The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  At dinner last night I sat next to a sculptor who had spent the day trying to make something out of welding rods, silk, and invisible thread. To me that kind of project sounds magical, alchemical—an unfettered curiosity about whether these unlikely materials can be transformed into something else—but the sculptor’s eyes were tired, and she sounded daunted by the prospect of going back into the studio to try to get the piece to work.

  I’m writing about my parents. I can ruminate coolly about professional biographers and their limitations and responsibilities and scruples, but I’m not a professional biographer. I’m their child.

  I’m writing because I need to understand the story of my family. But I’m also appropriating it, trying to transform it into something I can understand.

  Biography, in the case of someone who commits suicide, is particularly dangerous, misleading. It looks at a life through the lens of a death. Every time a bad thing happens, the temptation is to say, “Aha!”

  I have to be careful not to make it too orderly.

  Sitting in my quiet studio, I know that other people have struggled here, too. Today when I open my lunch basket and unscrew the plastic cup on top of the thermos, I see that someone has bitten a piece of its rim clean off. A whole crescent-shaped piece of the edge is missing, and there are jagged outlines of tooth marks.

  Another convention from the arc of biography: the modest comeback. The second eruption can never hope to reproduce the impressive glory of the first—the spewing lava, the boiling smoke, the noise—but the volcano isn’t dead yet. Steam and fire can still spit from the crater. If you once starred in movies, and have been drinking since then, you’re cast in a sitcom. If a sitcom was your pinnacle, you land some commercials. You’ll always have the memory of your long-ago idyll with the king, but you’ve since fallen on hard times, and now suddenly a California cattle baron wants to marry you.

  My parents had a period like this, for a little while. An almost-return to almost-grace.

  She became a real estate agent.

  He met some Japanese businessmen at a trade show. They were there representing their own machines, which were similar to his, but much bigger, and priced ten times as high. They wanted a foothold in the American market, but they didn’t have any experience doing business here. Maybe I can help you, my father said.

  And for a while he did. From their corrugated little office in the woods, he and his partner demonstrated the Japanese machines to interested buyers. In the evenings, he sat in his study with language books and tapes. He still had his old talent for languages, but Japanese was much harder than anything he’d ever tried to learn in the past, with its several alphabets and its complex code of nuance. He went to Japan several times, came home and developed roll after roll of photographs. I found the prints when I was cleaning his study after he died. Endless pictures of gardens and temples. No one knew anymore what or where they were.

  Let’s be merciful and cut this part short; we already know it ends badly. My father sold some machines, but not enough. The Japanese signed a deal with his big competitor.

  My father felt betrayed. He thought of getting out of the business and doing something else. His mother had recently died, and though her estate was tangled, there was still some money left in the end. Maybe he should quit business altogether.

  (Another classic biographical moment, close to the end. You consider canceling the duel, or wonder if instead of the Titanic in April you should sail on the Oceanic in May. But you decide that no, it makes more sense to proceed with your original plan.)

  My father and his partner decided to build their own big machine. My father would need to put more money into the business, but with the contacts they’d built up and the fact that they could deliver the same kind of product at a lower price, the investment was sure to pay off. Not right away, but eventually, and hugely. The hell with the Japanese.

  What was more, they were going to diversify. Never again would they risk putting all their eggs into one basket. They’d start another business, a door company. My father met someone at a trade show who was importing wooden doors from Korea and wanted to expand. With the way new-home starts were rising in America, my father reasoned, this was another great investment opportunity.

  Some historical context here: it was the 1980s. There was money everywhere; people were just plucking it out of the air. My husband’s stepfather got together with a group of guys and did a leveraged buyout. They picked up a company, broke it up, and sold it. My husband’s stepfather got sixteen million dollars.

  Look at any biography of a businessman, the part where he’s quoted reflecting on his own success. You’ll find the words “Don’t be afraid to take risks.”

  And also: “Never give up.”

  10.

  This is what it was like to talk to him on the phone.

  “How’s everything with you, Dad?”

  “Not too good right now. How’s your job?”

  “Fine. What do you mean, not good? Do you mean your business?”

  “Well, that and a lot of other things. So, have you been listening to Mozart lately?”

  Finally he admitted to me that he was close to bankruptcy. “But don’t tell Mom,” he said.

  I called my sister, and she agreed with me that my mother needed to know. But we thought my father needed support, in order to tell her. The next weekend, I drove down to my parents’ house from Boston, and my sister flew in from the Midwest. We sat my parents down in the living room and said, “Mom, Daddy has something to tell you, and it’s going to upset you, but you just need to listen and try to understand.”

  My father, who had seemed relieved that my sister and I wanted to come, took a breath and said, “Okay. All this may turn out fine if I can just sell two machines at the Louisville trade show next week. But if the machines don’t sell, then I need to tell you: I’m bankrupt.”

  My mother started screaming and ran out of the room and up the stairs. The bedroom door slammed.

  My father looked at me and my sister. “Well,” he said. “That certainly didn’t go the way we’d hoped.”

  A couple of days later, he called to tell me that he and my mother had talked, really talked. “Thank you so much for coming, for doing that.”

  My mother called and said the same things. “Daddy and I are feeling much closer. It was so good that you girls came. I don’t know what comes next—our life is obviously going to have to be different—but we’ll be okay somehow, no matter what happens.”

  My father went to Louisville, and sold the two machines.

  11.

  He got sick again, a couple of years before he died. Assorted vague symptoms. Headaches. A cough. Stomach troubles, which he’d had since a trip to India thirty years ago, but now suddenly they were worse. His color was bad. He went to his doctor for tests.

  The doctor saw a thickening in the wall of the intestine, and thought there might also be a problem with the lungs. More tests were scheduled.

  I drove down from Boston to spend the weekend with my parents. My father had a doctor’s appointment on Friday afternoon. When he and my mother got back, she told him to talk to me. She left us in the living room and went upstairs. My father sat down, motioning to me to sit, too.

  “All right,” he said. “The things in my lungs are pretty big, and the odds are excellent that they’re malignant. What they have to find out now is whether the lungs are the primary site, or whether it might have spread there from somewhere else.”

  I tried to match his factual tone. “How would they treat it?”

  “Chemotherapy.”

  So it’s inoperable, I thought.

  He went on: “Apparently it’s in too many places to operate. But I want you to know I’m not giving up. I think there’s a chance it may be tied up with this sinus infection I’ve had.”

  We talked some more, about second opinions, various hospitals; me questioning, him answering. Then there was a silence. “How was your day?” he asked, and
I said, “Better than yours.”

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  We all made dinner together, red-eyed, jabbering. We kept asking him questions. Daddy, how do you grow such sweet tomatoes? Paul, where’s the round steel platter? Can you taste this salad dressing? I feel like it needs something, but I can’t figure out what.

  It was as though we were enumerating his skills, his value, arguing with some higher-up: you see? This person has too much specialized knowledge for his job to be eliminated.

  For the next few weeks he went from doctor to doctor, test to test. I kept a journal, chronicling all of it: the colonoscopy, the debate about whether to do a bronchoscopy or proceed straight to a needle biopsy, whether to keep it all in Connecticut or go to New York.

  Now when I look at that journal I see things that in hindsight mean more, and pierce deeper, than all the medical blow-by-blow.

  This, from another weekend I spent with them:

  The illness is barely discussed; my father talks briefly to me about business problems. I am telling him about my day: a tough train ride with the baby, the upstairs toilet overflowing, the light above the stove falling down when I touched it. It’s the opposite of the Midas touch, I say. That’s been my problem lately, too, says my father. Does he mean the illness? But no: it turns out they’ve been having quality control problems with the doors. The first sample sent to the biggest U.S. distributor, who was set to take on the line, was defective. Fine, they said, that can happen; send us another one. The second one arrived from Korea, defective also. The distributor canceled the order.

  Or this, from the same weekend. He had begun, suddenly, to tell me family stories about his German cousins. “Did I ever tell you that I have a monocle?” he asked me, and went on to say that it had belonged to his grandmother. His cousin Marian had given it to him one night when he was visiting Germany in the 1950s; they were going to dinner with a particularly stuffy aunt, and Marian thought it would be funny if my father wore the monocle and bowed and kissed the aunt’s hand.

  My father says it’s so disappointing now, that Marian herself has become so stodgy. She wasn’t like that. She had spirit. But now, he says, to hear her talk you’d think her life was over. I think that’s really sad, he says. She’s resigned to the end of her life.

  Or this:

  Later, we all get into a discussion of lawsuits. A guy was operating one of my father’s machines, standing in the wrong place, and his leg was crushed and had to be amputated. There was no concept of contributory negligence, my father says. The suit was settled out of court. But you were insured, weren’t you? I ask. No, he says, we can’t afford it. Why don’t you just close the doors of that damned business? my mother says. What kind of a business is that, where you can’t even afford to carry liability insurance? My father turns away.

  Here’s my last journal entry from that episode.

  The red light on the answering machine, flashing. My father’s voice: “I’m back from the hospital, and I just wanted to let you know: it’s benign.” I grab the phone, call, get him. He sounds subdued. Says he’s relieved, but doesn’t sound relieved. In pain? Still absorbing? Still frightened? Angry at the false alarm? Who cares. If it’s not cancer, it’s okay. Anything else is beatable.

  I think, now, that he was sorry when the whole cancer thing turned out to be a false alarm. It would have been a good, sad death. He would have fought hard against the cancer and suffered a valiant defeat. He would have died in our arms.

  Something else would have killed him. He wouldn’t have had to pick up the gun and do it himself.

  12.

  Sometimes, when I’m in the studio and really desperate for some distraction, I leaf through the only book in here, which is a dictionary. This afternoon I look up the word “suicide.” The first definition is “The act or an instance of intentionally killing oneself.”

  An instance? Doesn’t that sound a little casual? As if it were a momentary lapse, a goof, a dopey one-time mishap the lesson of which was: well, I guess I won’t be doing that again. How would one use it in a sentence—“On Friday he had an instance of intentionally killing himself”?

  The second definition of suicide is “The destruction or ruin of one’s own interests.”

  Yeah, to put it mildly.

  But it’s the third definition that sobers me. “One who commits suicide.”

  It’s the only cause of death that can be used as a noun to describe the dead person. If you die of cancer you are not called “a cancer.” If someone else shoots you, you are not referred to as “a murder.”

  But if you shoot yourself, you are labeled as a suicide.

  Your death becomes your definition.

  In fiction, or in a play, you can let a big thing happen between the lines, or offstage.

  In biography, though, you have to state the facts.

  He died on Friday, February 8, 1991, at around 6:30 in the morning. He shot himself at home, sitting in the blue armchair in his study, with his feet crossed at the ankles, resting on a footstool.

  13.

  I have one of his shirts. It’s red, with a small green-and-tan windowpane plaid. He used to wear it on weekends. When I brought it home with me, ten days after he died, my memory of him in it was still vivid. I put the shirt way in the back of my closet, because I couldn’t stand to look at it. But sometimes I would burrow back there, behind my own clothes, and put my face against his shirt, searching for the smell of him.

  Now that he’s been dead fifteen years, I can’t really remember him in the shirt. The fact that it belonged to him is just that: a fact. I can’t picture him in it, any more than I could have pictured, on one of the many days when I was with him and he was alive and wearing it, that one day it would become a talisman, one of the few tangible things I have that belonged to him.

  The writer stands up again and moves away from the computer. She walks around the studio, looks at the old photographs and the pages tacked to the wall.

  She keeps trying to tell his story, all the different pieces of it. She wrestles with form, with genre. A novel? Memoir, biographical essay? First person or third? My father shot himself, or her father shot himself? So many things bore down on him, for so many years—should the story be told year by year, or thing by thing? It’s obsessive, it’s gone on for years.

  She believes that someday she might be able to tell it in a way that’s definitive, that makes it stay told, like a picture that finally stops falling off the wall once the right hook or adhesive is found. Sometimes she almost gets it, she thinks; but then, restlessly, she starts needing to look at it again. Does it have to do with trying to let him go, or trying to keep him?

  She flips through the dictionary again. Someone has cut something out of one of the pages, very neatly, with an X-Acto knife; a long skinny rectangle is missing, in the middle of the definition of the word “look.” Why would someone have cut out only part of a definition?

  Then she looks at the flip side of the page. On this side, the excision makes more sense: an entire word and its definition are gone, between “longicorn” and “longish.” (A longicorn, she reads, is a long-horned beetle.) What’s missing? Tonight when she leaves the studio to go to dinner, she can find another dictionary and check.

  But she doesn’t have to. Suddenly it occurs to her that the missing word is “longing.”

  In a novel that detail would be too much. But I can take refuge behind the voluminous skirts of nonfiction and tell you that this is the truth. Someone cut the word “longing” out of the dictionary in here.

  I wonder what became of it, that narrow flapping rectangle sliced away with surgical precision, along with whatever brief words defined it.

  But more than that, I find that I am wondering about its meaning and its purpose: why it beckoned, and what use it was put to.

  Suicide: numbness and

  Bullwinkle

  AFTER YOUR FATHER’S DEATH, YOU STAY WITH YOUR MOTHER for ten days. Then you drive back
to Cambridge, to resume your own life.

  You are numb.

  Every morning you drop your son off at nursery school. Then you go home and sit in your living room, in the big flowered chair. Your husband calls from work, to check on you. Friends call to ask if you’d like to have lunch. You thank them, and say you’d like to have lunch another time. You try to get some work done. Mostly you just sit in the flowered chair.

  You pick your son up at noon, bring him home, and make him a peanut-butter sandwich. Then he naps, and you sit in the flowered chair.

  When he wakes up, the two of you lie on the bed and watch Rocky and Bullwinkle videos. The Treasure of Monte Zoom. The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam.

  Your son laughs. He doesn’t understand the puns or most of the jokes, but he gets that it’s supposed to be funny. He goes along with the spirit of the thing. This kind of time with him has always thrilled you—watching him leap fearlessly forward into something he’s not quite ready for. It’s one of the best parts of having a child, you’ve thought. One day, a couple of months ago, your son was watching TV and you’d left the room for a few moments, when suddenly you heard a shriek. You ran back to see what was wrong. But nothing was: he was shrieking with laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” you asked, smiling with relief that he wasn’t hurt.

  He pointed to the TV screen, where some old comedy was unreeling itself in jumpy black and white. He could hardly tell you what was so funny, he was still laughing so hard.