5 5“There is nothing romantic about this journey.”
—Mariette Hartley
A year after Harry killed himself, my disastrous financial circumstances necessitated my getting a part-time job to supplement my writer’s income. The first week I was there, a group of women who worked at the organization invited me out to lunch. “So tell us all about yourself,” one of them began. “Are you married? Single?” I froze, totally unprepared for how to answer her question.
“I was married,” I stammered my reply.
“Oh?” she continued. “How long has it been since your divorce?”
“No, it’s not that.” I was finally able to collect myself. “My husband died.”
There was a long silence at the table. Then, the same woman said to me in a sympathetic hush, “I’m sorry. I thought you were one of us.”
Her words cut through me like a knife. If my new coworkers considered me an outsider because I was a young widow, what would they think if they knew my husband had killed himself? Panic swept over me; I wanted to run out of the restaurant.
“How old was your husband?” another woman asked.
“Forty-three.” I could hear myself talking from a distance, as if I were dead myself.
“Do you mind if I ask how he died?” the interrogation continued.
“Of course not,” I replied, hoping they would mistake my almost paralyzing distress for conventional grief. I launched into a detailed story, describing how Harry had suffered a heart attack from working too hard. How he had exhausted himself taking care of his dying parents. How he was slightly overweight. I even added the facts that heart disease ran in his family, that his cholesterol was high.
I recounted entering into his office to find him slumped over his desk. Calling 911. Watching the police and paramedics trying to save him. The medical examiner pronouncing him dead. Although the framework of the narrative remained intact, the facts were reshaped for my comfort. The women listened supportively, yet with intense curiosity.
This was my standard explanation of Harry’s premature and sudden death. I told variations of this story to his patients, our neighbors, my relatives, the doctors with whom he worked, his secretary, our casual friends. I was convinced that I had no other recourse but to deny the truth: If I had failed to keep my husband alive, the least I could do was to protect his name and reputation by lying about his decision to kill himself.
A few weeks after that calamitous lunch with my coworkers, I found myself on the elevator with the woman who had asked me about my marital status. She started telling me about the unexpected death of a board member, which had occurred the day before. It was a massive heart attack, she confided. All of a sudden, she gasped. “I’m so sorry,” she apologized. “How insensitive of me. Please forgive me.”
For the life of me, I could not understand what she was talking about. Why should I be upset that this person had died? Awkward silence filled the elevator as the woman looked away in embarrassment. I racked my brain trying to figure out what possibly could be wrong. Then, I remembered. “That’s right,” I blurted out. “My husband died of a heart attack.”
I felt humiliated by my inappropriate response. At that moment, I realized how dramatically my life had become transformed by the stigma that surrounds suicide. Why should I have to cover up what had happened? Yet, I also knew that if I decided to be honest with my colleague in the elevator, the real reason for my husband’s death would be broadcast throughout the office by the end of the day. Even though part of me wanted to tell her the truth, I was convinced that it was none of her business. The boundary between my right to privacy and the shame I felt at hiding my secret had totally blurred.
“My boyfriend and I broke up shortly after I told him about my sister’s suicide,” says Karen, a student at the University of Alabama. “I’ll never know if it was related, but he had a hard time with her death. He asked me all these questions, like if suicide ran in my family and did I have problems with my parents. As he turned away from me, I began to feel tainted, like something must really be wrong with me.”
Dr. Edward Dunne, an editor of Suicide and Its Aftermath: Understanding and Counseling the Survivors, is a highly regarded clinical psychologist and a suicide survivor himself. He believes that the stigma of suicide is so powerful because people who kill themselves are breaking an unwritten contract that declares we should not be free to leave society at will.
“The whole horror of suicide resonates with the most profound existential question of one’s life: ‘Why should I live?’ ” he explains. “To hear that someone has answered no, that someone has broken the rules, is extraordinarily threatening to survivors.”
In 1973, Dr. Dunne’s sixteen-year-old brother, Tim, committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. Dr. Dunne, who was fourteen years older than Tim, was in private practice in New York when his brother killed himself.
“My mourning was compounded both as a brother and as a professional,” he told me. “Being a psychologist in your family is like being a lifeguard in a hurricane. My mother and sisters were both nurses, with specialities in mental health counseling. At that time, there was an institutional belief that suicides did not occur in a therapist’s family. Nobody in the mental health community talked about the subject openly.
“I found out about my brother when I was in the middle of conducting a group therapy session. I got called out and I left the group. Part of my experience of being a survivor is the ability to remember many of the seemingly inconsequential details which surround the event. Twenty-two years later, I remember who was in the group at that time. Even now, I can visualize their faces when this unprecedented event of having the group interrupted took place.
“Although I believe that I saw most of the group members only a few more times, I still remember who they were and what they were wearing at the time. What I don’t remember is who in my family called me. Who told me the news? The receptionist had simply said that there was a ‘family emergency.’ She handed me the phone and I was told. But I don’t know by whom.
“I had always liked to believe that I was in control but, even at that early point, my mind was involved in constructing its own version of the story, holding onto details here, deciding to let go of others. It was as if I was just the body helping the mind get from place to place, person to person, as this drama unfolded.
“Tim’s suicide was written up in the newspapers so I didn’t lie to people who knew him. But we hardly talked about my brother when our family got together. My father was never able to acknowledge my brother’s death as a suicide. I thought it was my job to make him do so, so I bugged him with the ‘truth’ for years afterward. Why could he not see? What was the point of holding on to the illusion that something else had happened? Our later conversations were characterized by a familiar pattern of avoidance, and they would leave me frustrated and infuriated.
“The conflict kept us apart in his last years, and robbed us of the opportunity to talk about my brother at all. Years later, seeing so many families in the same situation—he says ‘yes,’ she says ‘no,’; she says ‘deliberate,’ he says ‘accident’; he says ‘suicide,’ she says ‘murder’—I recognize that I was not allowing my father his own personal path to grief and recovery. I wanted him on mine. Now I would welcome the chance to tell him that he had a right to his own version of this story, to his own grief. Certainly there was enough grief to go around. Would he have come to my path if I had let him find his own way? Of course, I have no way of knowing.
“Seven years after Tim’s suicide, at my sister’s suggestion, we formed a group of mental health professionals who were survivors of suicide. When I got to the first group meeting, I had the feeling that we were all somehow criminals of some sort—meeting secretly on a Saturday in an otherwise closed university. The group lasted four years and it was very powerful because we all shared this secret. As professionals, we felt that we should have been savvy enough to see it coming. In other words, it brought up—would I send a suicidal patient to you? How could you help someone if you couldn’t even help your own flesh and blood? If we told the truth, would it be the end of any referrals we might get from other professionals? There is very little written for therapists on how to deal with the suicide of a client: We can only go so far in making sure that our patients live. Dealing with the suicide of a loved one complicates the situation even more.
“I have learned the importance of respecting everyone’s grieving as unique to them and am encouraged that the survivor group movement has also made this discovery. We are more humble than in the beginning. Now we know that there are no true prescriptions. No one path. We tell you what our path has been. Then it is up to you.”
The stigma of suicide presents us with a profound dilemma: whether to tell the truth in order to prove that we are not ashamed, even though, by being honest, we might be ostracized by society. “Because my husband’s suicide was covered extensively in the local papers and on the television news, I became a pariah in an instant,” recalls Marie, the widow of the California politician. “Everyone was looking for the skeletons in his closet and I could have been one of them. My heart aches for Lisa Foster, the wife of President Clinton’s former deputy White House counsel, Vincent Foster, who shot himself several years after my husband committed suicide. All these powerful men down in Washington sitting around spending taxpayers’s money to try to figure out why he did it and even if he did it. They can hold investigative hearings forever as far as I’m concerned but they will never find the answer to his suicide. At least an answer that makes any kind of sense. That is the cruelty of suicide: We will never know what they were thinking when they pulled the trigger or swallowed the pills or jumped out the window. We will never have closure on their deaths.
“I was immediately cast out from my social circle. It was as if my friends buried me along with my husband. I had a friend call me and say, ‘I feel very ambivalent about Tony’s suicide.’ Well, I didn’t have the luxury to feel ambivalent—I had to deal with the huge mess that his death left behind. By one act, my husband not only ended his life but also ended my world.
“I have a hard time telling people whom I don’t know about Tony’s suicide. I feel like I’m damaged goods. Two years after Tony died, I went on a cruise. The first evening I was seated at the captain’s table. During the get-acquainted conversation, someone asked me why I was traveling alone. I replied that my husband had passed away. Then, another person asked the inevitable How? a socially acceptable question, as I have quickly discovered. I decided to tell the truth and answered that my husband had killed himself. It was like that E. F. Hutton commercial where everyone drops their forks and stops talking. There was this total silence and then the subject was instantly changed. I decided to go back to ‘heart attack’ when asked about my husband’s death; it was just easier.
“When a person you love kills himself, suicide is put on your menu. It becomes a permanent part of your life. I worry about my children. When they get upset, like teenagers do, I’m terrified that they might want to kill themselves. They’re also very traumatized by Tony’s suicide and I know it has entered their mindframes like it has mine. For that reason alone, I’m furious at Tony and can never forgive him for what he has done.”
The idea that suicide is a family legacy or “curse” intensifies the stigma of suicide, especially for children. Jessica was three months pregnant with her father’s first grandchild when he jumped off the roof of a downtown Chicago skyscraper. She almost lost the baby from the trauma and blames her father for her difficult pregnancy and birth. “My father’s suicide will always cast a cloud over my daughter’s life because she will never know if suicide can be inherited,” she states. “If it can, she will wonder if she was born with the same gene that killed her grandfather; if it’s not, she will ask why he didn’t want to stick around to see her born.”
Dr. Dunne strongly believes that children, even very young ones, should be told the truth about suicide from the very beginning. “It is unrealistic to hide the fact of suicide from children,” he emphasizes. “Children eventually find out the truth and often under circumstances where they are given little support, like hearing the news from a schoolmate or a relative, for example. Children can pick up overtones in a family and can sense when something is not quite right. Why betray the trust of children when they’ve already been betrayed by one adult? Children should learn from the experience that not all adults will abandon you or let you down.”
In a recent article on censorship in school libraries and the classroom, The New York Times reported: “Most would-be censors object to the obvious ‘s’ words—sex, suicide, Satanism and swearing.” For survivors, “s” also stands for stigma, shame, and silence. Even though suicide is not our decision, our lives are irreversibly affected by its consequences.
“There was always a sense of confusion and loss when I was growing up,” remembers John, a sixty-four-year-old writer from San Francisco who discovered at the age of fifty that his father had killed himself when John was five months old. “The real puzzlement is that I will never know if learning about my father’s suicide earlier would have made a difference in my outlook. I think it would have, because I have lived most of my life in the shadowlands—not quite telling the truth. With my first wife, I would have affairs and never be quite honest. It was because I felt comfortable living in a secret world, similar to the one I grew up in. Since knowing about my father, I feel freer about being honest instead of lying.
“My father was a lawyer and was twenty-five years old when he died. My mother remarried when I was two, to a man who had three sons, much older than I. My stepfather adopted me and I took his name. My mother told me that my father had died from a heart attack but she never said anything else about him. When I was four or five, I started picking up that something was wrong. We never visited my father’s gravesite, there were no photographs of him, I never met any of his family—I didn’t know my grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. My mother said that his parents were angry at her but she never explained why.
“Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I knew intuitively that there was something different about my father’s death. I began to wonder if my father had ever actually existed. When I was twenty, I started therapy. I tried reasoning with my mother to tell me what had really happened to my father. She became furious. ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she would scream at me. ‘Stop bothering me.’ I was convinced that I was illegitimate; suicide never even entered my mind.
“When I turned fifty, I decided to hire a private detective to find out the real truth. The detective located my father’s death certificate, which said that the cause of death was asphyxiation by gas. He then found out where my father was buried. I went to the cemetery. His tombstone said: ‘Beloved Father and Son.’ It did not say, ‘Husband.’ Obviously, my grandparents had buried him. I confronted my mother. I told her that I believed my father had killed himself and I wanted to know if it was true and why.
“My mother finally admitted that my father had committed suicide by putting his head in the oven. She said he did it because the Mafia was after him for gambling debts. I knew she was lying but she wouldn’t change her story. Then I asked her if my stepbrothers and stepfather had known about his suicide all along and she said yes. I felt totally betrayed that I had grown up in a family with everyone knowing something and my not knowing it. I only knew that something was wrong but not what was wrong.
“I decided not to pursue my father’s death any longer. I didn’t make an attempt to locate my father’s relatives. I did ask my stepbrothers, however, why they never said anything to me about my father’s suicide, and they explained that they felt it wasn’t their place to tell me.
“My mother died the next year. She left me a battered suitcase with my father’s name on it. It was totally empty. She also left me a bunch of photographs. There was only one of my father, and I was stunned to see how much I looked like him. I was furious at my mother because she withheld so much from me about my father.
“I lived with a lie until I turned fifty; my mother lived with a lie her entire life. She was torn apart by a secret that affected every part of her existence. Suicide is such a stigma that we feel we have to bury it. It was as if my mother had committed a murder that she didn’t want anyone to find out about. I used to be so angry at her. Now, I see how guilt and shame, especially when hidden, can control your whole life. I feel so sad for all of us—for my mother, my father, and myself.”
Suicide is not a topic that is openly discussed. It is a stain that blemishes the illusion of normalcy and our desire to demonstrate that we are like everyone else. Helen, seventy-four, a retired school principal living in Orlando, Florida, believes that suicide is a disgrace that trespasses on the accepted standards of society. Her nephew crashed his small plane in the woods eight months ago, leaving a note saying that he did not want to live after losing his job as an automobile executive. Helen admits that she is very uncomfortable discussing his story.
“I have always believed that you should keep your family secrets private,” she states. “People who kill themselves let out their confusions publicly instead of keeping their problems to themselves. Their actions are outside the accepted code of behavior, especially for someone in my generation. Suicide is a disgrace because all religions frown on it. It is considered murder, taking a life. I think suicide is rational and very planned; it is not impulsive. We have all had thoughts of suicide at one time or another, myself included. But there’s a certain resilience in the human spirit that wants to live. If I can overcome my feelings of despair, others should be able to do so also.”
The taboo against suicide can often condemn us to a life sentence of silence, like John’s mother, who hid her secret from her son, and Gina, who cannot even feel safe talking to her therapist about her husband’s shooting himself before her eyes. Yet, when we finally begin to discuss suicide openly, there is a certain relief. We no longer fear being exposed, because we are in control of our own history.
“I never told anyone about my mother’s suicide until last year, not even my husband or children,” says Annie, a forty-year-old physician practicing in a hospital in suburban Indianapolis. “When I was sixteen, my mother drove her car off a bridge and drowned. I invented a story that I never deviated from: My mother had been killed in a car accident when I was five and I couldn’t remember anything about it. I never varied any of the details so I was never caught in the lie. If you live with a lie for your whole life, you almost come to believe it.
“I was brought up in a Catholic background. I lived in a small town in New Hampshire and my parents divorced when I was five, which was very unusual. I went to live with my father’s mother, and my mother moved to a nearby town with my two-year-old sister.
“My mother never recovered from the divorce. She was always depressed and unhappy. I hardly ever saw her, even though we lived so close. Two months before she killed herself, she took an overdose of antidepressants and was hospitalized for six weeks. Two weeks after being released from the hospital, she drove her car off the bridge. I never knew any of this. My grandmother wouldn’t tell me any of the details of my mother’s death, just that she had died in a car accident. My grandmother wouldn’t even let me go to the funeral—it was weird, I went to school the day my mother was buried.
“Somehow I knew something was wrong. Why wasn’t I allowed to go to my own mother’s funeral? I went to see my uncle, who told me that the police had determined that my mother’s accident was deliberate. He said that she had not been buried in the Catholic cemetery and her coffin had not been allowed in the church.
“A few days later, the local newspaper ran a story on the front page with the headline CAR ACCIDENT RULED SUICIDE. It included all the gory details about my mother’s suicide. I was humiliated because everyone in town now knew my business. My friends shunned me and even crossed the street when they saw me. I felt alienated from everything that was once so familiar. My grandmother told me that suffering makes you a better person because it allows you to live through a new experience. But I don’t believe that for a second. As soon as I graduated high school, I moved to Boston. I put myself through college and medical school and never once returned to my hometown. When my grandmother and sister wanted to see me, they had to come to Boston.
“I married my husband in medical school. We had children right away and our sons are now ten and twelve. Two years ago, I began to suffer from a terrible depression. I later made the connection that this was the age when my mother killed herself, but, at the time, I wasn’t consciously thinking of her. My depression became crippling and the chief of medical services at the hospital suggested that I go for help. I was very reluctant to go for therapy, but I got the feeling that if I didn’t make the attempt, my job would be in jeopardy.
“I was in therapy for six months before I told my therapist about my mother. She was the first person I ever told. I couldn’t stop crying and she asked me if I thought suicide was wrong. I said, no, of course not. I’m a physician who often treats terminally ill patients. I know that many times the families of these patients will help them to die. This doesn’t bother me at all because I know they’re trying to help end the suffering. It’s different with my mother. She killed herself because she thought she was a failure, both as a wife and as a mother. But before she drove off that bridge, she should have thought of her children. I don’t blame her; I miss her. I miss having a mother.
“My husband was very supportive when I told him the truth about my mother, although I think he was hurt that I had kept such an important part of my life hidden from him. I still haven’t been able to tell my sons. I don’t want them to think any less of their grandmother. I’ve started talking to select people about my mother’s suicide, trying out how it feels to be honest. I’m still very wary, however, because I’ve noticed that most people recoil at the subject and are very uncomfortable discussing it.
“I care for several patients with AIDS. They get very upset when people ask them how they became sick. I can really identify with them because I feel the same sense of accusation from people when they ask me how my mother died. As if the how defines your life. There is a similar stigma attached to AIDS. It’s as if you have somehow brought on your situation yourself so you shouldn’t expect any sympathy or compassion from others.”
It is very distressing for suicide survivors that the how of our loved one’s deaths, as Annie describes it, comes to represent the sum total of their lives. Even as we move cautiously to reveal the truth about their suicides, we still remain defensive about their decision to take their own lives.
“Although I don’t lie about my sister’s suicide, I immediately add that she graduated second in her class at Stanford Law,” explains Pete, a salesman from Salt Lake City. “It’s almost like saying that my sister wasn’t a nut or some mentally unstable person who couldn’t function. I feel that I have to somehow validate her life because her death is considered so perverse and unnatural.”
Even though it is difficult for survivors to accept the truth about our loved one’s suicide, it is even more painful to expose our shame to other people. “I was determined to erase any evidence that my daughter had shot herself,” explains Connie, a forty-four-year-old advertising executive from St. Louis. “Three years ago, when my daughter was home on spring break from her freshman year of college, she lay down on her bed, put my husband’s gun to her temple, and pulled the trigger. I had no idea that anything was bothering her. Her blood-soaked bedroom reflected the carnage I felt in my soul; everything I once knew was hurled out of place.
“I hired professional cleaners to clean her bedroom. I also had them remove her bed. When they finished, I examined the room inch by inch. After searching for several hours, I found some blood spots on the wall that they had missed. I was desperately searching for evidence. I cleaned the spots because I didn’t want neighbors or relatives to gawk at the signs of destruction and say, ‘So, this is what happened.’ I kept on searching and finally discovered the hole in the ceiling where the police had removed the bullet. I said, ‘Aha, I found it.’ I knew there was something there for me.
“At least the bullet hole was a connection to her, as horrible as it was. I brought a stepladder from the kitchen, found some ready-made plaster and a spatula in the tool closet, and filled up the hole. I smoothed it down and painted it over. I felt as if I were protecting my daughter. No one has a right to make a spectacle of the situation, even though she did not have the right to do what she did.
“Except for the space where her bed had been, her bedroom looked normal again. It seemed so safe and sunny. That was all I wanted—for everything to be normal, like it used to be.”
For those of us who have survived the suicide of a loved one, life will never be normal again. We have changed and will never be the same people we once were. Yet, as we become more open about our experiences, the stigma of suicide will start to recede. By letting go of the secret of our loved one’s death, we can begin to reclaim our memories of his or her life.