7 7“Suicide is a permanent solution to a
temporary problem.”
—Common adage
The movie audience burst into applause as the despondent man, stirred by the impassioned pleas of his distraught wife, removed the loaded revolver from his mouth. Maybe it was true, I thought, suddenly flooded with doubts. With the right words, the right gestures, it is possible to vanquish the hopeless desperation of a person you love. Unlike the star of the picture, however, I had not been able to save my husband’s life. What if I had said something different to Harry? What if I had been able to reach him? What if I had acted more sensitively, more aggressively?
“You are my lifeline,” Harry used to tell me during those last terrible months. “You are the only reason I am staying alive.” And, still believing in the popular myth that love conquers all and that it is possible to infuse our will to live into another person, I initially accepted the responsibility—and, ultimate failure—for Harry’s suicide. By convincing myself that an action or word on my part would have prevented his death, I did not have to admit that my husband’s decision to end his life was both solitary and unconnected to me.
Like most survivors, I was haunted by the infinite regrets that are woven into the fabric of suicide. I would replay the chronology of events leading up to Harry’s death, searching for lost opportunities to reverse the inevitable outcome. Only as I began to accept the idea that my husband’s choice to kill himself was his alone did the powerful grip of the what-ifs of his suicide begin to loosen. Gradually, I came to understand that while it might be possible to help someone whose fear is death, there are no guarantees for a person whose fear is life.
“I made up tricks to keep my son alive,” relates Molly, a seventy-eight-year-old retired office manager from New Haven, Connecticut. “He was diagnosed as a manic-depressive when he was a teenager, shortly after my husband died. Seventeen years ago, at the age of twenty-five, he finally succeeded in committing suicide after many previous attempts. I was always trying to convince him not to kill himself, reminding him that you never know what is on the other side. I would tell him that he should try to fix what was bothering him, not to give up.
“When my son was nineteen, he took an overdose of pills, then cut his veins. I got a call from the police, who had found him in the middle of the street attempting to get run over. After that, he was in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Over the years, he saw eleven psychiatrists and was on and off a whole array of medications. He was depressed most of the time, but when he was not in crisis he was a wonderful person.
“My life was dedicated to him. I was always terrified that he would kill himself. At one point, he dropped out of college and refused to go out of the house. Every night, I would drive home from work as fast as I could, afraid that I would come back to find him dead. Then, when I would see him waiting for me at the window, I would be relieved that he was alive. Once, I arrived home and found him unconscious in his bedroom. I picked him up and gave him coffee. He was a big man but I could lift him because of the adrenaline that was pumping through me. Another time he tried to jump out of the car while I was driving but I was able to stop him.
“I knew that my son was suicidal, but I always had the hope that it wouldn’t happen. Friends would say that people who talk about killing themselves don’t do it, but that isn’t true. One day, I got tickets for a concert I thought he would enjoy. He didn’t want to go, but for some reason I decided to go by myself. Usually, I didn’t leave him alone at night. Before I left, I told him to watch a specific television program and to tell me about it when I came home. Somehow, I thought he would feel obligated not to kill himself if he had promised me something. I rushed home after the concert, scared, as always, that he might have taken his life when I was away.
“When I saw the light on in the garage, I knew immediately something was wrong. I opened the garage door and he was lying on the floor with his head in front of the exhaust pipe of the car. I started giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. There were all these horrible sounds coming out of his chest. There was a door in the garage that led directly to the house. I ran in to call the police. There were fumes throughout the house. My son’s dog, whom he adored, was dead in the living room. The house was filled with the urine and feces of the dog. I had noticed that my son’s clothes were ripped, as if the dog had tried to save him by pulling him from the garage. It was January, so if the dog had been barking, none of the neighbors would have heard him because all the windows were closed.
“When the police came, I told them to take my son to a hospital. They said it was too late. His body was at the medical examiner’s office for three days—I still remember every detail. After his suicide, I sold the house and moved away. I continued working but it felt dreamlike. I was functioning but not feeling anything.
“I finally went to a psychiatrist for help. I told him I could have done more to save my son. He told me I wasn’t God, and I had saved him many times before. He said I had to remember I wasn’t omnipotent. But the loss of a child is awful. A parent’s death should come first. Although I had devoted my life to my son, I still felt in my heart that I didn’t do enough for him because he died.
“One year after my son’s suicide, I saw some children playing baseball in front of my house. One boy didn’t want to play anymore. The other kids offered him the ball, extra points, anything to make him stay in the game. But he didn’t want to play and went away. It reminded me of my son. I did everything I could to keep him here, but he wanted to go and he left.
“The only consolation I have is time. Although you never accept the idea, you learn to walk through life with the pain next to you. My son was a machine that broke. Even his dog had the natural instinct to live. In my life, I have suffered many losses—my husband, my parents, and my sister. But I still do not understand my son’s death and I am a very old woman.”
Most survivors share Molly’s feelings of helplessness at not being able to keep someone alive, no matter how great their love or how much they care. “Three years ago, my brother’s lover killed himself after he found out he was HIV positive,” recounts Paula, a twenty-eight-year-old artist from San Francisco. “He was still very healthy but had lost a lot of friends to AIDS and didn’t want to face the eventual suffering of that horrible disease. I was devastated because I knew he could have lived many years without being sick.
“Six months after his lover’s suicide, my brother was diagnosed with HIV. I was terrified that he would also do something to himself. Before you experience suicide, you think it doesn’t exist. It seems so remote and unreal until it happens to someone you know. My brother became very depressed. It was as if I were watching an accident taking place in front of my eyes. He went for counseling, joined a support group, even went to see a priest. I could see him going under but there was nothing I could do.
“On the first anniversary of his lover’s death, my brother and I went for a long walk in the park. I asked him point-blank if he was feeling suicidal. He promised me he wasn’t but I knew he was lying. That night, he took an overdose of sleeping pills. I keep asking myself what I could have done to save him. What if I had forced him to be admitted to the hospital? It feels as if I literally stood there and watched him die.
“Suicide is an act of violence, not only against yourself but also against others. There is such a sense of abandonment, of senselessness, of loss of the person. I guess we all carry around our own pain, although the pain that makes you kill yourself seems so cold and alien. Suicide is different. We each try to make peace with what exists outside of us, even though it’s hard, but it’s impossible to make peace with the darkness inside of us. Now, when I hear that someone is depressed or has received bad news, the first thing I think about is suicide. I can imagine anyone doing it, including myself.”
As survivors reconstruct the deaths of our loved ones, we often identify key moments leading up to their suicides, moments when, we feel, we could have stopped the course of their actions.
“My sister slit her wrists after breaking up with her boyfriend,” says Amanda, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student at the University of Iowa. “The night she died, there was a message from her on my answering machine asking me to call. I was tired and decided to phone back in the morning. I’ll never know what would have happened if I had spoken to her. I keep thinking of her waiting for me and my just sleeping as she was bleeding to death in her bathtub.”
Sometimes survivors react to their loved one’s suicide with ambivalence and confusion, unsure if his or her death was truly self-inflicted or the result of a deadly accident or a tragic error. “Six years ago, my wife was killed when her car hit a tree in the curve of the road,” says Simon, a thirty-three-year-old businessman from Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Several months before, she suffered a miscarriage and she had been terribly depressed since then. The police were unable to determine if her death was an accident or suicide. She didn’t leave a note but she was always such a careful driver and she knew that stretch of road like the palm of her hand. It really bothers me to think that she planned her death. Then, I feel guilty because it shouldn’t affect the way I think of her. She’s gone and I miss her, period. The worst part is that I’ll never find out the truth.”
It is estimated that suicides represent 5 to 15 percent of all fatal vehicular accidents. Doctors Mark Taff and Lauren Boglioli, in an April 1995 letter published in The New York Times, explain that the criteria developed by medical examiners and psychiatrists for determining vehicular suicide include: history of psychiatric disease; previous suicide attempts; suicide note or informing someone of suicide plans; single-vehicle collision with a fixed roadside object; accelerator-pedal mark on the shoe; absence of skid marks; witnessed acceleration into oncoming traffic; and use of drugs and alcohol. Yet, even the most up-to-date use of scientific methodology cannot definitively determine the true motivation of the person whose life has been lost.
Suicide, by its very nature, leaves in its wake a tremendous sense of confusion and displacement for those of us who have been left behind. In the absence of conclusive evidence that a suicide has taken place, survivors are forced to face even greater feelings of uncertainty and ambiguity.
“My father just stopped eating after surgery,” explains Bruce, a sixty-two-year-old retired army captain from Virginia. “I knew he was killing himself but I couldn’t stop it. He just lost his zest and slowly faded away in front of me. My sister denies that he willed himself to die. She continues to believe that he was sick and couldn’t eat. But I consider his death self-inflicted, a suicide. That’s the only way I can deal with it.”
For some survivors, the feeling of helplessness that precedes a loved one’s decision to end his or her life is often replaced by a sense of relief when the suicide finally occurs. “When my mother killed herself eighteen years ago, it was as if she had died and I was reborn,” states Rosemarie, a thirty-seven-year-old photographer from Boston. “My initial reaction to her suicide was to move on with my life and not look back. I was relieved that I no longer had to take care of her. My mother suffered from periods of tremendous depression, and ever since I can remember, she was my responsibility. My parents divorced when I was ten. I was her only child, really her only friend. Yet, even though she confided her anguish to me, she had a great sense of humor and could make me laugh like no one else in the world.
“Eventually, the effect of her constant depressions was to put a wedge between us. It became the worst in my senior year of high school. She would just sit in her room and cry all day. I had two lives: In school I had friends, and at home I had my mother. I didn’t know how to talk about it with anyone. I did all the shopping, cooking, and cleaning for both of us.
“My mother would say there’s existence and there’s life and that she was just existing. She would cry that she was a failure. I would say, ‘No, you’re not.’ Then, she started talking about how it would be better for me if she ended it. I would fly into a rage. ‘Don’t you ever say that,’ I would scream at her. She would back down, explaining that suicide was not in her nature, that she would never do it. But she would say both things—that she would and wouldn’t kill herself.
“At the end of my senior year, I went away for the summer to work as a counselor at a summer camp. I was there barely two weeks when I got a call from a neighbor that my mother had been admitted to the psychiatric ward at the hospital. She had been scheduled to go to the hospital for a medical examination but took the subway there wearing her bathrobe and slippers and carrying the dog. They took one look at her and committed her.
“They gave her all these different drugs. Although she was flattened out, she hadn’t lost her awareness of what was making her unhappy. When I first came to see her, she rejected me. That had never happened before. I thought she was angry at me because I had gone away for the summer—or tried to—something I had never done before. She was in a trance and a dream state. I started crying to see her like that.
“Eventually, she started coming out of it, and one month later she came home. Soon after, I went away to college, something my mother had encouraged. In my last year of high school, I had focused my whole world around her. Her depression affected me greatly but I couldn’t recognize it at the time. I knew that I didn’t want to succumb to it. Although she was falling apart, I had to hold myself up. I worked hard and got a full scholarship to a good college around two hours from home.
“When I went away to college, my mother seemed to get better at first. Then, in the spring of my freshman year, she called me to say that she had suffered an extreme anxiety attack walking the dog and had thought she couldn’t make it home. She was hyperventilating on the phone. The reality of her situation hit me—she was not going to make it. I realized that she would not be able to survive if she couldn’t even walk the dog. I saw very clearly that she would not be able to climb out of the hole, that the walls were closing in.
“There were so many beginning-of-the-ends, but I’m thankful for that day. I knew it was the end. I asked for a leave of absence from school. When I came home, my mother was on a steady plane downward. I found a job near the apartment and one day she called me at work to say that she was thinking of killing herself, that she couldn’t hold on anymore. I wanted to jump out of my skin. I felt like I was talking her off the roof, that whatever I said would determine whether she lived or died.
“I told her to hold on, but I felt utterly useless. It seemed as if I were committing suicide with her; I could feel her hopelessness as profoundly as she. Her despair was beyond any talking, any medication, any person, including myself. I had tried to be her cheerleader and support. Yet, I felt my words didn’t matter one bit. I started thinking, Why? What were the terms of her life? I bought into her mind-set. Why should she live? Why hold on to life if it is so full of suffering? What’s the point—it’s all so futile.
“I came home from work. She was just sitting there, like a shell. She didn’t want me to leave. Although I convinced her at that moment not to kill herself, I felt at that point my mother had died. For weeks afterward, she would sit in the living room in the dark, wearing only her bathrobe. She was gone, as far as I was concerned. We were like two ships passing in the night. I came to believe that if she wanted to take her life, it was okay—there was nothing left to say.
“I told her I wanted to leave. We had a terrible argument and I exploded in rage. I said that she was manipulating me, that I couldn’t take care of her any longer. I told her she had to choose whether to live or to die—it was her life, not mine. She answered, ‘You’re right,’ and we said farewell.
“The next day, I left to stay with my cousin in Houston for a while. It was damned if I did or damned if I didn’t. But I knew that if I stayed with my mother, I would die. As I drove to the airport, I realized that I might have seen her for the last time. One week later, I was feeling great. I was living with my cousin and feeling totally liberated and at peace. I spoke to my mother every day. She sounded okay and wasn’t talking suicide. Then, my mother’s neighbor called to say that she had killed herself. She had jumped out of her seventh-story bedroom window. My first reaction was shock, then relief. Her misery was at an end.
“I flew back to Boston. The only people at her memorial service were me, my father, and the minister. I felt at the time that my mother’s pain and sadness were such a secret that I didn’t want to have to explain them to others. After my mother’s death, I knew I now had to live for myself. I gave up our apartment and sold the furniture. Boston was over. The curtain had dropped and I was starting over.
“I moved to Houston and entered college there. For a couple of years, I was feeling wonderful. I went from a period of tremendous relief to giving birth to myself. Then, about three years after my mother’s death, I began to feel a horrible guilt. I started thinking about why I hadn’t helped her. Why hadn’t I rescued her and found other options to save her? I was flooded with blame. I didn’t tell anyone about how I was feeling; I was just being stoic.
“It was as if I had a split personality. The outside of me was going around doing all these things and the inner me was obsessing about why I hadn’t saved my mother. I would try to convince myself that there was nothing I could have done, but then I would become consumed again with guilt. Finally, I went for help. I began intensive therapy because I knew I couldn’t handle all my problems by myself. I eventually moved back to Boston, where I have devoted myself to my work as a photographer.
“Even though I have come to accept that my mother’s life was hers and her death was hers, there’s a part of me that still feels guilty for not having found something that would have made her want to live. I have this recurrent dream where my mother is a homeless drug addict writhing in despair. I try to rescue her but I can’t. I know that I am a survivor because I just keep plodding on with my life. Although I was not able to save my mother, I didn’t want to die along with her. That is a choice I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.”
Like Rosemarie, I, too, still have dreams of helplessness and guilt. I am on a wooden platform careening in the noisy sea, frantically stretching out my hand. But Harry does not reach for it. The waves carry me away and he is left alone in the raging storm. I wake up, suffocating from the what-ifs: What if I had moved closer to the edge of the platform? What if I had screamed louder for him to swim over to me? What if I had jumped back in the water and rescued him?
Gradually, I have allowed myself to recognize that it is Harry’s preference not to come with me. I can use my hand to wave goodbye but not to pull him alongside me; only he can reach up to me. In order to move on with my life, it is Harry’s helplessness, not mine, that I must learn to both acknowledge and accept.