November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  Like Merryl Maleska two hundred years later, the woman in the engraving is a survivor of suicide. Although survivors of other kinds of death can depend on the rituals civilization has developed to support them in their grief, for thousands of years survivors of suicide have suffered alone and in silence. Today, although suicides are no longer dragged through the streets and their property is no longer confiscated, survivors still face a legacy of antisuicide attitudes that have evolved over centuries.

  In ancient Greece a stigma was a mark burned into the skin to identify a slave or criminal. Since then the definition of stigma has expanded to mean a mark of shame or disgrace whether visible or not. No subject has been more stained by stigma than suicide. In various centuries in various countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the corpse of a suicide might by law or custom be “decapitated . . . to render it harmless,” “burned outside the city, its hand cut off and buried separately,” “hastily removed and dumped outside tribal territories,” “burned so it cannot walk among and wreak vengeance upon the living,” “beaten with chains,” “thrown out into the fields to be devoured by wild beasts,” “buried in a corner of the forest far from the graves of his brethren,” “lowered by pulleys from the window, and the window frame subsequently burned,” “put in a barrel and floated down the Moselle,” “buried at a crossroads by night with a stake driven through the heart,” or “buried under a mountain whose whole weight shall . . . press down upon his restive soul.” Though such special treatment was intended to prevent the suicide’s ghost from wandering, one can easily imagine its effect on survivors.

  When primitive taboos were adopted into organized religion and the attitudes of the Church buttressed by civil law, survivors were more directly penalized. In effect they were treated as an accessory to what was now a crime. In England the suicide’s goods were forfeited to his feudal lord. (It was sometimes possible for an heir to buy back a suicide’s confiscated goods. In 1289, it is recorded, the widow of one Aubrey of Wystelesburg redeemed her husband’s property for three hundred pounds.) In France, according to a law of 1270, not only were the suicide’s goods confiscated, but his widow was forced to surrender her possessions. In some areas the suicide’s family paid a fine to the victim’s in-laws for the shame the suicide had brought upon them. Such penalties were intended as a crude sort of suicide prevention in which survivors became innocent hostages. “What punishment can human laws inflict on one who has withdrawn himself from their reach?” asked the eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. “They can only act upon what he has left behind him, his reputation and fortune; on the former by an ignominious burial in the highway, with a stake driven through his body; in the latter by a forfeiture of all his goods and chattels to the king, hoping that his care for either his own reputation or the welfare of his family would be some motive to restrain him from so desperate and wicked an act.”

  To evade these penalties, survivors learned to disguise suicides by destroying notes, hiding weapons, and securing premature burials. To soften the blow of forefeiture they smuggled valuables out of the house. In France, to counter this “abuse” of the law, a royal edict of 1712 empowered judges to investigate all cases in which the cause of death was doubtful, calling in medical evidence when necessary—an early version of the “psychological autopsy” developed by the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center more than two centuries later. In 1736 a second edict ordered that in cases of doubtful death no burial was permitted without license from the authorities. Since the Crown was the beneficiary of a suicide’s fortune—and the prosecutor was entitled to a percentage of the take—questionable cases tended to be declared suicides.

  In England, where suicides were tried posthumously in Coroner’s Court, the penalty was waived if it was ruled that the dead man had been insane. Juries had to decide whether a self-killer was an innocent madman or a sinful criminal. While the Crown usually argued that the deceased had formulated a deliberate suicide plan, survivors tried to prove either that the death had been an accident or that their loved one was a lunatic. In the case of Lancelot Johnson, a London merchant whose body was fished from the Thames in the early seventeenth century, the Crown claimed the defendant had been “observed to walk in a very sad, deep, melancholy and discontented manner along the river’s side, there where he had no other occasion to be, but only to execute his said ungodly resolution” and that a note “containing the reasons and causes of his discontentment and purpose to destroy himself” had been disposed of by his wife. The widow Johnson, however, argued that her husband’s death must have been an accident because he was too pious to have committed suicide: “He lived in good repute and esteem amongst his neighbours and acquaintances and also carried himself in an exceeding honest, upright, godly fashion.” The jury’s verdict is not known.

  During the eighteenth century many of the laws punishing suicide were erased, but the stigma they had helped create for survivors remained. In 1761, Marc-Antoine Calas, a French law student, hanged himself in his father’s shop in Toulouse. When his parents discovered his body, they removed the rope from his neck and hid it in an attempt to conceal the cause of death. Their subterfuge backfired: A wave of religious fanaticism was sweeping the town, and when the boy’s death became known, his father, a devout Protestant, was accused of murdering his son to prevent him from reverting to Catholicism. Found guilty and condemned to be broken on the wheel, the old man died protesting his innocence. The matter would have ended but for Voltaire, who took up Jean Calas’s cause. Four years later the decision was reversed. In the retrial it was learned that the parents had concealed the true cause of death because they’d dreaded the scandal that news of the suicide would provoke.

  The self-murderer’s legacy of shame was often invoked by preachers in their attempts to seduce the would-be suicide from the path of damnation. “He plants a dagger not merely in his own breast, but in that of his dearest, his tenderest connexions,” observed minister G. Gregory at St. Botolph’s Bishopsgate in London in 1797. “He wantonly sports with the pangs of sensibility, and covers with the blush of shame the cheeks of innocence. With a degree of ingratitude which excites our abhorrence, he clouds with sorrow the future existence of those by whom he was most tenderly beloved; and (as is alleged by some concerning the first of murderers) he affixes a mark of ignominy on his unfortunate descendants.” Eight years later, in New York City, Presbyterian pastor Samuel Miller was even more blunt: “Stay then, guilty man! Stay thy murderous hand! Extinguish not the happiness and the hopes of a family, it may be, of many families! Forbear, O forbear to inflict wounds which no time can heal, and which may tempt survivors to wish that thou hadst never been born!”

  A more temperate argument was offered by Richard Hey, an Oxford fellow, whose 1783 dissertation on suicide describes with surpassing empathy the singular effect of a suicide on a survivor:

  The Sorrow which arises upon the Loss of a Friend, is heightened to the most pungent distress, if he has perished by his own hand. The most calm and gentle death, attended with every alleviation to the dying person, and even to his friends, is yet to these usually no small shock. Minds of the firmest contexture, and retained in the best discipline, if not void of common sensibility, cannot at once reconcile themselves to the change. Add but the circumstance of Violence, either accidental or by the lawless attack of the assassin; and the shock is redoubled upon the survivors: even the robust constitution may long experience its effects; weaker and more delicate frames are sometimes thrown into a state of disorder from which they never perfectly recover. But, if the violence proceed from the hand of him who falls by it, a certain amazement is superadded to the more common sensations: and while sorrow, commiseration, apprehension, abhorrence, contend for possession of the mind, they spread devastation over the scene of their mutual conflict.

  In the nineteenth century, as suicide began to be interpreted as an illness rather than as a sin and a crime, there was a chang
e in the nature of its stigma. While permitted to bury their dead in consecrated ground and to retain their property and possessions, survivors were now the targets of all the superstition and prejudice associated with insanity. Most physicians maintained that insanity was hereditary, and that suicide was the most hereditary form of insanity. The English physician Forbes Winslow wrote in 1840:

  With reference to suicide, there is no fact that has been more clearly established than that of its hereditary character. . . . It is not necessary that the disposition to suicide should manifest itself in every generation; it often passes over one, and appears in the next, like insanity unattended with this propensity. But if the members of the family so predisposed are carefully examined, it will be found that the various shades and gradations of the malady will be easily perceptible. Some are distinguished for their flightiness of manner, others for their strange eccentricity, likings and dislikings, irregularity of their passions, capricious and excitable temperament, hypochondriasis and melancholia. These are often but the minute shades and variations of an hereditary disposition to suicidal madness.

  Viewing them as potential suicides themselves, the medical profession began to take a keen interest in survivors. Winslow was one of many medical scholars who traced “singular” cases of suicidal reverberations within families in which relatives and descendants killed themselves, sometimes in the same place, sometimes by the same method, sometimes on the anniversary of a previous family suicide. In 1901, at the Annual Meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association in Cork, Ireland, J. M. S. Wood and A. R. Urquhart presented a family tree that in four generations had spawned six suicides, four people with suicidal tendencies, and six with “obvious” insanity. Several years later a certain George P. Mudge constructed a Mendelian pedigree for two English families, evidently attempting to demonstrate that suicides could be bred like prize-winning peonies. “There exists a tradition in the village in which they live that death by means of self-shooting belonged primarily to the B family, and death by self-drowning to the A family,” he wrote in the Mendel Journal. “The two families have intermarried, and among their descendants three forms of suicide are manifested, namely, the two original forms, by shooting and drowning, and a new form, by taking poison.”

  The message to survivors was unmistakable: they were doomed to suicide themselves—or at the least to insanity, alcoholism, or feeblemindedness. It is little wonder that some survivors began to regard suicide as an inevitable family fate. “Many are induced to think of suicide from the circumstance of their being conscious that they labour under an hereditary disposition to insanity,” wrote Dr. Winslow. “. . . A gentleman, in full possession of his reasoning faculties, and a man of considerable powers of intellect, said to us one day, in a conversation we had with him on the subject of suicide, ‘You may probably smile when I tell you that, happy and contented as I appear to be in my mind at this moment, I feel assured I shall fall by my own hands.’ Upon our asking him why he thought so, he replied, that a relation of his had killed himself some years previously, and that he laboured under an hereditary predisposition which nothing would subdue.”

  These hereditary “theories” were especially terrifying for survivors when they intersected with the rise of the eugenics movement at the turn of the century. In his 1893 book, Suicide and Insanity, Samuel Strahan presented eleven family trees—the majority traced from his medical practice—as proof that suicides inevitably spawn imbeciles, murderers, epileptics, drunkards, lunatics, and more suicides. “The suicide by his last act places the bar sinister upon the escutcheon of his family,” wrote Strahan, “and the man or woman who marries into such a family runs a terrible risk. Just as the appearance of idiocy, epilepsy, or insanity in a family shows that the stock is deteriorating, so suicide points to the fact that the family has wandered from the path of health.” Strahan offered his findings to the public “in the hope that people may be induced to use intelligently, in the propagation of the human race some of the knowledge, care, and forethought so successfully exercised in the breeding of the lower animals.”

  Although possible genetic contributions are still being explored, the notion that suicide itself is heritable had been discredited by the 1950s. But the popular view of suicide as a social disgrace, fanned by the Victorian emphasis on family respectability, brought a new kind of stigma. A passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses in which Leopold Bloom and two friends are en route to a funeral is characteristic:

  “But the worst of all,” Mr. Power said, “is the man who takes his own life.”

  Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.

  “The greatest disgrace to have in the family,” Mr. Power added.

  “Temporary insanity, of course,” Martin Cunningham said decisively. “We must take a charitable view of it.”

  Bloom is silent; Cunningham, aware that Bloom’s father committed suicide, discreetly attempts to change the subject. But Mr. Power’s remarks reflect the modern notion that suicide was no longer primarily a personal failure but a family failure. A suicide was a black mark that polluted a family’s marriage stock and lowered property values. The word itself, with its evil-sounding sibilance, was poisonous—a taunt hurled by neighborhood children, a secret whispered by their parents. Suicide became an explanation for a widow’s quirks, for a young man’s “madness,” for a haunted house. “Nothing lowered the prestige of a family as much as the ‘talk’ that a suicide was involved,” wrote Henry Romilly Fedden in Suicide. “It broke the facade presented to the world; the suicide therefore was primarily culpable in relation to his family. He indeed created a disgrace in the family, for suicide, instead of chiefly bringing on a soul the wrath of God and the law, now brought to the ears of the family the twitter of malicious tongues.” There was a kernel of truth in Cyril Connolly’s sardonic observation that some people are afraid to commit suicide for fear of what the neighbors will say.

  Whereas in the eighteenth century survivors had camouflaged the cause of death primarily to avoid losing money or property, now they dissembled to avoid losing face. Funerals were hasty and hushed up; servants were discharged “because they knew”; friends and relatives were avoided; and suicides were transformed in family myths into hunting accidents and heart attacks. Children were told the truth years later if they were told at all. Families entered unspoken agreements to avoid mentioning the name of the departed. Suicide was a family secret to be kept at all costs, a skeleton in the closet. Neighbors sifted evidence and assigned blame; phrases like “he drove her to it” echoed in gossip. Shunned by neighbors, families moved out of the house, out of the neighborhood, out of the state, where people “wouldn’t know” and they could start over. But just as in primitive cultures the suicide’s wandering ghost was believed to haunt the living, so, too, did memories of the suicide pursue twentieth-century survivors. Whether to unhappiness, madness, or suicide, the survivor felt in some way doomed. Reaching back to the Old Testament to describe his feelings of being stigmatized, one man referred to his father’s suicide by drowning as the time when “he placed the mark of Cain upon me.”

  And so survivors went underground, keeping their grief, guilt, and anger locked inside. Even when interest in the subject of suicide and suicide prevention grew in midcentury, survivors were overlooked by the mental health profession. In the traditional psychiatric model, the case was closed when the patient died. The therapist—if the suicide had been in therapy—tended to focus on his own feelings of guilt and grief instead of reaching out to the surviving family. Most survivors were too ashamed to seek professional help themselves. Some survivors eventually developed severe disturbances that forced them into treatment; only after months of therapy did they reveal that there had been a family suicide buried in their past.

  Interest in survivors emerged in roundabout ways. When the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center began to perform psychological autopsies in 1958, researchers found widespread resistance, suppression of evidenc
e, and mental trauma among suicide survivors. They found something else as well. Although they had been apprehensive about approaching distraught relatives, they discovered that survivors had a great need to talk—about their grief, their guilt, their anger, and often their own suicidal feelings. It was usually the first time the survivors had been given an opportunity to discuss the suicide, and they frequently found the interviews therapeutic. “I believe that the person who commits suicide puts his psychological skeleton in the survivor’s emotional closet,” wrote LASPC cofounder Edwin Shneidman. “He sentences the survivor to deal with many negative feelings and, more, to become obsessed with thoughts regarding his own actual or possible role in having precipitated the suicidal act or having failed to abort it. It can be a heavy load.” Shneidman urged that suicide prevention programs address the psychological needs of survivors by offering counseling and support he called “postvention.”

  Like the LASPC, other suicide prevention centers soon realized that survivors were a high-risk group in need of their services. A 1967 study of a St. Louis center showed that one in three callers had had a previous suicide in the family. If, as studies have shown, members of families in which there has been a suicide are eight times more likely to kill themselves, helping survivors clearly constituted effective suicide prevention. “Given the present stage of our knowledge about suicide,” wrote Harvey Resnik, Shneidman’s successor as director of the Center for Studies of Suicide Prevention, “proper postvention seems the most promising avenue toward reducing the large number of suicides that occur annually.” For centuries survivors had been penalized in the name of suicide prevention; now they were counseled in the name of suicide prevention.