November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  Fred and Holly

  The following June I received a letter from Holly that began, “I thought that you would like to know that my gentle husband of 61 years died peacefully in his sleep at two a.m., May 1st.”

  Fred, I learned later, had prospered his first few months in the hospice. He played bingo, was elected president of the council, and was crowned King of Hearts on Valentine’s Day. But as his health declined, he lost interest in the organized activities, and he wept whenever Holly visited. One day he asked Holly about Hemlock. “He wanted to know how to do it, where to get it, how much to take,” Holly recalled in a telephone conversation with me. “I said, ‘Fred, if you had read all the material I’d put in front of you over the years, you’d know.’ But I told him, ‘I have enough pills saved up for us both, and we can take them and die a peaceful death, but you have to come home to do it. So you just tell me when you want to come home and we’ll do it.’ But Fred never gave me the high sign.”

  In April, Fred was bedridden for three weeks. “Finally, at the end, when he was having a very bad time, he said he guessed it was too late for Hemlock. I said, ‘Yes, because I couldn’t get you out of the hospital now.’ “ Holly paused. “Fred was miserable because he was so weak, and he had trouble breathing. But the doctors provided enough painkillers so I think he was pain-free.” At the end of April, Fred slipped into unconsciousness. He died three days later. “I saw him the night before,” said Holly. “I couldn’t rouse him, so I went home. At two in the morning they called and told me he had died. It was a blessing. He was at peace. The anxiety and suffering were over. It was the first day of May, one month shy of our sixty-first wedding anniversary.”

  In the months following Fred’s death, Holly sorted through his belongings and talked with her family and to a counselor, trying to forgive herself for the resentment and anger she had felt during her husband’s last years. “I’m doing very well,” she told me. “I’m not lonely. My philosophy is that grief is a selfish thing so I’ve gotten right back into my activities and club life.” When I asked about her own future, she said, “I know quite positively when I want to make my exit, so I’m making plans. I feel a burden to the kids. I was prepared for a double suicide. I had my notes all written out. Now all I have to do is change the we to I.” I encouraged her to use her vast energy to stay alive. I told her I loved her and would be sorry if she were no longer on this earth. But she sounded certain. I made her promise that she would at least say good-bye.

  Several months later I came home one Friday night to find a letter from Holly, saying good-bye, and a copy of her suicide note that she planned to leave next to her when she made her “exit.” The letter had been written on Monday, and she intended to take an overdose on Thursday night, she said. The note, she wrote in her neat, elegant hand, “will capsulize my reasons for wishing to live no longer.” It said:

  To whom it may concern

  “The right to die is as sacred as the right to live.”

  I am ending my life in a planned and deliberate manner. I have a loving and devoted family and friends who know that this act may be a possibility without knowing when it might occur.

  I have lived a full and fruitful life, 61 years of which were shared with my devoted husband. . . . Now I have become dependent on others because of increasing incurable loss of vision and painful, crippling arthritis.

  All who know me know that I am fiercely independent. I feel that my family and friends deserve freedom from the anxiety which my declining years have caused them.

  I will be 86 years old soon. I do not want to overstay my time. I am not depressed, I am sure that this is the right thing for me to do.

  Now I choose to die in a peaceful and dignified way.

  I have taken 30 vesparex which should be fatal.

  Please respect my right to die.

  Holly G. Isham

  Fred’s and Holly’s ashes were scattered near the mountain cabin they had loved and shared for fifty years.

  6

  SURVIVORS

  I

  MERRYL AND CARL

  FOR MANY YEARS suicide was known as the victimless crime. But whether the act of an impulsive teenager, a depressed businessman, or a terminally ill cancer patient, each suicide leaves behind a great many victims—wife, husband, parents, children, friends—for whom the pain is just beginning. “There are always two parties to a death; the person who dies and the survivors who are bereaved,” wrote historian Arnold Toynbee. “. . . There are two parties to the suffering that death inflicts; and, in the apportionment of this suffering, the survivor takes the brunt.” The suffering of survivors is acute after any death, but the grief inflicted by suicide may be the hardest to bear. In addition to shock, denial, anger, and sorrow, the suicide survivor often faces an added burden of guilt and shame. Although the pain is over for the one who died, and his problems, in their way, answered, the survivor is invariably left with questions. “Suicide is the cruelest death of all for those who remain,” says a bereavement counselor. “Each day the survivors face the gut-wrenching struggle of asking themselves, ‘Why, why, why?’” What makes a suicide so difficult to resolve is that there may be no answers. “I’ll never know why,” says a man whose seventeen-year-old son hanged himself. “There’s only one person who can tell me, and he’s dead.” After her husband, Carl, killed himself at the age of thirty-three, Merryl Maleska’s life was ripped open just when she’d believed it was most secure. It was the beginning of a long, excruciating journey in which she was forced to reexamine every moment of her life since she had first seen Carl sixteen years before.

  On a September evening not long after she had arrived for her freshman year at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, Merryl Maleska lay on a bed in her dorm room, flipping through the “pigbook,” a thin yellow volume containing pictures of everyone in her class. It was her third night of school and there were hundreds of faces to scrutinize, but when Merryl got to the seventh photograph, she stopped. Something in the boy’s eyes—a faraway, intense look—drew her in. She studied his picture. His name was Carl, and he was from a small town in Pennsylvania. She looked at the picture next to his: that boy was a standard-issue matinee idol, but she had passed right over him. Carl was handsome, too; even in a photo not much larger than a postage stamp, she was drawn to his smooth face and his thick brown hair, neatly parted on one side and a little windswept on the other in a way that reminded her of the Kennedys. But it was those eyes, looking straight at her yet keeping their distance, that stayed with Merryl. She called to her roommate, pointed at Carl, and said, “I’m going to marry him.” They laughed, and then they laughed again because her roommate realized Merryl wasn’t kidding.

  In the following weeks Merryl often saw Carl walking across campus in a green high school football jacket with cream-colored sleeves. She was thrilled to discover they took the same biology class (he was a premedical student), and she sneaked peeks at him during lectures. In the cafeteria his name came up often. By the end of his sophomore year Carl had accrued four years’ worth of honors—president of the Sword and Shield Honor Society, president of the Biology Club, the biology prize, highest GPA in his class. At the most prominent frat on campus, Carl was known as the Golden Tongue because, although he was quiet, almost timid, he was a riveting speaker. To Merryl he seemed everything his picture promised. When friends teased her about having a crush on a man she had never met, Merryl laughed. But she kept her eyes peeled for that green jacket, and when she saw it coming across campus, her stomach knotted. Before she went to sleep she often found herself pulling out the pigbook and turning to the seventh photograph. It seemed inevitable that someday she and Carl would meet.

  They did, sort of, during sophomore year when Merryl’s lab partner invited her to the annual Sword and Shield dance. Merryl accepted, half because she knew Carl would be there. When they arrived, Carl, as club president, was greeting guests at the door. Next day Merryl swore to her roommate that when Carl shook he
r hand, he had given her a meaningful smile. Her roommate, reminding Merryl that she had always needed glasses, kidded that her perception had been blurred by myopia, not romance. But all evening as she danced with her lab partner, Merryl was aware of Carl and of his date, who Merryl felt wasn’t nearly good-looking enough for him. For the evening’s last dance the disc jockey put on “Light My Fire” by the Doors—and while they danced, people mouthed the words. As the song went on, Merryl found that she and her date were dancing in a corner next to Carl and his date, on the fringe of the vibrating crowd. As Merryl danced, sometimes it seemed to her that she was dancing with Carl and then sometimes with her date and then again with Carl, and she was exhilarated, and sometimes she knew Carl was watching her and it seemed he knew she knew he was watching, and yet he kept watching, and though the song lasted only six minutes and fifty seconds, to Merryl it seemed to go on forever.

  Merryl spent her junior year in London, studying English literature. Carl studied political science in Sweden. When Merryl returned to Tufts, she decided to write an article for the school newspaper about students who had lived abroad. One day in the cafeteria, with five of her girlfriends watching and praying, Merryl walked over to Carl and asked him for an interview. They agreed to meet Friday evening. Friday afternoon in front of her mirror, Merryl tried on every outfit she owned, finally settling on a gray wool dress that was prim yet flatteringly tight. That night they went to dinner and talked for hours. Carl was everything Merryl had imagined: intense, strong, and sensitive, with a gentle voice that inspired confidence. Merryl didn’t bother taking notes—she never even wrote the article—they just talked and talked. Afterward, she asked Carl back to her dorm. When they arrived, she made him wait on the stairs. She ran to her room, spent fifteen minutes stuffing everything under the bed—she had never expected him to come back and had left the place a mess—then ran back downstairs and invited him up. They spent the night together, and the following morning they took a bus down to her family’s summer house on Cape Cod, broke in through the bathroom window, and spent the weekend huddled in her parents’ double bed. Merryl told Carl about her crush. He was surprised. He didn’t remember her from the Sword and Shield dance, and he was sure he hadn’t given her a meaningful smile. But now he did, and the next day, on the bus back to Boston, he asked her to move in with him.

  Merryl threw herself into the relationship and was happily overwhelmed. Although Carl was shy and retiring by nature, his intellectual curiosity was fierce, and he cared passionately about certain things; he had dropped his premed program, in fact, to devote more attention to political activism. Merryl, warm and gregarious, had always felt a little frivolous, and Carl’s intensity lent her a focus she had not yet found. Carl was the teacher and Merryl was his willing student. This imbalance kept their relationship somewhat tilted, and Merryl was often fearful that Carl would leave her. A year after their graduation, at Carl’s insistence, they did break up and were apart for two years. But they got back together at the age of twenty-five, and two years later they were married at Merryl’s parents’ house on Cape Cod. The bride and groom recited vows they had written in secret. Standing in a gazebo built for the wedding, Merryl expressed her belief that “our lives together will be infinitely richer than our lives apart.” Carl’s voice broke as he promised, “I will be as open and honest with my emotions as I can possibly be.”

  They set up married life in a cozy carriage house in Evanston, Illinois, a short commute to the University of Chicago, where Carl was a graduate student in developmental psychology. Merryl embarked on a seven-month job search that landed her an entry-level editorial position at Rand McNally. Carl was immersed in his studies but managed to read widely, tend an indoor garden, and bake bread. It was a happy time. Merryl felt secure in Carl’s love, and Carl, who had entered therapy, seemed at peace with himself. One Christmas he surprised her with a pillow he had stitched with a favorite scene: Merryl sitting at a picnic table in their backyard, looking up from her writing in delight as Carl serves her iced tea from a tray. Carl had labored over the pillow for months when Merryl was at work, carefully noting where the markers were on the sewing machine, stitching for hours, then restoring the markers to their original position before she came home.

  Gradually, however, Carl’s frustration with his work began to show. The University of Chicago had not been his first choice. It didn’t offer clinical psychology, only developmental psychology, which led to an academic career. But because the academic market was so tight, the only route assuring an eventual job in psychology was the clinical one. Carl felt cornered. Furthermore, the Chicago program emphasized adult and geriatric psychology; the sole faculty member who specialized in child psychology was two years younger than Carl, and he didn’t feel she was the mentor he needed. In any case Carl was a perfectionist who hated to ask for help, and rather than admit uncertainty, he preferred to wait until a piece of work was flawless before turning it in. Carl was especially demanding about his dissertation, an analysis of toddlers’ cognitive responses. Carl loved children, and he spent five hours a day on his hands and knees performing puppet shows for two-year-olds, taping their reactions, then recording the results in the dozens of spiral notebooks that lined his study. He made the puppets himself from dolls, proudly showing Merryl each painstaking creation: an elephant, a pilot, a truck. But the project seemed to take forever; there was always another paper to read, another reaction to research, another departmental requirement to fulfill. Friends began to joke about whether he would ever finish. At night Merryl would watch him work at his desk. Though Carl was doggedly trying to live up to his marriage vow and be more open with his feelings, Merryl could sense the tension building inside him, and when she probed, it would often turn out that something had been irking him for days.

  Meanwhile, after six years of graduate school, Carl was anxious to start earning money. But the résumés he sent out drew no response. He felt inadequate when he compared his stalled career to the smooth successes of the people around him. His brother had landed a job in a psychology lab at Harvard; his sister was winning awards at Harvard Medical School; Merryl was being given increasing responsibility at Rand McNally. Nevertheless, Merryl was prepared to move when Carl found work; she had given him a list of twenty-five states she’d live in. She preferred New England but would live almost anywhere east of the Mississippi. Texas and the Far West were out. Carl applied to schools in those twenty-five states, but he received no offers. As his dissertation dragged on, he typed and retyped his résumé, changing only the date he expected his Ph.D. to be completed. The time was postponed so often that eventually he just used Wite-Out to change the date.

  Eventually, they moved back to Boston. Merryl had found work as an editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Carl had been promised a job at a think tank. But Carl’s position didn’t come through, and though he seemed to make the best of it, the next two years held a series of progressively more galling disappointments. The job search became numbing. Carl followed up every lead, every newspaper ad, every cocktail party conversation, but the only positions available, it seemed, were at junior colleges for sums so low that people apologized as they offered them. Merryl, who was delighted with her work, watched Carl grow ever more depressed. But she still had faith in him. She knew he would get a job, she told him, and someday he would teach in a university. So what if it happened at forty instead of thirty? For Carl’s thirty-second birthday Merryl had his portrait painted. Important people had their portraits painted, she reasoned, and she wanted to let Carl know that he was an important person. Carl was pleased with the idea of the gift but was anxious about having an artist capture a time of his life when he felt so fragile. In the portrait, Carl, in his green suit, looks young and terribly handsome. Whenever Merryl passed through the living room where it hung, she found herself looking up at him and marveling at how well the artist had captured that faraway look in his eyes.

  Merryl’s faith in Carl was so absolute that she was stu
nned when one January morning she was on her way out the door to work and Carl, lying in bed, said, “If I have to go through another job search like this, I’ll kill myself.” Unnerved, Merryl said, “Well, I don’t want to come in this house and find you hanging.” Carl’s statement was so out of character that she put it from her mind. In any case, a month later Carl got a job. Merryl baked him a cake in celebration.

  Carl was the junior member of a three-person team studying the effect of a new drug on learning disabilities in children. He did the paperwork and ferried the youngsters to and from the hospital where a clinical psychologist ran the experiments. But it was a job, and though it paid poorly, Carl drew a salary for the first time in years. His confidence was renewed. At night he worked on his dissertation; his proposal, two years in the writing, had been accepted, and the finish line was in sight. Meanwhile, he and Merryl talked about having children of their own. They filled their bedroom shelves with books on pregnancy and parenting and discussed buying a house. Although they tried for six months, Merryl did not get pregnant.

  One night in late October, Merryl and Carl were filling each other in on their workdays. Merryl had chaired an important meeting and was feeling proud. Carl had always helped celebrate her triumphs, but Merryl sensed her success was making Carl’s own dreams seem further from him. Later, when they were preparing for bed, Carl suddenly went into a tense, agitated tirade; he was worthless, he said. He hated his job and he hated himself. It disgusted him to be ferrying vials for someone whose job he would have had if only he’d stayed premed in college. As Merryl watched, horrified, he repeatedly punched himself in the temple with his fist. When Carl calmed down, Merryl tried to persuade him to get help from a therapist. Carl refused, saying he didn’t want anyone to see him like this.