. Gradually, I began to understand that in order to accept his death and commemorate his life, I would have to forgive both of us for what had taken place.
Harry had been very depressed since the deaths of both his parents in the preceding year. I remembered the terrible anguish I suffered from my own father’s sudden death fourteen years earlier, and so I accepted Harry’s explanation that his double loss accounted for his darkening moods and increasing agitation. Throughout our entire marriage, Harry had recurring bouts of what he called melancholia and I referred to as “black clouds” that always seemed to pass over after several days. He spoke freely and openly about his two suicide attempts at the age of seventeen, attributing them to a troubled teenager’s desire to get attention from parents whom he considered remote and judgmental.
Harry and I married in college. Although he was born and raised in Colombia, South America, his parents were refugees from the Holocaust who fled Vienna in 1938. He was deeply affected by the fact that his intellectual father, a prominent lawyer in Austria, was forced to support his family in his new country by becoming a zipper salesman. Harry claimed he would rather die than give up his dream of becoming a physician.
Ironically, Harry killed himself just as he was becoming extremely successful in his medical career: His private practice was booming; he had been recently appointed an assistant professor on the faculty of a prominent medical school; and he was beginning to achieve recognition as a pioneering researcher in the field of urology, having just published his fourteenth article in a leading medical journal.
Harry’s dedication to his work seduced me from recognizing the truly despondent state of his mind. Even now, I still find it almost impossible to understand how he was able to treat patients two hours before executing his own death. Like most other survivors, the option of suicide seemed inconceivable to me at the time. Sure, Harry was depressed. Of course I could understand his sadness at his parents’ deaths. Yes, I could see that he was becoming withdrawn from me and that our marriage was suffering. “I’ll get over this,” Harry promised me, and I allowed myself to believe him.
Like Eric’s, my crystal ball is much clearer now. In razor-edged sharpness, I can reconstruct the various signs of Harry’s foreplanned death. I recall his reaction when a medical colleague killed himself on a steamy August night, less than six months before Harry’s own suicide. I had received a telephone call from a mutual friend explaining how Chris had left his hospital in a small Texas town after completing evening rounds, had driven to a nearby lake, and shot himself in the head with a gun he kept in the trunk of his car.
I decided not to tell Harry until he came home from his own hospital rounds because I did not want to give him such devastating news on the telephone. But I was unprepared for his reaction. “He really showed those sons of bitches,” he replied, without even knowing the context of Chris’s suicide. There was an almost-triumphant smile on Harry’s face, which so frightened me that I was unable to ask him what he meant. As I map out the signs that led to Harry’s own suicide, I see that his eerie response that evening reflected a deep inner turmoil that was too terrifying for me to acknowledge.
I also remember the sadness that never left him after his mother suffered a stroke two years before she eventually died. His father had called from Colombia to say that although her condition was serious, the doctors assured him that she would not suffer any permanent impairment. Harry flew down immediately, taking with him medication that was difficult to obtain in Colombia and copies of articles for the doctors describing the most advanced treatments for stroke victims.
Harry returned the next week, a different man. “My mother is gone,” he reported, in an undramatic, clinical tone. “She can speak, even remember, but her soul has been eradicated.” Harry had gone to the hospital directly from the airport. His mother was lying in bed in elegant bedclothes, her hair coiffed, her nails manicured—as always, the dignified Viennese lady. When Harry went to kiss her, his father prompted her, “You know who this is, don’t you?” She replied, “Of course, this is my son, Harry.”
From the day he was born, Harry’s mother called him by the nickname “Strupy.” I never heard her refer to him in any other way, whether she was talking to him or talking about him. After her stroke, she never called him that again. Harry’s diagnosis was irrevocable: “Even though my mother is able to give what she knows to be the correct answers, she has no memory of emotions,” he told me. “I have lost her forever.”
I pinpoint that conversation as the moment when the spirit started ebbing out of Harry. It was almost as if he had joined with his mother, responding and acting in a socially appropriate manner but without any sense of joy or hope. Our once complex and rich relationship—previously filled with discussions, disagreements, and eventual détentes—started straining as two longtime partners slowly became strangers, each of us struggling alone with our own private terrors.
Over the following two years, Harry flew back and forth to Colombia on a frequent basis, each trip sapping more of his diminishing reservoir of optimism. One weekend when he was down there, his mother died of a second, more powerful stroke. Harry returned with one of his “black clouds” over his head. This time, I knew it was neither temporary nor without risk. It darkened, it strengthened, and it spread. Five months after his mother’s death, Harry’s father called to say that his colon cancer, which had been in remission for ten years, had spread to his liver. Within the year, he, too, was dead.
Looking back, I know the exact moment when I lost Harry. He and his father had a turbulent relationship, suffused with explosive arguments, dramatic reconciliations, and long periods of silence. Yet, in his capacity as physician to his father, Harry could function without any internal conflict. He did not have to resolve his role as the loving son in order to provide his father with the best medical care and caring possible. Again, Harry flew back and forth to Colombia practically every other weekend. He was living on adrenaline and an almost desperate battle to defeat death.
He was in the middle of seeing patients when I got the call that his father had died. Harry had just returned from Colombia three days earlier, announcing in a flat voice that his father would not last the week. I walked over to his office, carrying the bad news with me like a ticking bomb. I sat with his secretary in the crowded waiting room. When Harry saw me, he waved me into his consultation area. Before I could open my mouth, he cut me off. “When did he die?” he asked.
“An hour ago.” I went to hug him, to comfort him, but he pushed me away angrily.
“I still have patients to see, so you better go,” he dismissed me.
That is when my husband slipped away from me. The cruelty in his voice and the coldness in his actions were like being punched in the stomach.
“I’ll make the airline reservations.” I got up from my chair in a daze.
“What makes you think I’m going to the funeral? I just saw him. You think I give a shit what the community down there thinks about my being there?”
Harry was in a rage. Even though he never attended temple, Harry had a healthy respect for the cultural aspects of the Jewish religion. As the oldest son of an observant father, he was defying the gods by refusing to attend the funeral. He knew it and he welcomed it.
We had the worst fight of our marriage that night. I could not believe he would not be saying the prayers at his father’s gravesite the next day. He shouted that it was none of my business and that I better shut up because he was feeling violent. We screamed at each other until we finally fell asleep from pure exhaustion. Harry had scheduled early morning surgery at the hospital, and he left the house as if nothing were wrong.
Three months after his father’s death, having carefully researched how best to carry out his own execution, Harry was dead by lethal injection. During this period, as Harry sank farther into a black hole of despair, we fought constantly. I finally made it a condition of our marriage that he seek professional help. After one session, Harry dismissed the first psychiatrist he saw—a widely respected expert on depression—as a pompous jerk. Next, he went for several visits to a social worker who specialized in crisis counseling. He then refused to continue treatment because the social worker was, as Harry put it, too enamored by the simplistic twelve-step recovery movement.
But then Harry offered me a deal, one that I accepted against my better judgment. After returning from a lovely walk in the park with our black Labrador, Cinco, Harry made a proposal. He asked me to look at our twenty-one-year marriage as a bank account with credits and debits. He said that the glorious times we’d had together over the years should be viewed as credits. Now, his increasingly bizarre behavior—caused, he theorized, by the temporary blow of his twin tragedies—should be considered as debits. He was withdrawing money from the bank, but his history should be sufficient to extend his account. In other words, stand by him a little longer.
Weeks after Harry’s death, when I was finally able to clean out his office, I found pages and pages of computer printouts from the National Institutes of Health, cross-referenced under “Suicide” and “Drugs.” He had started conducting the research around the same time he asked me to give him a chance and continue to trust him after two decades of marriage.
The conclusion of the article abstracts that Harry had circled was that Thiopental, used to execute prisoners in some states where capital punishment is legal, was the most effective drug available. Five months after Harry’s suicide, Dr. Jack Kevorkian helped his first client, Janet Adkins, inject Thiopental into her veins, bringing about her death within minutes. Once, when I was reviewing with my lawyer the dismal financial situation left by Harry’s suicide, I remarked to him that even though Dr. Kevorkian was getting rich and famous in the suicide business, at least he had the good sense to use Thiopental on others and not on himself. As it was, it took me almost a year before I was able to pay the medical supply company where Harry had charged his order for ten bottles of Thiopental: I finally bought a money order for $240, because I was physically unable to sign my name to a personal check.
Harry called me several hours before he killed himself, saying he would be working late in the office. He sounded somewhat sad, not wanting to get off the phone even as his secretary apologetically buzzed into our conversation to tell him that his patients were becoming restless.
Something about our conversation made me nervous. By the end of the day, my repeated calls were being picked up by his answering machine, so I decided to walk over to his office. It was then that I entered his examining room, suffused with the smell of death. The police were there within minutes after my call, young men visibly shocked that a physician had chosen to use his own medical skills to kill himself.
They led me into the lobby of the building, asking me to wait there for the detectives. Sometimes I picture myself being hysterical; other times I think I was calm. I do remember using the doorman’s telephone to call my close friend Alex. He lived nearby and it seemed that as soon as I put down the receiver, he was magically sitting by my side on the brown leather couch in the suddenly very busy lobby.
The building was hopping. The police cars, ambulances, emergency service vehicles outside had attracted a circuslike crowd. The superintendent, who could never be found in the best of times, was talking nonstop to any police officer who would speak to him. Maintenance workers emerged from the basement to sweep the lobby. Residents of the building came down to walk their dogs, check their mail. The honest ones just stood in front of me and gawked.
“Your husband is dead,” the detectives, two broad-shouldered men dressed in suits and ties, told me. Even though they were gentle, one of them even putting his arm around my shoulders, I screamed from my very depths: “He killed himself, right? He killed himself.”
There is no dignity or privacy in suicide. The police, the super, the dog walkers, the gawkers all found out that my husband killed himself at the same exact time it was confirmed to me.
The detectives took notes as they questioned me. What was the financial state of Harry’s medical practice? Had we been experiencing any marital problems? Did he have a drinking problem? When was the last time I had seen him alive? Was I a nurse? Did I have any experience with intravenous drugs?
Through my disassociated haze—nothing seemed quite real to me—I began to grasp that I was being treated as a suspect. “Do you actually think I killed my husband?” I remember asking them.
The detectives were kind, closing their notebooks before their next question might possibly send me over the edge. They told Alex he could take me home, I did not have to wait for the medical examiner to arrive. They gave me their cards, writing the telephone number of the medical examiner’s office on the back and telling me to contact them at the precinct if I needed their assistance.
As we left the lobby, I saw the medical examiner getting out of his car. His black leather bag was similar to the one I had given Harry as a present when he graduated medical school. There was yellow police tape draped in front of the entrance to Harry’s office. It was right out of a crime scene in the movies. It was a crime scene.
Bruce Danto writes in Suicide and Its Aftermath: Understanding and Counseling the Survivors that the standard practice of treating a suicide as a homicide until evidence proves to the contrary compounds the difficulties the survivor has dealing with the death. He explains that most people are unfamiliar with official police procedures, and the “suggestion that they may be a murder suspect is difficult to cope with under the circumstances and can result in increased despair and anger toward the police officer.”
The fact that suicide is considered a criminal act comes as an abrupt shock to most survivors. Even as we are trying to absorb the unexpected and often violent deaths of our loved ones, we find ourselves dealing with the intricacies of a law enforcement system that is largely unfamiliar and somewhat threatening to us. If we are lucky, the police are sensitive; if we are confronted with hostile accusations, our self-ordained role as an accomplice to a murder is confirmed and validated.
I knew I had to make telephone calls. Harry’s brother, from whom he was estranged after his refusal to attend his father’s funeral. My mother. My sisters. His close friend in Bogotá. My best friend in Oregon.
Although chaos whirled around me, I was calm in the eye of the storm. It seemed as if the unfolding events were happening to some other person. I was quite organized: Harry was to be buried in my family cemetery in Massachusetts, as close to my father as possible. My sister was to get me the pertinent information—the name of the funeral home that had handled my father’s burial, details about purchasing a cemetery plot, the arrangements I’d have to make for transporting the body out of state. I gave clear instructions: Anyone who asked must be told that Harry had died of a heart attack. There were to be no exceptions.
A representative from the funeral home called me back immediately. He assured me that he would coordinate all the details relating to Harry’s burial. I was fully in control as I answered his questions. I gave him the relevant telephone numbers in New York. I told him I wanted a simple pine coffin, a traditional white shroud. I said that I needed a rabbi to conduct the prayers at the cemetery. I confirmed that I would be paying by check.
And then he asked if I would be buying a single plot or a double. It was as if someone had taken a blowtorch and melted the frigid ice cabinet in which I had been encased.
“How dare you ask me that?” I howled from a primal spot deep within my chest. “I’m not dead, do you hear me? Why would I want to be buried with my husband? I’m still alive. I didn’t die.”
Of course, I now accept his question as standard in the funeral business. And maybe if my husband had really died of a heart attack, I might have considered his inquiry to be thoughtful. After all, Harry and I had been married for twenty-one years. Married couples buy double plots—even common tombstones—all the time, planning years ahead to be buried next to each other. But I heard only accusation, not comfort, in his tone, confirming my deepest fears that my failure to keep Harry alive had made me an accessory in his death.
That night, I refused to take tranquilizers to calm down or go to sleep. I had to remain alert, a soldier on the lookout for further sneak attacks. Only this time, I would not be caught off guard or unprepared.
During the months that preceded Harry’s suicide, I had confided to very few people my fears about his increasingly irrational behavior. One of the people I did feel safe talking with was an old high school friend now living in Boston. Dana had recently gone through some very difficult times herself, and her empathetic advice had given me much needed strength to deal with events that seemed to be rapidly spiraling out of my control.
It must have been three in the morning when I called Dana with the news of Harry’s suicide. She listened patiently, reassuring me again and again that his death was not my fault, that there was nothing I could have done to stop it. She then told me that one of her good friends had a brother who had recently killed himself.
“Let me have her call you,” she suggested. It seemed pointless to me. My husband’s body was still at the city morgue. I was telling the truth about Harry’s suicide only to close friends and family. Why should I reveal what had happened to a perfect stranger? Besides, losing your brother was different from losing your husband.
“Trust me,” Dana urged. “She has been where you are now.”
Five minutes later, the phone rang. “Carla, this is Dana’s friend, Nancy,” she said in a voice that gave no indication that she had been sleeping. “Seven months ago, my kid brother shot himself in the chest. He was thirty-eight years old.”
“Did you find him?”
“No, his wife did,” Nancy answered matter-of-factly. “She said there was blood all over the house.”
I wanted to know everything. It felt as if I were a reporter for the National Enquirer: The more sensational, more personal the details, the better.
For two hours, Nancy threw me a lifeline. She told me about the shock, the violence, the nightmares, the chaos her brother’s death had left in its wake. She talked about her regret at not being able to say goodbye to him. Her conviction that his suicide was the ultimate “fuck you.” Her sorrow for the desperation she knew he must have been feeling when he pulled the trigger. Her guilt for not having returned his morning phone call. Her anger at his leaving her alone with their shared childhood memories. She described how her moods fluctuated dramatically from moment to moment, constantly reconfiguring as if trapped in a twirling kaleidoscope.
Shafts of the rising sun were just beginning to fill my apartment. Nancy then listened sympathetically to my obsessive recounting of the lurid chronology leading up to Harry’s suicide. She understood perfectly about feeling guilty and ashamed. She appreciated my need to lie and cover up the truth. She empathized with my isolation, my feelings of madness.
I will never forget that talk with a stranger in the middle of the night. Our conversation gave me the courage to face the first task of the new morning: identifying the body. Identifying my husband. Identifying Harry.
Alex accompanied me to the medical examiner’s office, in a nondescript building that housed the city morgue. If this were a real death, I thought, if this were a normal death, right now I would be sitting in temple, crying during Harry’s funeral service. Instead, I was surrounded by dazed strangers sitting on plastic chairs, waiting for our names to be called out so we could confirm that it was indeed the body of our sister who had been murdered or our son who had been run over or our husband who had died by his own hand.
Alex and I were ushered into a windowless cubicle. The air felt heavy and stagnant. Color Polaroid mug shots of Harry lay on the desk. His face was smeared with blood and there were dark brown stains on his pink shirt. For the first time in my life, I fainted.
The staff, city workers who are routinely criticized by the public and the press for their callous indifference to their jobs, were compassionate and gracious. I was given a paper cup of orange juice. Alex was permitted to identify the photographs. A wet paper towel was placed on my forehead.
I felt as if I was having an out-of-body experience, and panic swept over me. I could not believe that any of this was actually happening. Alex led me out into the cold December morning.
“Maybe we should put off going to the police,” he counseled. “Let me take you home.”
But I wanted it all over with as soon as possible. I needed clearance from the police to enter Harry’s office, to return to the scene of the crime. I needed to be able to sift for evidence, to search for clues, to find some answers.
I had never been inside a police station before. There were men being handcuffed and booked, women crying into pay phones, officers drinking coffee from deli takeout containers. The detectives invited us to sit in their office upstairs. We waited there for several hours, until they officially ruled Harry’s death a suicide and closed the case. The medical examiner could now release his body to the funeral home. I could pick up Harry’s personal belongings—his wallet, his wedding ring, his watch—at police headquarters. I could rip the yellow police tape off the door to Harry’s office. Clorox was recommended for removing the blood from the floors and walls. As their ringing beepers called the detectives away to cases that had not yet been resolved, we exchanged final handshakes. I appreciated the genuine concern I could see in their eyes.
As I entered Harry’s office, I was greeted by the red light on the answering machine blinking frantically in the darkened reception area. My thoughts started racing: Who would take care of Harry’s patients? I had to find another doctor to take over the practice. Harry’s secretary needed to be informed, the hospital notified. The extent of what Harry had left me with began seeping into my consciousness.
Furniture in the office had been knocked over, papers were strewn about, the IV pole had fallen on top of the bloodied examining table. The claustrophobic atmosphere evoked the medical examiner’s office; again, I could not breathe.
I was not ready to face my husband’s killing grounds. I fled home, searching for safety. People skimmed by me on the street, on their way to buy groceries or go to the bank or visit a friend. How were such trivial activities still possible? My husband had just committed suicide and my life would never be the same. I had passed over into another world.