The crematorium called again, asking when I would be ready to make a decision regarding David’s remains. I called Margaret, a friend and attorney whom I knew could help me navigate this world without collapsing into emotion. When she answered, she didn’t run down the laundry list of things she had to do. Instead she said, “I’ll be right there.”
Margaret had been the first to offer help in planning the reception after David’s funeral. Her timing and generosity were not out of character. Margaret was a modern-day Mother Teresa: she spent her vacations building homes in poverty-stricken areas of Mexico, she volunteered her time for several nonprofits in town, and she still found time for her friends and family. We were both hard workers and had saved wisely. We’d invested in apartment buildings together after a few years of friendship. Margaret did the painstaking work of accounting for every dollar we made. She arrived at my doorstep in a St. John suit and sensible black pumps. She carried two newspapers she’d picked up from the snowdrift and held them away from her clothes.
“Hello, darling,” she said, stepping inside. “Here are your papers. I’ve called the Bensons for the reception, I’ve coordinated with the girlfriends so that each person will bring a dish, and I’ve sent out the announcements.”
“Margaret,” I said, hugging her hard, “would you please quit your job and go run the war? We need someone like you.”
She laughed, and on our way to the funeral home, we caught up on news of Sophie and her son Gavin. When we finally rounded the corner to the acres of graves, she said, “Weird, I’ve only ever come through here bicycling with the kids.” She shook her head. “It takes on a brand-new meaning now.”
We walked through the door of the funeral home, a massive place with too much marble and gold clashing with the somber tones of death. The carpeting, the couches, and the drapes all were in the same palette of tan. On the long granite countertop, four small candles burned with names in front of them. One said “David Krol.” David Krol, I thought, what’s he doing here?
I had to physically jerk my body to remind myself that David was dead. It was something I experienced over and over again, a stray confused thought that maybe he wasn’t dead after all. Margaret looked at me, worried. She smiled, put her arm around me, and introduced us to the woman in the tan pantsuit behind the counter who spoke in low, measured tones. It occurred to me how tiresome it must be to show empathy all day long, every day.
She showed us into a small room adorned with plaques and memorial engravings full of samples of granite and marble. These are the decisions you face when someone dies. It is the ultimate Hallmark experience, summing up a person’s life by choosing the right kind of casket or the best vase to hold their remains. David would have hated this place. He would have walked out the minute he saw the money-making room. “Something simple would be fine,” I said.
“Most people prefer to have something longer lasting, something significant and tasteful,” she said.
“Something simple will do.” I noticed a beautiful, plain piece of unfinished pinewood pushed to the side of the choices. It was the type of wood David loved to shape and mold into projects. I’d seen him turn pine like that into a tree house, a chest, a fence at our first home.
“I’ll take that,” I said to the tan pantsuit woman.
“Are you quite sure?”
“Quite.”
She pushed a folder of ten pages in front of Margaret. We sat at the long cherry wood desk. “We will need to read through each of these,” she said. “Let me know if you need any help understanding any part of this.”
Margaret gave me a sideways glance, pulled down her glasses, and began reading. To my surprise, the funeral director read the words out loud. “I, the widow of the deceased, David Krol,” she said.
Margaret looked up at me to see how I reacted. I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know how I felt. The terms felt so new and foreign. Widow. Deceased. I rolled the words around and around on my tongue, wondering why I was still in denial when I knew I was in denial. Deceased. That was it. I still did not believe David was dead. I hadn’t seen his body. The medical examiner had transferred it straight here after determining he’d died from suicide. I hadn’t seen a shred of evidence that he was dead. “I’d like to see my husband before you cremate him,” I blurted out.
The woman looked up, concerned. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” she said in sorrowful tones. “He’s badly decomposed. He’s been here a few days. I don’t know how to say it, but there’s an awful odor from the body.”
“I don’t care,” I said, now convinced it was the right thing to do, to see evidence that might help me move from unbelieving and shock to believing and recovering.
The woman phoned someone and whispered, “Would you please come in here?” Soon, the morgue operator, or cremator, came in, still wearing green gloves. He explained to me something I already knew—if I were to go into that room, I would smell of death for days. I’d heard cops say it before after entering rooms where bodies had decomposed. The stink permeates your skin, your hair, your cells, and you can’t wash it out.
“I can,” he said, “take a picture for you, so that you can see your husband one last time.”
I sat back down. Margaret told him, “I think that’s a good idea.”
A few minutes later, the morgue operator came back with three Polaroid pictures and put them in front of me. They were close-ups of David’s face. One from the front, another from the side, and a third of his left hand. His eyes were closed, his mouth slack-jawed, as if he had fallen asleep in front of the television. There were blue and purple marks on his face from frostbite, and deep dark purple bruising under his eyes and into his cheeks from the force of the bullet. Dried blood ran down from his head past his ear to his neck. There was a small hole an inch or so above his ear. He was painfully thin, like a cancer victim, no fat left on his face at all, just skin and bone, and his hair was as wild as it must have been that morning, when he left us all behind. Animals hadn’t gnawed him. The force of the blast hadn’t ripped his brains apart. I felt an overwhelming sense of relief looking at the photos. The officer who called me the night of his death was right: David did not look haunted at all. He was at peace, finally. I picked up the third photo and tears filled my eyes. On his finger was the gold ring I’d given him ten years earlier, on our wedding day.
Men account for four out of five suicides in the United States. Male suicide often follows job loss, business failure, relationship loss, or an embarrassing public disclosure.
Florida State University psychology professor Roy Baumeister analyzed suicide in terms of motivation to escape from aversive self-awareness. “The causal chain begins with events that fall severely short of standards and expectations. These failures are attributed internally, which makes self-awareness painful.”
Baumeister points out that most people who kill themselves actually lived better-than-average lives. He argues that idealistic conditions actually heighten suicide risk because they often create unreasonable standards for happiness, “whether produced by past achievements, chronically favorable circumstances, or external demands.” Baumeister notes that a “large body of evidence” supports this theory.
Baumeister emphasizes that the biggest risk factor for suicide isn’t chronically low self-esteem per se, but rather a relatively recent demonization of the self in response to a negative turn of events. Feelings of worthlessness, shame, guilt, or inadequacy, or feeling exposed, humiliated, and rejected lead suicidal people to dislike themselves and to see themselves as unlikable and unacceptable.
Baumeister’s escape theory applies well to male suicide. It depicts the individual struggling with some injury to self-esteem and shifting into a crisis mode in which the cognitive awareness of options narrows.