The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  It was a lot easier for me to get angry at this stranger than at my father.

  But much as I thought I disapproved of the stranger, I was envious of his family. The story made me wistful. I went from thinking, “My father didn’t leave a note” to “Maybe we just haven’t found it yet.”

  I ransacked my parents’ house whenever I went to visit my mother.

  I went up to the attic and looked through the Christmas ornaments, and boxes filled with wedding presents that my husband and I hadn’t liked but had never bothered to exchange, and boxes full of the dirndls that my father’s cousins used to mail from Germany when my sister and I were little, and boxes of family papers and photographs.

  I went down to the basement and looked in my father’s toolbox, and under the lids of old, mildew-smelling Monopoly and Clue and Risk games—any of which, if my father had been feeling clever and bursting with ironic significance when he hid his suicide note, might have seemed like a suitable cache.

  I knew even as I was looking that my father wouldn’t, by that point, have felt clever or sought a witty hiding place. I knew he hadn’t written a note. I knew that he’d felt definite about wanting to die, and about letting his death be as stark and mysterious as it in fact was. But every time I got one of those brilliant tiny ideas—I wonder if he slipped it between the pages of The Sorrows of Young Werther!—it seemed, for a moment, possible that he’d been waiting patiently all this time for me to join my thinking with his, to follow his footprints down the path he’d taken in those final days and arrive at the big clue or answer or apology or something he’d left behind.

  I went through his bureau drawers and found a broken gold pocket watch in an old jeweler’s box from Wiesbaden, and packets of pins and needles from when he’d been president of the family business, and foreign coins, and breath mints, and, beneath a pile of boxer shorts, a couple of issues of Penthouse.

  I went through the pockets of the clothes hanging in his closet and found business cards from competitors and suppliers, and empty cases that had once held traveler’s checks, and a small calculator that still worked, and a crumpled Kleenex, and more foreign coins and breath mints.

  I looked in all his shoes, which were empty.

  Eventually my mother gave away his clothes, but I kept looking. In the backs of closets. On the shelves of the garage. Again and again in the attic and basement.

  One day I climbed up on a chair to look at the top of the canopy that hung over my parents’ four-poster bed. In that moment, it suddenly seemed likely, even certain, that my father had stuck the note up there, not wanting it to be found until the day came when the bed was dismantled because my mother was moving out of the house. The day when this part of our lives, the whole big part that had included him, and his death and our sorrow or rage or bewilderment or whatever it was that we were feeling, was over.

  I never told anyone that I was looking. I never found anything.

  Suicide: philosophical conundrums stemming from

  first

  DID HE HAVE A CHOICE?

  If so, then he did something unforgivable.

  If not, then how can we blame him?

  Suicide: philosophical conundrums stemming from

  second

  DID HE KNOW WHAT IT WOULD DO TO US—MY MOTHER, MY sister, and me?

  If so, then he did something unforgivable.

  If not, then I wish he had known. But only if he really did have a choice, and only if knowing would have stopped him.

  Suicide: possible ways to talk to a child about

  family tree

  “WHEN DO YOU THINK I SHOULD TELL MY SON ABOUT ALL THIS?” I asked the first psychiatrist.

  We were sitting in her office, an upstairs room in her house that looked out into the flickering leaves of an old maple tree. I saw her in the morning. The room was cool and fresh, with chairs covered in rough oatmeal linen. There was a red-and-black batik cloth hanging on the wall behind her chair, and a small blond wooden shelf filled with reference books. It was all very organized and soothing.

  When I asked her the question about my son, she nodded and pressed her forefinger hard against the nosepiece of her glasses. “Well,” she said, “that’s a tough one.”

  My father had been dead for six months. My son was three and a half.

  “How much does he already know?” the psychiatrist asked.

  I looked through the window at the shuffling leaves of the maple tree. “I’m not sure. We told him that his grandfather got very sick and then died.”

  She nodded again, and said that this was probably about as much as a three-year-old could understand. She cautioned me that the next time one of us got sick, we might need to reassure our son that sickness didn’t always mean death, that in fact most people who got sick went on to get well. She said, “The tough thing about reassuring kids is that you don’t always know what it is they’re worrying about.”

  I told her that my son had said one thing that made me wonder how much he knew. It had been the day of my father’s memorial service, in the evening, and my son had come over to the couch and stood facing me, with a hand on each of my knees. He had looked at me and asked, “Why did Pa want to die?”

  The psychiatrist blinked. “How did you answer him?”

  “I asked him what made him think that Pa had wanted to die.”

  “And?”

  “He didn’t say anything else. He sort of wandered away. I think he started playing with his Lego. The rest of us just sat there staring at each other.”

  After a moment, the psychiatrist said, “Well, you did the right thing. You gave him a chance to talk more, without pushing him at all.”

  I asked if she thought my son had overheard the grownups talking—if it sounded to her as if he were trying to grapple with a fragment of conversation that had bewildered and scared him. She said it was possible, but that he might also have made an uncannily apt accidental remark. We agreed that I shouldn’t quiz him, that all I could do was stay alert in case he alluded to it again.

  “But what if he doesn’t allude to it again? At what point should I tell him what my father did?” I asked her.

  She blinked and considered for a moment. Then, as briskly as she might have pulled out a prescription pad, she applied herself to the problem. She glanced at the photographs of her own three children, ranged in plain wooden frames along the windowsill near her desk. “Listen,” she said. “This is what you do. When he’s in—let me think—around fourth grade, he’ll probably get an assignment to do a family tree. And he’ll come to you, and he’ll ask a bunch of questions about your parents, grandparents, et cetera. Where and when were they born, when did your father die. Et cetera. It will all be very factual. He’ll be nine or ten, which is about the right age for him to begin to understand this. That’s when you tell him. Wait for the family tree project.”

  Suicide: possible ways to talk to a child about

  full disclosure

  “OH, HE KNOWS,” KATE SAID OF HER SON. WE WERE SITTING outside, in her backyard this time. It was a late summer afternoon, and our little boys were running through her sprinkler, wearing sagging bathing trunks.

  “You think he knows?” I asked. Her son was flinging himself through the spray of water, chest out, with a kind of fearless glamour; my son followed, admiring, imitating.

  Kate was nursing her daughter, who had been born in the spring: a small oval head, wisps of soft dark hair curling in the damp heat. “Oh, I know he knows. I told him.”

  “Really? All of it?” I remembered her telling me about picking her father’s jawbone up off the floor.

  “He knows his grandfather shot himself.” Kate held the baby upright, between her breasts, slowly rubbing one tanned hand up and down along the baby’s bare heat-mottled back. The baby, her head slumped against Kate’s shoulder, gave me a lazy, sated, milky, sideways smile. I smiled back. The baby looked away, then looked at me and smiled again.

  We went on flirting like this for a w
hile, while Kate kept talking in her cool, even voice.

  “He knows it happened in Florida, when he was a baby.” She glanced down at her daughter. “He knows it made everyone in the family sad and angry.”

  I wanted to ask her, Don’t you feel the need to protect your son? What can he possibly make of this knowledge, at the age of four?

  “He asks about it a lot,” she went on. “More often than I would have thought. I tell him what he wants to know, and I say, ‘Granddad was a very sick man.’ Which he was.” Her voice hardened. “And a very selfish one.”

  “Do you worry about—?” I stopped.

  “About what?” She lifted the other side of her T-shirt, swiftly but gently laying the baby in a horizontal position and helping her to find the nipple. I suddenly remembered, rather than heard, the sound a nursing baby makes, that soft, rhythmic, squeaky, clicking hum.

  “About—” I looked over at my son.

  Kate said, “I didn’t want it to be this big secret. I think it’s better for him to grow up knowing than to suddenly find out one day.”

  I nodded. I could see the logic and the sanity of this, and I admired Kate’s clearness.

  But I said, “I guess I worry about him growing up knowing that people actually do this. Kill themselves, I mean. I worry that if he knows too early, he’ll just take for granted that it’s part of the normal range of human actions.”

  “It is,” Kate said.

  Suicide: possible ways to talk to a child about

  not yet

  I WAS LISTENING TO THE CAR RADIO, DRIVING HOME FROM THE shoe store, when a story came on about Vince Foster’s suicide, which had happened the week before. “Apparent suicide,” the announcer called it.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror at my son, who was almost six; he was calmly buckled into his seat, looking at a Berenstain Bears book.

  “Questions remain about the death of the presidential aide,” the announcer went on. “Although a lengthy note was found near the body, some close to the investigation are speculating that Foster’s death may have been—” I reached over and turned off the radio, knocking the bag containing my son’s new sneakers off the passenger seat.

  He was still turning the pages of his book.

  “Do you know what that word means, ‘suicide’?” I asked suddenly.

  His eyes found mine in the mirror for a wary instant, then slid away. “I’m not sure,” he said.

  “It’s when a person kills himself,” I informed him.

  He didn’t say anything. I checked the mirror again; he was looking out the window.

  “Did you know that that’s something which happens sometimes?” I asked.

  After a moment, still looking out the window, he said, “Yes.”

  I stopped for a red light. I turned around, gripping the back of my seat. “It’s awful when it happens,” I said. “Nobody should ever do it. It’s wrong.”

  My son looked at me.

  I turned around again. The light was red for a little bit, then green.

  “But it doesn’t happen very often,” I finished.

  “I know,” my son said.

  I drove, and turned on the radio again. The news was over and they were playing music.

  Suicide: possible ways to talk to a child about

  rational approach

  MY SON WAS SEVEN. WE WERE STILL A COUPLE OF YEARS AWAY from the prophesied family-tree assignment. Sometimes I wondered if he already knew how my father had died. My husband and I never talked about it in front of him, but the house we lived in was small—wasn’t it likely that he’d overheard things over the years?

  What I did talk about in front of him was what a wonderful man his grandfather had been. “You know how much you like history?” I would say. “My father did, too. He would have found all your castle books really interesting.” Or: “You know those soldiers you play with, the Japanese warriors? Your grandfather gave you those, when you were little.”

  He would listen and nod, not terribly interested. He never asked me any questions.

  I didn’t mention my father too often—that would have seemed unnatural, even to me—but when I did, it was always in that doggedly upbeat, almost hagiographic way. One night I sat on the floor of his room and read him the chapter from Winnie the Pooh where Kanga gives Piglet a bath. My son lay on his back in bed, smiling at the ceiling. “She knew it wasn’t Roo,” he said when I finished.

  “She knew,” I said.

  “Did she know it was Piglet, or just that it wasn’t Roo?”

  “I think she knew it was Piglet.”

  “So do I,” he said.

  I sat there on his rug for a little while, and then I said, “My father used to read me this book when I was your age. He always did it in an English accent. I wish I could do that voice, but I can’t.”

  There was a silence. “Good night,” my son said.

  “Why did that seem to wreck the moment?” I asked my friend Liz over the phone. She was a psychologist, which had intimidated me at first—but by now, two years into the friendship, we’d developed an easy, sometimes very funny frankness with each other, which often came out around the ways in which we’d blown it with our children. “Call me,” we would say into each other’s answering machines, without even needing to identify ourselves, “I’ve got a bad-mother incident to tell you about.”

  “Because he was picking up on the fact that you were uncomfortable,” Liz said now. “And you are. You’re very uncomfortable mentioning your father around him.” She pronounced the word differently from the way I said it. I said “uncomfterble.” Liz always gave it its due, all its syllables: she put the word “comfort” in the middle of it. Hearing “uncomfortable” said that way now made me suddenly, newly aware that its original meaning must have been “incapable of being comforted.”

  “Here’s the problem,” I said. “He doesn’t remember my father. All he knows is what I tell him. I want him to know that my father was wonderful, so that when I do eventually tell him about the suicide, he’ll have something to balance it against. He won’t just think, ‘Oh, my grandfather was a crazy man who killed himself.’”

  “So he still doesn’t know how your father died?”

  “No,” I said. I told her about the supposedly upcoming family-tree project.

  Liz said, “I’d just tell him.”

  “You would? Now?”

  “I’d probably look for the right moment. But yeah. He knows there’s something there, he just doesn’t know what it is. I think I’d tell him.”

  I was surprised. I loved Liz’s directness: it usually dictated a policy of candor, but sometimes not. Once I’d asked her what she would say if her son, when he got to be twelve or thirteen, were to ask her if she’d ever smoked marijuana. “I’d lie,” she had said instantly. That had surprised me, also. But I admired the way she was so definite: here’s where you lie, and here’s where you tell the truth. I was always dithering, always unsure.

  “What stops you from telling him?” Liz asked now.

  “I’m afraid he’ll ask me questions I can’t answer,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like, ‘why?’”

  There was a silence. “Maybe you’ll just say, ‘I don’t know,’” Liz said.

  That had never occurred to me.

  After Liz and I finished talking I got my one-year-old out of his crib, where he’d been napping, and let him play on the kitchen floor with some brightly colored plastic shapes he liked to throw around. I moved restlessly, assembling things I would need to cook dinner. The baby loved it when I made a big point of stepping over him as I went back and forth: I would lift each leg high and grimace, as if he were a much bigger obstacle than he actually was, and he would sit there laughing. After a while this escalated into another game we had, where he would stand at one end of the kitchen and I’d stand at the other, and when I said “Go” we’d charge toward each other, and when we met I’d swing one leg up and he’d pass under it, as i
f it were a bridge.

  Once my other son came down the back stairs to ask what we were having for dinner.

  “Noodles,” I said.

  “Soon?”

  “Pretty soon.”

  He took a handful of goldfish crackers and went back upstairs.

  When my husband got home, the baby was in the high chair, making his usual happy mess of dinner. I kissed my husband and handed him the jar of carrots. “Can you keep an eye on the spaghetti?” I said. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  I went slowly up the stairs and stood in the doorway of my son’s room. He was squatting on the floor, like a baseball catcher, carefully positioning plastic dinosaurs inside a block structure that looked like a labyrinth. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi,” he said, without looking up from the stegosaurus he was holding.

  “Listen,” I said.

  I had a brief, violent spasm of anger at my father. You fucking coward, I thought.

  “Can I talk to you for a second?” I said.

  My son nodded, his hand hovering over first one part, then another part of the block structure, comparing possible situations for the stegosaurus.

  It was the wrong moment and the wrong way to tell him. But there’d never be a right moment, or a right way. It wasn’t going to come up in conversation. He wasn’t a child who wanted to talk about life or death or why the sky was blue.

  I sat down on his floor and told him. I kept it short. I kept it calm, and gentle, and rational. My son sat down, too, with his legs sticking straight out in front of him, still holding his dinosaur. He didn’t look at me; he looked at his feet. I said, “He was a good man and I loved him, but he was sick in a way that no one really understood. I don’t know why he did it, or even if something like that can have a reason. I wish he hadn’t done it.”

  We sat there. I was looking at my son, and he was looking at his feet. I said, “Do you have any questions about all that, about what I told you?”