10 10“A suicidal person is like a black hole of pain. You can
give and give but you just can’t fill it up.”
—Suicide support group leader
My father died when I was twenty-nine years old. It was my first experience with losing someone close to me, someone I loved very much. I had always dreaded his dying. He was the anchor in my life, my protector and ardent supporter. I was afraid that I would not be able to survive his loss, that I would somehow fall apart when he was no longer here.
My father’s death was swift and dignified. A respected author and educator, he was a Pulitzer prize–winning journalist who had been education editor of The New York Times for twenty-three years. He was lecturing in Korea as the guest of the government when he suddenly suffered a fatal heart attack. He died, as he wanted, with his boots on, at the age of seventy-two.
My grief was immense. To my surprise, however, I did not break or even splinter. I mourned, I cried, I felt the first stirring of my own mortality. But I remained whole, a testament, I believed, to my father’s legacy that life should be embraced, not merely endured.
Six months after my father’s death, I began to experience excruciating pains in my chest. At first, I just assumed I was having sympathetic heart attack symptoms and dismissed any physical basis for my growing discomfort. Even as the episodes became more frequent and severe, I refused to go for medical attention. I was convinced that my problem was psychosomatic, a manifestation of the terrible grief I was feeling about my father’s death.
One day, as I lay writhing on my living room floor, it passed through my mind that if I jumped out the window, my unbearable suffering would stop. I did not want to die, that I knew, I just wanted to put an end to the pain. The solution seemed so easy, so logical. I would do anything not to feel this way.
Needless to say, I did not go crashing through the window. Instead, trembling with fear, I took a taxi to the emergency room of the hospital where Harry was doing his internship. After a battery of tests, I was informed that my gallbladder was inflamed and I needed immediate surgery. The cause of my problem was neither dramatic nor romantic, just ordinary, mundane, pedestrian gallstones.
Memories of that last, terrible attack descended on me from out of nowhere as the second anniversary of Harry’s suicide approached. I found myself reliving not only the suffocation of my crushing pain but also the feeling of violent urgency to do anything to stop it. Is this how Harry felt, I wondered. Was his pain, his psychic pain, so intractable that only self-murder could end it? Was it possible he really did not want to die but truly believed he had run out of options to extinguish his torment?
Primo Levi, the noted author and scholar who survived the horrors of the Holocaust, only to kill himself forty years later, wrote in his last book, The Drowned and the Saved: “Suicide is the act of man and not of the animal. It is a meditated act, a noninstinctive, unnatural choice.” Because my father’s death was part of a natural continuum, I was able to mourn his loss by celebrating his life. Harry’s determination to die, however, offered me no such spiritual balm. Like most survivors, I was consumed with finding the reason for my husband’s “unnatural choice” to kill himself. Gradually, I came to accept that I would never understand his motive to cease living; there was no rational explanation for his irreversible act.
The term rational suicide is an oxymoron. When a person chooses to die, he or she is so distorted by pain—physical, mental, or emotional—that the world is reduced to a solitary alternative. Suicide is an anguished response to loss: the loss of faith, of a loved one, of health, of mental powers, of money, of the ability to fight. As we survivors separate ourselves from the hopelessness and desperation that propelled our loved ones to end their lives, we start to mourn their deaths, not their suicides, and begin to heal from the very real pain deep within us.
“My brother’s death left me as a poet without words,” says Rachel, a fifty-five-year-old New Yorker whose work has been published in leading literary journals throughout the country. “I was stunned when Paul shot himself. I kept wanting to be able to write about what had happened, but I had lost the capacity to express myself. I was afraid that my gift had been extinguished by his suicide, that I would never get my art back again. At the beginning, I couldn’t concentrate long enough to read a magazine or watch the news on television, let alone create my poetry.
“Paul was a brilliant scientist, a fierce achiever who received his doctorate in physics at MIT when he was only twenty-seven years old. After he graduated, he was asked to teach at a prestigious Ivy League university. He married his high school sweetheart and was working on an international research project. Then, suddenly, his personality began to change. He became paranoid and delusional; he was acting crazy, to be precise. My parents and his wife took him to a series of doctors. They eventually diagnosed his condition as the sudden onset of manic depression, which hits some men in their late twenties, early thirties.
“The doctors placed Paul on different types of medication but nothing seemed to work. They even put him in a mental institution for thirty days. The day he was released from the hospital, he bought a gun and drove to a park near his house and shot himself in the heart. It was two weeks before his twenty-ninth birthday.
“I believe that Paul killed himself because he knew his condition would only deteriorate, and he did not want to live like that. I’m also convinced that even if he was aware of the devastating consequences his act would have on the rest of us, he still would have gone through with it. Suicide is very selfish. With the force of one bullet, Paul blew away all the history we shared together. Suddenly, I was alone with my parents, the sole guardian of my childhood memories.
“I was thirty-six when Paul died. I had just published my first book of poetry and had won a grant to start on my next collection. It took me more than two years to be able to write again. I knew I had to start with his suicide, but it was as if my putting words to such a dark and frightening act would give it an undeserved validity. Although I used my isolation as protection, I was also silenced by it. When my voice gradually returned, I was overjoyed. Over these past years, my poetry has helped me to relinquish my pain and, in some small way, to keep Paul alive.”
As suicide survivors begin the long, arduous process of navigating the labyrinth of our loss, we face the risk of confronting a reality that is often covert and always ambiguous. “Catharsis is important not only to purge but also to clarify,” states Larry Lockridge, a literature professor and the son of Ross Lockridge, Jr., the author of Raintree County. He was five years old when his father poisoned himself with carbon monoxide fumes from his car exhaust, and eleven before he learned the truth about his father’s death. “Clarification is the first, necessary step in a survivor’s journey of healing,” he says.
Patricia, a junior at the University of Vermont, was twelve years old when she came home from school one day to find her mother dead in the kitchen. “The oven was turned on and there was gas all over the place,” she recalls. “I ran screaming over to a neighbor’s house, as if I were in one of those horror movies you always see. My mother had been very depressed since my brother was killed in an accident in the army the year before. Many times, I would come from school to find her crying. When I tried to comfort her, she would tell me that I shouldn’t worry about grown-up problems, that I should enjoy being young. My mother’s suicide created a scandal in our small town. My father refused to discuss it with me and my two sisters, and we lived our whole childhood without even mentioning my mother’s name, in any context.
“I grew up believing that ending your life makes a lot of sense if things get too bad. I would wonder why anyone would even want to stay alive if they were really miserable. As soon as I went off to college, my father remarried. At his wedding, one of my cousins told me he was happy for my father, especially after everything he had been through. I took a deep breath and asked, ‘You mean my mother?’ He answered, ‘Yes, and your brother.’
“I felt my stomach go rigid. ‘What happened to my brother?’ I demanded to know. My cousin was very embarrassed. ‘He shot himself the day before his unit was supposed to go overseas,’ he replied. ‘I thought you knew that.’ I walked away in a daze to look for my father. In the middle of the celebration, I confronted him about my brother. He just said calmly, yes, it was true that my brother had died by his own hand—my father would never use the word suicide—but that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“When I went back to school, I started having terrible stomach problems. The doctors from the health service gave me all these tests but they couldn’t find anything wrong. They suggested that I talk to a mental health counselor. I resisted going until the pains started interfering with my studies. For the first time, I told someone about how much it hurt that my mother had left me and my sisters alone. How could she have loved us and done that? I also talked about my own fears about suicide, the fantasies I had about killing myself, especially now that I knew about my brother.
“I had lived in silence for so long that it defined my life. Now I understand that the feelings have to go somewhere—you can’t wish them away. Sometimes the pain is so great that I can barely speak. But I know that I can’t keep pretending it didn’t happen, the way my father tries to do. I’m studying to be a social worker. I want to get married and have children, I want to have a normal life. The difference between my mother and me is that I will fight to be happy; I will not let myself give up.”
For many survivors, healing begins when they find a comforting shoulder or a safe place to talk about their complicated and conflicting reactions to their loved one’s suicide. “Everyone in my office seemed to avoid me after my wife’s suicide,” says Jerry, a forty-seven-year-old computer software executive from California, whose wife shot herself fifteen months ago. “People in my business are very involved in their jobs. I understand that. But when I came back to work after the funeral, no one even mentioned that my wife had died. Colleagues whom I had known for years would avert their eyes when they saw me; if we did talk, our conversation would be about the latest sales figures or basketball scores. I wanted to stand on my desk and scream: ‘My wife is dead. Please, someone, acknowledge it.’ I started thinking that maybe I was crazy, that I had only dreamed the suicide. It was as if the entire office was sharing a secret from which I was somehow excluded.
“One day, a salesman who was visiting from our New York office asked to speak to me. ‘I heard through the grapevine that your wife recently took her life,’ he said. I was floored by his honesty. ‘I know what you must be going through,’ he continued. ‘Two years ago, my wife jumped out of our apartment window while I was shaving in the bathroom. She had suffered from depression her whole life. I never thought I would get over her suicide, but it gets easier over time. It helps to talk about it.’
“His words opened up a floodgate of tears. I started crying so hard I thought I would never be able to stop. This man, who minutes before had been a stranger, embraced me. ‘Tell me about it,’ he urged. The whole story about my wife’s death came tumbling out of me, detail by detail. For the first time, I was even able to say the word suicide out loud.
“There are many suicide survivors out there—too many—and we share a special bond with each other. From the moment I realized that I was not alone, I knew I would be okay.”
Like Jerry, survivors often find unexpected sources of support during the tumultuous aftermath of suicide. Yet, often we are disappointed by the absence of friends and relatives, who turn away from us as we try to cope with the disorienting repercussions of our traumatic loss.
“One of my closest friends stopped calling me after my sister’s funeral,” recalls Andrea, a thirty-four-year-old travel agent from Dallas. “I was in such a state of shock after Marci shot herself that my friend’s disappearance seemed part of the general insanity. After several weeks, she phoned to say she was sorry but she was having a hard time accepting Marci’s death. Her apology made me feel so empty. I would have really appreciated her help; instead, I assumed that she was avoiding me because she blamed me for my sister’s death.
“I was amazed at who comes through for you and who doesn’t. The least likely people end up offering you the greatest comfort. The day Marci killed herself, a woman from my bowling team brought over a hot casserole to my house. Even though food was the last thing on my mind, her gesture made me feel I was not alone. Afterward, she called me every day, sometimes just leaving a message on my machine if I wasn’t home. She always asked how I was doing and if I needed anything. She was a very strong woman who had raised three children all by herself after her husband was killed in Vietnam. Maybe it was her own suffering that made her able to reach out to me, I don’t know. Yet, I found her constant support to be very important. Her courage showed me people can go through such terrible tragedies without being destroyed.
“Marci was twenty-one when she killed herself three years ago, one week after her first wedding anniversary. She was a very private person and never talked about her feelings, not even what she thought about a movie. We came from a family where we expressed ourselves in tones and small gestures, never words. When Marci was in high school, she attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of aspirin. She then woke up my mother, who took her to the emergency room. After the incident, Marci and my mother went to family therapy together. It was a total failure because my mother acted like a clam. She just sat there and wouldn’t say a word. They eventually stopped going because Marci didn’t want to go alone.
“I didn’t know about Marci’s overdose until she let it slip out about a year after it happened. My reaction was that her trying to kill herself made perfect sense because she was such an unhappy teenager. I never mentioned it to her again because I assumed that if she wanted to talk about it, she would bring it up herself.
“During college, Marci suffered from bouts of depression. I would call her up and she would be in bed crying. I would just let it pass, telling myself that it was not my business to intrude into her life. In her junior year, Marci dropped out of school to get married. She took a job at a medical billing company and her mood seemed more upbeat. The last conversation I had with her was about her plans for Christmas.
“On the morning Marci killed herself, she called her husband at work. She told him there was a bet going around her office about the best way to commit suicide—the best type of gun to use and the best part of your body. He answered, ‘A shotgun in your mouth.’ My brother-in-law is a big hunter, and Marci had a rifle he had given her for Valentine’s Day. She drove home, but her husband kept all the guns in the house locked up and unloaded. My sister didn’t know the combination lock for her rifle, so she used her pistol, which she kept in her own box with its own lock. The instruction book on how to load the pistol was still on the table when I went to her house that night. It is amazing to me that she had the presence of mind to follow the directions on how to put the bullets in the gun. In a way, I find some comfort in knowing that Marci had to take all these steps before she killed herself. It makes her act seem more thoughtful and less impulsive.
“Marci shot herself in what she called the ‘dead animal’ room of her house, a den where her husband had mounted the stuffed heads of animals he had killed. Her husband found her body when he got home from work. There was very little blood because Marci had shot herself in the mouth and there was no exit wound. She left a note for her husband that said: ‘You’ll be better off this way. I can’t do anything right.’
“There was no autopsy because the police didn’t suspect any foul play. But my mother is firmly convinced that it was murder and that a cover-up is taking place. She invents all these different scenarios—that my brother-in-law killed her, that Marci was having an affair that went wrong, that she came home unexpectedly and interrupted a robbery. Anything but the truth. I tell her that if she doesn’t come to terms with the reality that my sister killed herself, she will never be able to begin mourning her. But my mother doesn’t seem interested in her own life anymore. Her whole world is now consumed with finding Marci’s murderer.
“After Marci’s death, I couldn’t sleep unless I kept the lights on. I suffered from major panic attacks, which I still have occasionally. I blamed myself for not being perceptive enough to realize that something was wrong with my sister’s life. On the first anniversary of her death, I went through a period of total grief. I couldn’t stop crying for weeks on end. I really missed her and craved speaking to her. I became angry at her for doing something so drastic without giving me a chance to try to help her. I still find it surprising that Marci had enough determination to kill herself but not enough to face her problems.
“My husband and I were trying to have a baby right around the time that Marci committed suicide. My first reaction was to put it off. No way did I want to bring a child into a world where such terrible things could happen. In all honesty, I was afraid that suicide might run in my family. My husband was very understanding and suggested we go to a genetic counselor at the medical center. She was absolutely wonderful, using scientific evidence to dispel my fears. I am now eight months pregnant with a baby girl. I am very hopeful for the life I plan to provide for my daughter. My sister’s suicide has taught me the importance of talking about your feelings and confronting problems before they go too far. If Marci’s suicide helps me to be a better mother, her death might not be as senseless as it seems.”
Some survivors find great comfort in the spiritual belief that the act of suicide is a mystical occurrence that must be accepted outside conventional, preconceived concepts. “I believe that my son is not dead, that he is finally in peace somewhere else,” explains Howard, a sixty-nine-year-old retired history professor from Eugene, Oregon, whose son hanged himself fifteen years ago at the age of twenty-five. “I have faith that people who commit suicide are so desperate that they don’t feel emotional connections to the rest of us and must seek a place where they will belong. My son lived as full a life as possible but then came to believe he had no future. It is my hope that he has found the happiness that eluded him while he was here.”
As survivors move through the healing process, one of the most difficult decisions we encounter is whether or not to reveal the true circumstances of our loved one’s death. If we choose to protect our privacy by not telling the truth about the suicide, we feel guilty and ashamed; if we are honest, we run the risk of having to defend ourselves from reactions ranging from intrusive curiosity to open censure.
“My response to the question of how my husband died depends on who’s asking and how I feel that day,” explains Joyce, a fifty-nine-year-old mother of four who lives in an affluent suburb of New York City. “My answers include: His heart stopped. He died from depression. It’s a long story. I’d rather not talk about it right now. His death was sudden. He died from unnatural causes. Then, sometimes, out of the blue, I’ll find myself coming right out and saying: He committed suicide. He took his own life. He killed himself. He swallowed a bottle of Nembutal with a bottle of Absolut. He checked out.
“My husband was a prominent dentist, a perfect husband and father. We were married for almost thirty years. I had absolutely no idea that anything was wrong with him. One Friday night, five years ago, we had tickets for the theater. I had spent the day shopping in the city, and we had planned to meet at our favorite French restaurant before the show. He wasn’t there when I arrived so I figured that he had been delayed in traffic. After about an hour, I called our home and his office but only got both machines. I then paged him on his beeper. There was still no response—this was totally out of character for him.
“The train ride home seemed to take forever. I called my husband again from the station; still no one answered. When I arrived home, there were two police cars parked in front of my house. I knew he was dead. The police told me that the cleaning lady at his office had found my husband’s body. I automatically assumed that he’d had a heart attack because he suffered from high blood pressure. Then, the police told me they had found a handwritten note and bottles of pills and vodka on his desk. When they said the preliminary cause of death was suicide, I heard these howls starting to come out of me. I felt like the person in the Munch painting ‘The Scream.’ The police must have called my son, who lived nearby. He’s a doctor, so he was able to give me a shot to calm me down. It knocked me out for several hours.
“The next day I called the police to get the keys to my husband’s office. At first they wouldn’t release them, but I had my lawyer call and they relented. My husband’s favorite blue sports jacket was draped on the back of his desk chair. There was an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, even though he had stopped smoking fifteen years ago. I also had my lawyer get a copy of the suicide note from the police. It said he loved me, that my love had kept him going, but he didn’t know what else to do.
“For months on end, I would retrace the events of those days. I would go over every detail of every minute, searching for a clue I might have missed. Now, after all these years, my recollections are starting to become fuzzy. I know it’s a natural process but it makes me feel sad, as if I’m starting to forget him.
“Everyone tells you not to make any decisions during the first year. It is very wise advice. I was so numb and confused. I wanted to sell my house, move to California, give away the artwork my husband and I had carefully collected throughout our marriage. Basically, I just wanted to run away. Instead, I started going to intensive therapy and joined a widow’s support group. I was the only member whose husband had committed suicide. I was surprised to discover that the other women, all of whom had lost their husbands to natural causes, were also angry at having been left. My anger was the greatest, however, because my husband had died knowingly and willingly.
“After my husband’s death, I felt that I was the focus of gossip. I sensed that there was this question about my integrity as a wife. I felt very pointed-out, judged, and objectified. My friends gradually stopped including me in their plans. I don’t know if they dropped me because I was a single woman or because of my husband’s suicide or both. All I know is that when I was invited to two weddings of the children of people who had been my closest friends, once I was seated with three elderly widows and the other time I was put at the children’s table. My circle of friends—the couples—were sitting together.
“Two years after my husband killed himself, I decided to find a job. I was always a wife and mother who was fairly well off financially so I had never worked in my life. But I knew I had to do something for myself. I went to temp agencies, but I was so nervous I couldn’t even read the instructions for the spelling test. Then I did something I consider very courageous. I enrolled in a reentry program for displaced homemakers at the local YMCA. There were all types of women there—from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. Yet, we all bonded and helped each other. At the end of the program, I was chosen by the other women to give the graduation speech. I had never done any public speaking, although I had helped my husband with his presentations at professional conferences. I was terrified, but I had the audience laughing and crying. It made me feel so good about myself.
“I now work at an entry-level job at an insurance company. I sold my house and moved to a condominium apartment in another town. All my friends are new. I find it difficult to go out with men, however, because I still feel defensive about my husband’s death. Recently, I dated a man whom I found very attractive. When I finally told him the truth about the suicide, he became very uncomfortable. He kept on trying to find out what was really wrong with my marriage, why my husband really killed himself.
“I truly wanted to grow old with my husband. I have these fantasies of our holding hands and being together. I would have done anything to save him if I’d known he was depressed. Since his death, I have had to learn what my own capabilities are. Even if I do marry again, I will never give up knowing how strong I am. Although part of me died with my husband, I have faith that I will be able to love again.”
As we begin to put our lives together, survivors gradually find that the acute rawness of our pain is replaced by a dull ache of regret for the uncompleted lives of the people we have lost. In our moving on, we discover that we still have the capacity to laugh and love, even to be concerned about the ordinary worries of the everyday world.
Kelly, the young social worker from Houston whose twin brother shot himself almost one year ago, told me she was engaged to be married when her brother committed suicide. A large wedding had been planned for several weeks after her brother’s funeral, and she did not know if she should cancel the arrangements.
“I went to the rabbi for advice,” she said. “He told me that when two processions meet, the funeral procession waits for the wedding procession. So I went ahead with our big wedding. Although I was mourning my brother, I celebrated my marriage and love for my husband with all the joy it deserved.”
Like Kelly, I, too, was confused by achieving the delicate balance between going forward and not forgetting. In the process of resuming my life and forging a new one, I came to understand that life does come before death, as a wedding must move ahead of a funeral. Over time, the rich memories of the many years I spent with Harry started to reemerge, as in a faded photograph that suddenly regains the sharpness of its lost images. As the clarity returned, the chaos receded: My healing had begun.