4 4“Is suicide grief the worst, as is often suggested in the
literature?”
—John McIntosh,
Suicide and Its Aftermath: Understanding and Counseling the Survivors
The morning of Harry’s funeral, four days after he killed himself, was so bitter cold that the grave diggers had trouble breaking open the frozen ground to lower his plain pine coffin. There were only six of us at the traditional Jewish ceremony held at the small cemetery in Massachusetts where my father, grandparents, and other members of my extended family were buried. The mood was tense and uneasy; Harry’s was an angry death and our mourning reflected the absence of peace that surrounded it. Oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion, my dog, Cinco, raced excitedly from grave to grave, frolicking happily in the mounds of snow left by the past week’s storm.
I had deliberately kept the funeral small. I could not face playing the role of grieving widow in front of a crowd of friends and relatives who might suspect that I was lying about the real cause of Harry’s death. Some close family members who did know the truth about his suicide, however, chose not to attend the services for reasons they never explained to me. I interpreted their absence as a judgment against me: I was guilty, in their minds, for allowing my husband to die.
As the rabbi intoned the Jewish prayer for the dead over Harry’s grave, I felt no sense of solace. I wrapped my wool coat tighter around my shaking body to protect myself not only from the frigid winds of the New England winter but also from the gusts of rage inside me. Harry had chosen to leave me without even saying goodbye, slamming the door in my face as he departed. I felt alone and abandoned.
Traditional funeral customs and rituals help mourners to restore a much needed sense of order to their disrupted lives. Yet, in death by suicide, even the observance of this universal passage is suffused with complications and uncertainty. Although many religious leaders now regard people who kill themselves as having suffered from a mental illness and not having committed a mortal sin, the act of suicide is still universally condemned by most major religions. As a result, the familiar anchors to which we normally cling for consolation and support during our grieving period are often not accessible to suicide survivors.
According to the book The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, the “horror” of suicide is primarily moral—the betrayal of family and friends—not theological—the betrayal of God. The book advises that “respect for the bereaved family must be scrupulously considered, as they are the sufferers and not the perpetrators of the act.” Although there is no specific law against suicide in either the Bible or the Talmud, the book explains that if a death is judged self-inflicted, burial should be at least six feet from the surrounding graves, in a special section for suicides, or near the fence or border of the cemetery. No eulogy should be made for the suicide, “despite any good qualities he may have demonstrated in his life.” Even so, the book states that because of the difficulty in determining a true suicide, “the rabbis have sought to deal leniently in their treatment of suicide.”
The Christian view of suicide as sinful and forbidden evolved in the second half of the first millennium A.D., according to Charles Rubey and David Clark in Suicide and Its Aftermath: Understanding and Counseling the Survivors. They explain that the rites of burial were commonly refused to people who killed themselves, and this view had a direct impact on civil law in the West for centuries to follow. In many civil codes, suicide continued to be defined as a criminal act, with the heirs of suicide held responsible for the crime and deprived of their inheritances.
Over the last two decades, the legal, medical, and moral response to suicide has become more sympathetic, the authors relate. In addition, the religious perspective on suicide has evolved over the years to the point where suicide is no longer automatically considered a sin. Rubey and Clark theorize it is unlikely that God judges suicides as either moral or immoral, because a person who takes his or her life is experiencing the kind of pain that is the hallmark of illness or desperation. “God’s judgment is likely to be based on a lifetime ledger of moral and immoral actions, not simply on the suicidal act that precipitated death,” they write.
In the past, the rite of burial was offered strictly out of consideration for the deceased, the authors explain. In modern times, however, there has been an increasing recognition that religious ritual is also a significant source of comfort and closure for the survivors. Rubey and Clark believe that while the suicide should not be the focal point of the clergy’s remarks at the funeral or the burial, neither should it be ignored.
Keith, a young playwright from New York City, found great comfort in his family’s determination to be honest about his sister’s suicide. “The minister, who knew our family, spoke about her valiant fight against depression,” he says. “His eulogy referred to my sister’s suicide in the context of an illness, not as a depraved act. Instead of being ashamed of how she died, I was proud about how she had lived.”
The decision to allow traditional funeral services and burial procedures to be held for a person who has committed suicide is often left to the individual minister, rabbi, or priest. As a result, the course of a suicide survivor’s mourning process can be profoundly affected by the degree of compassion and understanding extended by members of the clergy.
“I was brought up as a religious Jew and I was very ashamed that my wife had taken her life,” says David, a government official from Washington, DC, who is in his late fifties. “As I understood it, suicide was considered murder and you couldn’t be buried in the cemetery. The first rabbi I asked to officiate at the funeral barraged me with intimate questions about the details of my wife’s suicide. His probing made me feel very uncomfortable and defensive.
“I then went to another rabbi, who was much more sympathetic. He helped me to understand that my wife was suffering from a mental illness, and that the Jewish religion is flexible enough to change its interpretations as more information about suicide becomes available. He reassured me that my wife could be buried in the Jewish cemetery with all the rituals. This rabbi was more concerned about how my children and I were dealing with our terrible loss than with the reasons why my wife had killed herself. He bestowed dignity not only to myself but also to my wife’s memory.”
Funerals are never easy; yet, with suicide, every decision takes on an added significance and importance. Details involving the type of ceremony, burial, eulogy, tombstone, and so on are influenced not only by how we judge our loved one’s life but also by how comfortable we are with his or her death.
“My husband’s family was ashamed of his suicide and did not want a funeral,” says Kate, a thirty-six-year-old housewife from Memphis, who was left with three young children. “They said it wouldn’t be helpful to anyone and we should hold a memorial service for him in six months when everything was ‘cleaned up.’ I had to fight them on it but I won. There were almost one hundred people in the church. I wrote a eulogy saying that my husband had been in a lot of pain and should be forgiven for killing himself. I also insisted on bringing my children to the services. I don’t regret my decision for one minute.”
Some survivors decide to hold a large funeral, even as they hide the truth about their loved one’s suicide from relatives and friends. “My father was a well-respected businessman in town and my family didn’t want the community to think less of him for taking his life,” explains Juan, a college student from Houston. “We told everyone that he had died from a heart attack. Four hundred people came to his funeral; they practically didn’t fit in the church. The minister talked about my father’s ‘love of life’ in his eulogy. Two days later, the local newspaper reported that my father had died from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by automobile exhaust. When I saw the article, I felt doubly disgraced: First, for lying to people who cared for my father, and second, for being ashamed that he had killed himself.”
There is a distinct sense of discomfort among the mourners at a funeral connected to suicide. “My next-door neighbor died during childbirth,” relates Peggy, a twenty-six-year-old secretary from Long Island. “Her husband was distraught and didn’t show up at her funeral. They broke into his house and found him hanging from the ceiling fan in the kitchen. Nobody wanted to talk about it. His funeral was so different from hers. Both were tragic in their own way, but no one spoke about how he had died. It was all so hush-hush.”
Suicide not only opens up old wounds for family members but also creates new ones. “My son’s funeral was filled with accusations and anger,” describes Gloria, a retired day care worker from Chicago. “After my son married and had a child, he became estranged from me. He and I had an argument last Christmas and we stopped talking. Three months ago, my daughter-in-law called me at two in the morning to say that she had found him dead on the bathroom floor, a needle filled with heroin still attached to his arm. He had left a note, which she then proceeded to read to me. It said, ‘May God forgive me for what I am going to do.’ I thought she was playing a cruel joke on me. I just said okay and made myself go back to sleep. When I woke up, I knew it was true.
“I hated the funeral. I wasn’t consulted on anything, as if his death were somehow my fault. I can’t believe that my son died angry with me, yet I blame my daughter-in-law in part for his suicide. She should have seen it coming and tried to stop it. I guess I’ll never find out what was going through his mind when he killed himself. All I know is that I feel dead, as if I’ll never laugh or be carefree ever again in my life.”
Kelly is a thirty-four-year-old social worker from Baltimore whose twin brother shot himself ten months ago after being laid off from his job. “The whole funeral was totally chaotic and unreal,” she says. “I really didn’t want to go. I flew down to his home in Little Rock in a state of shock. On the plane, I told the man sitting next to me that my brother had just killed himself. He was extremely sympathetic, explaining that his brother had also killed himself in Idaho more than thirty years ago. He was an older man and I imagined that his brother must have been Ernest Hemingway.
“My brother’s wife wanted an open casket. Somehow they were able to put him back together but he looked so strange, almost as if he was pissed off about something. My mother was a wreck—sobbing, angry, and hurt. My father was very angry and two of my sisters refused to attend.
“I got the feeling from my sister-in-law’s mother that she blamed my family for causing her daughter all this grief. After the services, she came up to me and said that it had cost her daughter four thousand dollars to clean up my brother’s blood from the carpets and wallpaper in the house. She told me that her daughter didn’t have that kind of money and I knew she wanted my family to offer to pay something. I just walked away from her. My brother and I were like one person, yet I felt very unemotional and detached during his funeral. Being there was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life.”
The decision to keep the casket open or closed is especially difficult for suicide survivors. “Even though my husband was physically wrecked, I was determined not to hide him in a closed coffin,” declares Marie, a fifty-three-year-old widow of a prominent California politician who killed himself six years ago. “Tony shot himself in the head, so his injuries were extensive. I fainted at the medical examiner’s office when I had to identify his body. The left side of his face was missing and his brains were falling out of a hole onto his shoulder. He was totally covered with blood. His right eye was wide open, as if in horror.
“Even so, I became obsessed with fixing Tony up so that his coffin could be open at the funeral. I paid a lot of money to embalm him and re-create his face. They cleaned off the blood, put his brains back in his head, and put wax on the entire left side of his head. Before the viewing, I would sit alone next to Tony’s open coffin and read him his favorite passages from Shakespeare. I couldn’t stop touching him. Finally, the funeral director told me not to hug his head so hard because the wax would probably come off under such pressure.
“By the last day of the viewing, his body began to smell like rotten meat. His was not a natural death; there was so much broken and destroyed about him. I was devastated when the funeral director told me that it was impossible to keep the casket open any longer.
“His funeral was huge. People came from all over, including the press. But all I kept on thinking was that everybody must be whispering that his coffin was closed because his body must be in such shambles. I was sure people were gossiping about what I might have done to make him want to kill himself. In order to get through the services, I encapsulated myself in a ball of light. I kept on repeating to myself over and over, ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ and ‘Forgive them, they know not what they say.’ On the receiving line, I was like a robot. I just stood there, shaking people’s hands and thanking them for coming. I felt insane, as if I were hanging on for dear life.”
Like Marie and Kelly, whose twin brother shot himself, many suicide survivors comment on the fact that the bodies of their loved ones appear troubled, even angry in death. “I refused to believe it was my daughter at the funeral parlor,” says Shirley, a forty-seven-year-old bus driver from Buffalo. “She was such a lively young woman, only twenty-one years old, and this thing just lying there was not my daughter. Her skin was red from being refrigerated. She looked upset; her hands were almost in fists. I tried to smooth them down flat and fix her mouth in a smile. I kissed her and told her that she shouldn’t have killed herself. But all the time I was talking to her, I really didn’t believe it was my daughter.
“I wanted an open coffin and it was important that I pick out a special outfit for her to be buried in. I chose a suit we had just bought together two weeks before she killed herself. She had loved it. I also gave her my pearl earrings and pearl necklace.
“My daughter took an overdose of sleeping pills two years ago and part of me is still in denial about her being dead. I tell you, if my daughter walked through the door right now, I would believe it. It feels as if she left on a trip and will be back any minute.”
Some suicide survivors are more comfortable with cremating their loved ones because cremation eliminates the need for a formal funeral, burial, and tombstone. Others choose cremation out of respect for their loved one’s beliefs. Earl, a New York City police officer who is in his early forties, would have preferred to bury his wife with a traditional church ceremony but felt obligated to honor her last wishes.
“The day before my wife turned on the car engine in the garage and died from carbon monoxide fumes, she was working in our garden,” he recalls. “I came home from work early and she was really glad to see me. She had been depressed recently but that afternoon she seemed happy. She looked young again, like when I met her in high school. As I started going into the house, she said to me, ‘When I die, I would like to be cremated and have my ashes scattered in this garden.’ I laughed her off, kidding that with my bad heart and big gut I would be dead long before she ever goes. She laughed along with me, but four days later I was spreading her ashes on the flowers. I miss not being able to go see her at the cemetery. Sometimes I walk around the garden but it doesn’t feel the same.”
Cemeteries, however, can also be unsettling for survivors, as Roger, a twenty-four-year-old video store manager from Denver, discovered when he visited his mother’s grave last year, the first time since her funeral nineteen years earlier.
“For some reason, I was always afraid to go to the cemetery,” he says. “Although my father told me the truth about my mother’s suicide from the beginning, he would never go into detail about it with me. When I was growing up, I also spent a great deal of time with my mother’s parents. They, too, never spoke about her or even had any of her photographs around the house. I had a very lonely childhood and was depressed all the time. Right before I was supposed to graduate from college, I swallowed a bottle of my father’s heart medication. He found me unconscious when he came home from work and rushed me to the hospital. After they pumped my stomach, I was admitted to the psychiatric unit for thirty days. It was there that I began to realize the tremendous impact my mother’s suicide had had on my life.
“It was my psychiatrist’s suggestion to visit her grave. What really blew me away when I went there was that the only thing written on her tombstone was her name, date of birth, and date of death. All the other monuments had these elaborate inscriptions. It was like they just wanted to throw her in the ground and get rid of her. When I saw how lonely her grave looked, I started crying. It hurt me so much to think of her all alone there. I’m now considering asking my father and grandparents to put up a new tombstone or add something to the one already there. Part of me is afraid that they’ll think I’m crazy for wanting to do it; that they’ll tell me to just let it be. But I can’t let her rest like that—so discarded and forgotten.”
Alice, an elderly widow from a small town in Minnesota, removed the epitaph on her brother’s tombstone when her children were little because she was afraid they would find out not only about his suicide but about her mother’s suicide as well.
“Maybe if my children and grandchildren don’t know what happened, it won’t happen to them,” she states. “I was seven and my brother was six when my mother took her life. It was seventy-two years ago and I can remember the scene as vividly as if it happened yesterday. My father was calling for her, ‘Sweetheart, where are you?’ Then, my brother and I were standing at the window, watching the police carrying her off. She had shot herself in the backyard. I can still picture the striped blue pajamas she was wearing.
“We didn’t talk about it—it was too shameful. I thought she was crazy and that I would eventually go crazy too. My mother was pretty and smart. When people said I was like her when I was growing up, I didn’t want to hear it. I was scared to be like her.
“Thirteen years after my mother’s suicide, my baby brother killed himself. I was in the kitchen making fudge and a bullet came up through the kitchen floor. I ran downstairs to the basement. He had shot himself, like my mother, but he wasn’t quite dead. On the way to the hospital, he pleaded with me to let him die, and he did die during surgery. My father was very angry at me for not saving my brother. He said I could have saved him if I had put a rag in his wounds. But I don’t know if that’s true.
“My brother left a note on his desk saying, ‘Please forgive me. There is no scandal—I just want to go on to better things.’ He was majoring in philosophy at college and also left one of his philosophy books open to a page with the underlined passage: ‘A brave man is he who denies the will to live.’ My father put that quote on my brother’s tombstone. When my children were little, I hired a workman to scrape it off. I was afraid they would ask me questions about what the words meant.
“I don’t talk about the deaths of my mother and brother very much because of the terrible shame I feel. Sometimes, I find myself crying, wondering why they took their lives. I can’t remember my brother ever being depressed. The afternoon he killed himself we were dancing in the snow in the front yard. Then I went to make fudge and he went to study his philosophy. I still don’t understand what happened.”
In burying our loved ones, we look for some kind of closure to their deaths. Randy is a veterinarian from San Diego whose close friend hanged himself two years ago. He told me about his visit to a cemetery outside Washington, DC, where the wife of Henry Adams, the nineteenth-century historian, is buried. He was startled to see a statue of a mysterious, hooded figure carved on the top of her tombstone.
“I was haunted by that image and couldn’t shake it from my mind. I did some research and found out that Henry Adams’s wife had killed herself at a young age. He had commissioned that statue for her grave. You can’t tell who it is or what it means, but I don’t think it’s her; I think it’s death. It stands for the unanswered questions he had about her suicide. The questions all of us have who go through this experience.”
According to Jewish custom, there is a one-year waiting period between the time a person is buried and when his or her grave marking is unveiled. Twelve months after Harry’s death, on another cold, bright December day, I stood in front of my husband’s tombstone and read the words I had chosen after much soul-searching: “Harry Federico José Reiss, M.D. January 12, 1946–December 16, 1989. Physician and Healer. In Peace, Love and Serenity.”
The wish for “Peace, Love and Serenity” was my prayer for both of us. Although Harry was now safely laid to rest, I was just beginning my painful journey toward understanding and acceptance of the reasons why he had chosen to die. In the aftermath of the chaos that his suicide left behind, I had to make sense of his death in order to reclaim not only my future but also my past.