In the week after the service Jane, Sally, and Ruth cleaned out Peter’s apartment, looking for clues that might help them understand his death. Jane found Peter’s letters to his former girlfriend Anna in which he sounded pathetic and groveling. She was so upset by them that she burned them. Sally read a journal her father had kept one summer when Jane had gone to Alaska for a month; he had written of his feelings of rejection. She realized her father had been more insecure and unstable than she had imagined. “He must have been so unhappy all those years,” she says, “and it gradually intensified until he couldn’t stand it.” Sally, who had herself toyed with the idea of suicide during her teenage years, had insomnia and nightmares. “I kept trying to imagine myself in his place, sitting in the chair with a gun in his hand. I just didn’t know how he could do it.” Andy noticed that there were fifty more miles on the speedometer of Peter’s motorcycle than on the night before he had left for school, when he and Peter had driven into town for ice cream. “On Saturday or Sunday,” Jane says, “Peter must have taken a long ride somewhere, maybe to try to dissipate that sense of ‘My God, it’s coming over me again, that black cloud.’”
In their effort to find some answers, Sally and Ruth met with their father’s psychiatrist. They talked for half an hour, but the psychiatrist, citing doctor-patient confidentiality, told them little. “We tried to work around that,” says Sally, “by making statements like ‘He was sensitive, insecure, had a poor self-image, and we wondered whether that might be the reason he committed suicide.’ The doctor said yes, that was close. He said my father’s death had taken him by surprise, too. But I was annoyed because he didn’t seem very remorseful.”
Jane, who was hounded for months by bloody nightmares, was bewildered. She knew Peter had been unhappy and depressed at times. She knew he had problems expressing his feelings. She knew that he had always had high standards and principles that perhaps at bottom he felt he could never live up to. She knew enough about psychiatry to realize that Peter had had lifelong feelings of inadequacy, and a part of him had seemed to need to be punished. She knew that he had attempted suicide before he’d met her. But why now? Why that weekend? Why just when it seemed everything was going so well? She wondered if perhaps he had been opening up so fast in therapy that it had scared him. Perhaps his melancholy had come over him at a time when he was vulnerable and no longer had enough defenses to cope. But at bottom there was something inexplicable, like those fifty extra miles on his speedometer.
When Jane met with Peter’s psychiatrist, she found that the part of Peter she didn’t know was larger than she had suspected. He told her that Peter had made three other suicide attempts before he’d met her. In fact, the psychiatrist had known about the gun and had told Peter that if he did not get rid of it, he would stop treatment. Instead, Peter padlocked the gun in a metal case and put it in his cellar. “I think Peter thought he could always use it if he needed to,” says Jane. “I wish the psychiatrist had stepped out of the traditional role and invited me in. It might have diffused the danger that lay in the secrecy of that gun. Peter was not an assertive person, and if he hadn’t had access to a weapon, I don’t think he would have done it. I think he would have just suffered through whatever black mood he was in.
“I feel I have to keep justifying him because I lived with him and I loved him, and if he came back, I would live with him again. But when I went back to the apartment, I found a velvet-lined case with another small gun and something that looked like a shotgun lying in pieces,” she says slowly. “I don’t know how to put that together with the man I knew. That’s a mystery I’ll never solve. There’s no one who can tell me why because the person who knows is dead, and even he probably didn’t know.” Jane folds her hands. “But I know now what I hadn’t known before, that it is possible for even the most deeply disturbed and desperately unbalanced among us to be a beautiful person.”
II
UNDER THE SHADOW
FROM TIME TO TIME magazines print articles with titles like “Are You the Suicide Type?” They offer statistics on who is likely to complete suicide: four times more men than women kill themselves; whites complete suicide more than nonwhites; suicide rates rise with age, soaring after sixty; divorced men are three times more likely to kill themselves than married men; two of every three suicides are white males; and so on. Through these demographic factors a composite emerges, like a police artist’s sketch, of an older, white, divorced, unemployed male who lives alone and is in poor health—the “suicide type” or “high-risk paradigm,” as clinicians call it. As a white male who was divorced and approaching retirement, Peter Newell was in many ways the typical suicide.
Such articles, however, usually conclude that there is no such thing as a suicide type. Suicide cuts across all sex lines, age groups, races, and diagnoses. Just as no two fingerprints are identical, no two lives are identical, and no two suicides are identical. While the vast majority of suicides may be associated with a diagnosable psychiatric illness, focusing on an underlying disorder may divert us from the fact that for the suicidal individual, the act has a meaning, a goal, a motivation. “No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide,” observed the Italian author Cesare Pavese. But Peter Newell’s reasons were different from Justin Spoonhour’s. The man who responds to voices urging him to kill himself is different from the terminally ill man who decides he has had enough of life. The depressed woman who builds up to the act over many years is different from the girl who, rejected by her lover, impulsively flings herself from a bridge.
“Suicide,” says psychologist Edwin Shneidman, “is an attempt to solve a problem.” That problem is rarely external pain or misery on a large scale. In fact, adversity often seems to strengthen the desire to live. History is brimming with people who, in the face of prodigious bad fortune, poverty, illness, or torture, manage to survive, and with others who, despite being blessed with every possible advantage, such as Peter Newell, take their own lives. This is reflected on a macroscopic level by the higher rates of suicide in industrialized nations than in underdeveloped countries; in the upper classes than in the middle and lower; among whites than among blacks. It is also illustrated by the reported rarity of suicides and suicide attempts in the Nazi concentration camps. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi, noting the low incidence of suicide at Auschwitz, wrote, “The day was dense: one had to think about satisfying hunger, in some way elude fatigue and cold, avoid the blows. Precisely because of the constant imminence of death there was no time to concentrate on the idea of death.” Yet many survivors seemed to experience a delayed reaction in which a built-up residue of depression found expression only after the immediate threat of death was gone. Levi was one of only three of his original convoy of 650 prisoners to return alive from Auschwitz. Forty-two years later, at age sixty-seven, suffering from severe depression, the author threw himself down the stairwell of his fourth-floor apartment in Turin, one of numerous death-camp survivors who ultimately took their life.
The internal misery that leads to suicide often involves loss. “It is impossible to think that I shall never sit with you again and hear you laugh. That every day for the rest of my life you will be away,” wrote Bloomsbury painter Carrington in 1932, less than a month after her beloved Lytton Strachey died. One month later she killed herself. Three days after his bride died of asphyxiation when he had tried to smuggle her into the United States in a suitcase, a thirty-one-year-old Iranian émigré shot himself in the head with a pistol he had bought the day before after telling a friend, “I’m just dead. I lost everything.” Such suicides often involve the conscious or unconscious fantasy that death will bring a reunion with the lost loved one. Not long after his beloved dog Boxer died, one elderly man fell ill, became despondent, and took a nonfatal overdose. When a psychiatrist examined him, the man spoke sadly of his life and physical infirmities. But when he was asked what he had imagined death would be like, he brightened up and said, “Well, I rather thought Boxer would be there.”
Suicide is frequently occasioned by the loss or threatened loss of status, career, or power. People often kill themselves when they are on the verge of being exposed or captured, such as Hitler and his lieutenants, who swallowed cyanide as the Allies closed in. One reads of criminals who kill themselves even as the police are knocking on their door. “There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession,” observed Daniel Webster, arguing a murder case in 1830. Newspapers often report the seemingly inexplicable suicides of powerful men. Only later does news of some scandal emerge. On January 10, 1986, in New York City, for example, Donald Manes, the popular Queens borough president, was found at the wheel of his car, dazed and bleeding profusely from knife slashes on his left wrist and ankle. At first it was assumed he had been mugged—Manes insisted he had no recollection of the evening—but over the next few weeks, as a vast bribery and graft scheme unraveled around him, it became apparent that Manes had attempted suicide. His world continued to disintegrate. A close friend agreed to testify against him; the mayor, his political mentor, called him a crook. One night in March, while talking on the phone with his psychiatrist, Manes pulled a knife from his kitchen drawer, thrust it into his chest, and died. Months later a former friend and political ally, himself convicted of racketeering, described Manes as “one so corrupt that he chose suicide rather than face the consequences of his crimes.”
Like those Japanese who commit kashitsu-shi—suicide to admit failure or to atone for a mistake—some people cannot face shame or loss of face. Paul Kammerer, the eminent Viennese biologist, spent most of his professional life attempting to prove the inheritance of certain acquired characteristics in a particular species of toad. In 1926 it was found that India ink had been injected into the paws of some of the toads, producing tainted results. Although it was never ascertained whether Kammerer or his assistant was responsible, his reputation was ruined. Six weeks after being accused, he shot himself in the head in a forest outside Vienna. In 2003, shortly after being exposed as the inadvertent source of a highly publicized leak embarrassing to the British prime minister, David Kelly, a fifty-nine-year-old, government-employed chemical- and biological-weapons expert, known as a careful, rigorous scientist and a deeply private man, walked into a wooded area near his home, swallowed painkillers, cut his left wrist, and bled to death.
The scandal can seem minor to the outside world. In 1956, when French bakers went on a nationwide strike, the mayor of a small town, scorned by citizens who felt he hadn’t done enough to get bread supplies, climbed a power line and killed himself by touching a hundred-thousand-volt high-tension wire. In 1980, Lady Isobel Barnett, a wealthy English widow, was convicted and fined the equivalent of $650 for shoplifting a tin of tuna and a carton of cream. “I have only myself to live with, and I can live with myself,” she said after the trial. Four days later she electrocuted herself in her bath. In 2003, the celebrated French chef Bernard Loiseau, whose family had a history of bipolar disorder, shot himself to death, apparently despondent over rumors that his restaurant was on the verge of losing one of its three Guide Michelin stars.
The suicide may involve the loss of a sense of self, as poignantly evidenced by the high rate of suicide in the Federal Witness Protection Program, in which government informants are literally provided with new identities—names, jobs, homes, and fingerprints. It may involve a threatened loss of status. A depressed psychoanalyst, urged by his therapist to enter the hospital, refused, saying it would hurt his image. When his therapist went on vacation, the psychoanalyst shot himself. Preserving his image was apparently more important than preserving his life. It may involve the loss of a way of life or of an ideal, as when a person fails to fulfill his early promise. Bruce Gardner was voted the most valuable college baseball player in 1960, but after spending four years in the Los Angeles Dodgers farm system, he never achieved the greatness predicted for him. At thirty-two, a high school physical education instructor, he walked out to the pitching mound at his alma mater, the University of Southern California, and shot himself in the head. Clutched in his right hand was his diploma and next to his body lay a plaque commemorating his selection as an NCAA All-American a decade earlier.
Such deaths may, paradoxically, be an attempt to preserve that self-image. “I believe that suicide has a lot to do with the ideal—often unconscious—that one has of oneself based on early relationships,” psychiatrist Robert Litman told me. “Suicidal people tend to believe that if they do not live up to it, their lives must be a total failure. Often, then, they kill themselves in order to preserve that ideal, to save the flag, save the halo—in addition to punishing the failed self. You know that song Frank Sinatra sings: ‘I did it my way.’ Well, I think that the ideal of the hero who does it his way is suicidogenic—it’s a breeding concept for suicide because many people think it’s either my way or no way, and if it’s no way, it’s suicide.”
For some, loss of sanity—or fear of its loss—may be a spur to suicide. In 1941, Virginia Woolf, plagued much of her life by what would now be called bipolar disorder, stuffed her pockets with stones and walked into a river near her home. She left a note to her husband that began, “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”
On the other hand, suicide is often completed by people who are seemingly on the mend, such as Peter Newell, who was making progress in therapy and on the verge of marriage to a woman he loved. “Paradoxical and tragic suicidal efforts may occur in a patient who is recovering from a psychosis out of a fear of ‘getting well,’” wrote psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie, “when ‘getting well’ means to the patient that he must return to an unacceptable situation from which he can see no escape other than suicide.” Kubie also described the common phenomenon of “depressive response to success,” in which people whose self-esteem is so low that they feel they do not deserve success or happiness may kill themselves shortly after something wonderful has happened or some long-sought goal has been attained.
Many suicides are aggressive acts directed at a particular person or group of people, motivated by conscious or unconscious rage or a desire for revenge and often accompanied by the fantasy of surviving to witness the enemy’s suffering. In a graphic illustration of Freud’s thesis that suicide is murder turned inward, a policeman under investigation during New York’s corruption scandals of the 1930s arranged to meet his sergeant, who he believed had mistreated him, in a bar. While waiting, he told several people there that he planned to kill the sergeant as soon as he saw him. The sergeant never showed up; after a long wait the policeman shot himself, leaving this note: “To whom concerned: Goodbye you old prick and when I mean prick you are a prick. Hope you fall with the rest of us, you yellow bastard.”
Of course, the policeman may have planned all along to kill himself after killing the sergeant. Freud was among the first to emphasize the overlap between homicidal and suicidal behavior, which may blur most literally in murder followed by suicide. Although no national statistics are kept, studies estimate that about 5 percent of people who commit homicide also complete suicide, usually immediately following the murder. Murder-suicides fall into a few general types. In one, not unlike Japan’s tradition of oyako shinju, a parent, usually the mother, murders her child or children and then kills herself, often within the first six months of her child’s life, and often in the grip of severe postpartum depression. (One literature review found that of eighty-eight women who had murdered a child, nearly half had also attempted or completed suicide.) In another, an elderly person, usually male and often ailing, kills his chronically ill spouse and then kills himself. (The perpetrator frequently conceptualizes the murder as a mercy killing.) In the United States, however, the overwhelming majority of murder-suicides—as many as three-quarters—involve a man who kills himself after killing his wife or lover
, often triggered by the victim’s decision to end the relationship, and usually the culmination of years of abuse marked by jealousy.
Less than 2 percent of murder-suicides involve victims who are strangers to the perpetrator. Like the killings at Columbine, these incidents tend to involve more than one victim and are often carried out after long deliberation by disgruntled individuals who believe they have been slighted or humiliated in some way. When their grudge comes to a boil, they lash out at their perceived persecutor—and at anyone else who may be in the vicinity. Murder and suicide are, of course, also combined in terrorist acts, from Samson to the Japanese kamikaze pilots to contemporary Muslim terrorists. “Although such events are murder-suicides, the perpetrator probably does not regard his own death as a suicide, but as a necessary outcome of the successful completion of his mission,” point out Matthew Knock and Peter Marzuk in their review of murder-suicides.
Although there are several types of murder-suicide, they have a great deal in common: 93–97 percent of the perpetrators are male; over 85 percent of the victims are female; nearly 90 percent involve only one victim; and 80–94 percent involve firearms. Although alcohol seems to have less of a role than it does in simple suicides, depression almost always plays a part. “One central theme seen in all types of murder-suicide,” write Knock and Marzuk, “is the perpetrator’s overvalued attachment to a relationship that, when threatened by dissolution, leads him to destroy the relationship.” That relationship may be literal—a marriage, a friendship. It may be figurative—a job, a sense of recognition. In either case, the perpetrator may believe that the only way to preserve that relationship is to end it forever.
November of the Soul Page 33