November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  For many years researchers believed that notes held a key to understanding motivation for suicide, but several dozen studies have revealed little more than that suicide notes reflect the range of emotions of suicidal people. In one early project, psychologists Edwin Shneidman and Norman Farberow categorized nine hundred notes according to socioeconomic level. They found that more advantaged writers spoke of being “tired of life,” while blue-collar suicides were apt to focus on physical illness and the press of details of living. A Philadelphia study of 165 notes found that slightly more than half displayed feelings of gratitude and affection, while 24 percent were openly hostile and negative and 24 percent were “neutral.” In a study by psychiatrist Calvin Frederick, five graphologists, five secretaries, and five policemen were shown forty-five sets of suicide notes, each consisting of a genuine note and three verbatim copies in the handwriting of a nonsuicidal person of the same sex and approximate age of the genuine note writer. Asked to select the genuine notes, the secretaries and detectives couldn’t tell the difference. The handwriting experts selected the genuine notes more than 60 percent of the time. They found the penmanship of the suicidal individual to be “impulsive, spontaneous, aggressive, agitated, aimless, disorderly, and laden with anxiety.” In sum, suicide notes, which would seem to offer a window into the soul on the edge of the abyss, have yielded little of use. Writes Shneidman, “Suicide notes often seem like parodies of the postcards sent home from the Grand Canyon, the catacombs or the pyramids—essentially pro forma, not at all reflecting the grandeur of the scene being described or the depth of human emotions that one might expect to be engendered by the situation.” Investigation into why more than 75 percent of suicides do not leave some final written expression has turned up little. “Whether the writers of suicide notes differ in their attitudes from those who leave no notes behind it is impossible to say,” observed psychiatrist Erwin Stengel. “Possibly, they differ from the majority only in being good correspondents.”

  Many note writers ask for absolution, like the minister who hanged himself in his church after scrawling on the paper wrapper that came around the rope, “God forgive me.” Others go out of their way to insist that certain people are not to blame. But as Herbert Hendin has observed, “‘You are not to blame’ written to a husband, wife, or parent usually turns out to mean the opposite.” Some attempt to provoke lingering guilt. After receiving a letter from his girlfriend telling him she was marrying another man, an Illinois man wrote, “Darling, I cannot live without you. I am going to the garage and use the car that is in there. Remember, I loved you so much I died for you.” Others are more direct. “I hope this is what you want,” wrote one man to his wife. Notes may be frank expressions of anger. A man who gassed himself after learning that his wife had run off with his brother wrote on the back of her photograph, “I present this picture of another woman—the girl I thought I married. May you always remember I loved you once but died hating you.” One mother found her teenage son hanging behind the Christmas tree. A note pinned to him said, “Merry Christmas.”

  Notes may offer literal explanations for the suicide. In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the title character, whose family had fallen upon hard times, found a haunting note underneath the hanged bodies of his three sons: “Done because we are too menny.” Gay activist Michael Silverstein asphyxiated himself at thirty-six, writing, “Help isn’t what I want now. I’ve decided it’s alright to stop if I want to. I’m tired.” Rarely do notes offer philosophic defenses of suicide or treatises on the moral ramifications of the act. More often they are filled with practical instructions, outlining the disposition of property, guest lists for the funeral, what to tell the children, reminders to “change the spark plugs on the Ford every ten thousand miles,” to “please see that Tommy gets a Mickey Mouse watch for his birthday,” or “Don’t forget to put out the garbage on Thursdays.” A thirty-year-old psychiatrist left this note: “Car to Helen or Ray. Needs a tuneup. Money to Max and Sylvia. Furniture to George plus $137 I owe him.” A thirteen-year-old Los Angeles girl who shot herself shortly after actor Freddie Prinze’s suicide left her parents an eight-page letter detailing which of her toys and clothes to give to whom, and advice on the care of her pets, plus repeated requests to “please let me be buried by Freddie.” While such directives may be thoughtful ways to ease a family’s burden, they can be subtle attempts to control a friend or relative after one’s death. “I would like my sister Frances to have the piano that you have in your apartment,” wrote a sailor to his girlfriend. “Do this or I will haunt you. Goodbye Sweets. Be seeing you soon. Love. Joe.”

  Some notes written after the overdose has been taken or the gas turned on may sound as if the writer is conducting a scientific experiment on the experience of dying. After swallowing a lethal overdose of sleeping pills, a sixty-eight-year-old man played solitaire, pausing occasionally to record his thoughts. At 9 p.m. he wrote, “No one’s fault . . . no one to blame,” and quoted Sydney Carton’s last words from A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Later he wrote, “Thirty-five minutes past nine. It works so slow.” At the bottom of the page there was a final, plaintive entry: “I can’t win.”

  Above all, notes reflect their author’s unhappiness. A twenty-year-old who gassed herself in a New York City rooming house on July 4, 1931, wrote, “This is my Independence Day—from life. Love and holidays are not for me. I’m tired and no one wants me.” The celebrated young Brazilian cartoonist Péricles killed himself on New Year’s Eve, 1962. After shaving and putting on his best white suit and silk tie, as if he were going to a party, he spread a blanket and pillow on the floor, turned on the gas jets of the stove, and lay down. He left this note for his mother:

  I’m deeply sorry for you. I spent Christmas Eve alone in this apartment hearing the laughter and joy of neighbors. But it’s impossible to go through it again. On a day like this everyone seeks the company of beloved ones. Here I am with nowhere to spend New Year’s in anyone’s company. It’s simply my fault. Forgive me for such a vulgar note.

  Fanny Imlay Godwin, the illegitimate daughter of the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, suffered an unrequited love for her half-brother-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1816, at age twenty-two, she poisoned herself at an English seaside inn, leaving this note:

  I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate and whose life has only been a series of pains to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death may give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed.

  A fifty-year-old Massachusetts man simply wrote:

  I’m done with life

  I’m no good

  I’m dead

  In the end the lengths to which suicidal people go to communicate their feelings are matched by the difficulty of writing something that can explain or mitigate such an act. David Kinnell was a depressed eighteen-year-old who had been known in his Massachusetts high school as a gifted poet and athlete before his parents started having marital difficulties and his life became centered increasingly around drugs and rock music. Many times he had asked his mother to listen to a particular song. “Can you hear it?” he would say. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Living at home after graduation, David spent much of his time in the basement listening to his albums, copying down the lyrics as the songs played. One day he borrowed his mother’s car, saying he had a job interview and wouldn’t be home until after midnight. He drove five hundred miles to a park, where, as a child, he had spent many happy times with his family. At an overlook called Inspiration Point he hanged himself from a tree. When the park ranger found him, the tape deck in his car, parked nearby, still blared music by his favorite group, the Grateful Dead.

  In the week following his d
eath David’s family and friends began to receive packages from him in the mail. His psychologist received a stack of records and a note saying that killing himself was the right thing to do. The youth leader of his church received a book written by Jerry Garcia, the leader of the Grateful Dead, with a note asking him to pass it on to the psychologist after he had read it. A girlfriend received a record and a note saying, “Call my mother. Please come to it.” (She did call his mother, and she did go to David’s funeral.) David’s thirteen-year-old sister received a $100 gift certificate from Laura Ashley for her birthday the following month. David’s mother received a six-page letter that consisted largely of song lyrics by the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, and other groups, strung together, one song after another. “They were almost impossible to understand,” says his mother. “But they seemed to say that he’d gone over the edge, and he couldn’t come back. I think he felt so out of control, and finally he took control of his own life. . . . Toward the end of the letter there was a song that said, ‘Carry on my wayward son / There’ll be peace when you are done.’ . . . It was a comfort to read that. I regarded it as an affirmative statement, that he was at peace.”

  David had labored over his farewell packages for several months. All those times his mother had seen him in the basement copying down lyrics from records, he had been composing his elaborate suicide notes. Then he had wrapped his gifts, put them in the trunk of his mother’s car, and mailed them en route to the park where he had chosen to die. While so much care, effort, and thought had gone into the packages, it seemed a tragic footnote that the boy who had once expressed himself so well in poetry could only communicate through someone else’s music. And even then he was unable to make himself understood. His mother took the note David sent her to a local youth counselor, who identified some of the songs. “But I could research every single lyric, every single song, and I still don’t think I’d understand,” she says. She recalls all those times David asked her to listen to his music, how he had tried to explain, how she had tried to comprehend. “‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ he’d say, and I’d say, ‘I can’t understand it. Tell me why you think it’s beautiful.’ And he’d say, ‘You just don’t understand.’ But now I think he meant much more than that—‘you don’t understand’—not just the lyrics, but the whole thing, everything.”

  IV

  THE NUMBERS GAME

  AT THE OPPOSITE END of the investigative spectrum from clinicians who look at suicide on an individual basis are the statisticians and sociologists who churn out graphs and charts in pursuit of a broad, external perspective. What they tell us may at first seem esoteric (for instance, that from 1928 to 1932 males in Minneapolis were more apt to kill themselves on Tuesday, females on Thursday) or even trivial (that, in metropolitan areas, the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate). But they are trying to answer the question—why people kill themselves—not by examining case histories of individuals but by examining case histories of entire groups.

  According to the World Health Organization, about 1 million people take their own life during an average year: as many as are killed in murders and wars combined. Although no countries or cultures are immune to suicide, some are more prone than others. In the nineteenth century, when statistics were first employed to measure various societal ills, a country’s suicide rate served as an index of national pride or embarrassment. So, too, in the twentieth century, when Sweden acquired an international reputation for suicide. In 1960, President Eisenhower provoked a fuss when, during a speech at the Republican National Convention, he attributed Sweden’s high rate to the country’s liberal welfare policies, intimating that socialism had left its citizens with nothing to struggle for. Eisenhower overlooked the fact that in 1960 Sweden had about the same suicide rate as it had in 1910, long before its welfare policies were introduced. (Today, Sweden ranks thirty-third among the one hundred nations that report suicide statistics to the WHO.)

  Scandinavia, however, presents an interesting paradox. While the suicide rates of Denmark and Sweden have long been among the highest in the Western world, Norway, also a welfare state, has consistently ranked far lower. A six-year study undertaken by the four Scandinavian nations suggested that the reasons had little to do with politics. Focusing on Norway and Denmark, the Nordic Planning Group on Suicidology devised a complex system of calculating “social integration” and found that Norwegians had far stronger ties to family, neighborhood, social clubs, and church, bonds that Émile Durkheim and other sociologists have long believed reduce the likelihood of suicide. (During the 1970s and 1980s, the Norwegian rate approached that of its Scandinavian neighbors—boosted by a surge in suicides among young men, whose degree of social integration was reported to be in decline. Over the next decade, however, the rate fell again.) Why are Norwegians more apt than Danes—or Swedes or Finns—to form such bonds? Herbert Hendin, who spent two years studying suicide in Scandinavia, found that suicidal people were psychologically quite different in each of three Scandinavian countries and that the difference reflected their cultural backgrounds. In Denmark, Hendin was struck by how often suicidal behavior was used to arouse guilt. Danish mothers often discipline their children by letting them know how hurt they are by their behavior, and the child learns how to use his own suffering to arouse guilt in others. Young Danes are also taught to suppress aggressive feelings. Dependence on the mother is encouraged far more than in America, Hendin said, making them especially vulnerable to what he called “dependency-loss” suicides.

  Swedes encourage their children to be independent, but they also foster an intense concern with competition and achievement. “Among the men, success or failure has a life-or-death meaning,” wrote Hendin. “Expectations for performance are rigid and self-hatred for failure is great.” At the same time Hendin found that Swedish children are taught not to express emotions; they deal with their anger by withdrawal and detachment. This response is exemplified in a common Swedish phrase, tiga ijhal, to kill someone by silence. Their psychological profile encourages what Hendin characterized as a “performance” type of suicide, triggered by a failure to live up to perceived expectations.

  By contrast, Norwegian mothers tend to be warm and emotionally involved with their children without having rigid expectations. The child is encouraged to express his feelings, and as he grows, he is less concerned with performance and more able to show his emotions. Norwegians, said Hendin, are better able to communicate their anger and frustration in ways short of suicide.

  According to Hendin, to understand suicide we must take a “psychosocial perspective”; that is, we must investigate its meaning within its cultural group, synthesizing psychological, social, and cultural factors. Suicide for a Norwegian differs in meaning and motive from suicide for a Korean. Similarly, within the United States, suicide for an urban black differs from suicide for a suburban white or a Native American. “On some level all suicidal people are united by some common denominator of unhappiness,” said Hendin. “But what makes them unhappy and why they want to die is a function of the time and place in which they live.”

  If the suicide rate is any barometer, Lithuania, with a rate hovering around 45 suicides per 100,000 people—four times the U.S. rate—is the unhappiest nation in the world. It wasn’t always thus; indeed, the suicide rate in the former USSR over the last few decades offers a dramatic illustration of psychosocial influences. In its Communist heyday the Soviet Union did not report suicide statistics to the WHO; suicide, Party spokesmen asserted, was a “bourgeois activity.” Western suicidologists, however, suspected the rate was high, as is often true of groups experiencing excessive social regulation. In fact, from 1984 to 1990, under the more relaxed policies of perestroika, the suicide rate for Russian males declined by 32 percent, nearly four times the decline for males in other European countries. (The drop was not solely attributable to the life-affirming properties of freedom; it also coincided with a vigorous national antialcoholism ca
mpaign.) Following the breakup of the Soviet state in 1990, with its cataclysmic economic, political, and social changes, the Russian suicide rate soared—as did the rates for Lithuania, Belarus, and most other former Soviet states and Eastern European satellites. Many of the victims were middle-aged men unable to readjust and find a new career in the shambles of the Soviet economy. Today, these countries report the highest suicide rates in the world, eclipsing Hungry, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Switzerland, West Germany, Japan, Sweden, and other nations with traditionally high rates.

  Among the countries at the other end of the scale are Italy, Spain, and Mexico, which have suicide rates consistently under 10 per 100,000. Although their low rates are often attributed to the preponderance of Roman Catholics in these countries, Costa Rica and Northern Ireland, which are predominantly Protestant, have low rates, while Catholic Austria has one of the highest rates in the world. (For centuries it has been traditional wisdom that Protestants have a higher suicide rate than Catholics, Catholics a higher rate than Jews. Actual figures are difficult to procure—death certificates in the United States do not record religious affiliation—but several European studies show that although the rates for all three groups increased over the twentieth century, the rate for Jews rose more rapidly.) Of course, some of the disparity is the result of reporting techniques. Industrialized countries, which tend to have higher rates, also tend to have more sophisticated methods of gathering statistics and fewer taboos against doing so. Reported rates in predominately Catholic or Muslim countries may be artificially low; greater stigma surrounding suicide usually begets greater reluctance to certify a death as suicide. A few countries may, like the former Soviet Union, underreport—or not report at all—for political reasons. In 1985, for instance, a Nicaraguan newspaper reported that Sandinista censors objected to the publication of a story about a ninety-six-year-old woman who had killed herself. The story, said the Sandinistas, was “an attack on the psychic health of the people and, therefore, an attack against the security of the state.”