November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  Gradually, research on suicide widened its focus to include those left behind. A bibliography of publications on suicide dating from 1897 to 1970 lists only fifteen articles relating to survivors; during the following twenty-five years more than five hundred books and articles on survivor issues were published. In Survivors of Suicide, the first book to explore the problems of survivors, published in 1972, psychologist Albert Cain categorized a range of reactions: reality distortion, tortured object-relations, overwhelming guilt, disturbed self-concept, impotent rage, identification with the suicide, depression and self-destructiveness, search for meaning, and incomplete mourning. Recent studies, however, suggest that survivors of suicide may be more similar to survivors of certain other forms of death than previously supposed. A 2003 conference summarizing survivor research concluded that suicide survivors were no more likely to suffer psychiatric disability than those bereaved by other forms of violent death—accidents or murder. They were, however, more likely to feel guilt, to experience social discomfort, and to struggle with trying to understand why it had happened. It also concluded that more research was needed: on the efficacy of various interventions, on suicide’s impact on family functioning, and on survivors from different cultural, racial, or ethnic backgrounds, among other topics. “Historically, one of the most neglected areas of suicidology . . . has been the issue of the aftermath of suicide and suicidal behavior,” wrote Indiana University psychologist John McIntosh, in a 2003 article summarizing the state of survivor research. “. . . Our knowledge of survivors in many ways remains only a few steps beyond the level of understanding that existed 30 years ago when Cain’s seminal effort appeared.”

  In some ways, the research community is struggling to catch up with survivors themselves. Without waiting for mental health professionals to pinpoint their problems, survivors have been reaching out to each other, forming self-help groups, organizing conferences, catalyzing suicide prevention efforts, and writing articles and books about their experiences. In 1980, two hundred survivors from more than thirty states and Canada attended a National Survivors Conference in Iowa City. Today, survivors can choose from dozens of survivor seminars and panels on suicide and grief each year. Prevention centers and suicidologists now provide training to physicians, coroners, funeral directors, policemen, and the media on how to handle families after a suicide. In 1983 the LASPC was unable to persuade a celebrity survivor to speak at their twenty-fifth anniversary banquet; since then actress Mariette Hartley, whose father shot himself when she was twenty-two; actor Peter Fonda, whose mother cut her throat when he was ten; comedienne Joan Rivers, whose husband took an overdose; and singer Judy Collins, whose thirty-three-year-old son poisoned himself with carbon monoxide, have spoken out about their experiences.

  Such openness has begun to diminish the isolation that centuries of stigma have encouraged. “When my brother killed himself, I knew nothing about suicide,” says one woman. “For some reason I thought maybe this happened to three hundred people a year. I don’t know where I got that figure, but it made me feel as if I were the only person it had ever happened to.” Indeed, there are millions of survivors of suicide in this country. Even using the official figure of thirty thousand suicides annually, the ranks of survivors are swelled by some two hundred thousand a year—a figure that doesn’t include extended family, friends, and therapists, all of whom may be devastated by a suicide. (It also leaves out family and friends of those who attempt suicide, an unresearched, infrequently addressed—and often devastated—subgroup of survivors.) Like the Japanese soldiers who emerged from their jungle hideouts to find that World War II had ended decades before, some survivors are finding they no longer have to hide. One thirty-two-year-old Minneapolis woman who was four years old when her mother shot herself began only recently to speak about the suicide: “For twenty-eight years my pain was like a rock I carried wherever I went,” she says. “When I finally began to grieve, it was as if my tears dissolved that rock.”

  Over the past few decades, the shame surrounding suicide has been alleviated by the increasing awareness that depression is a disease. “To the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer,” wrote William Styron in Darkness Visible. And, by extension, the family and friends left behind by that tragic legion should be treated with the same openness and compassion extended to those whose loved ones died of cancer or were killed in a car accident. But while suicides are no longer buried beneath mountains to trap their restive souls, their survivors are still struggling under the weight of centuries of stigma. More than a hundred years after confiscation of property was abolished, many life insurance companies continue to deny benefits to families of people who complete suicide within two years after buying a policy. More than two hundred years after Jean Calas hid the noose that had squeezed the life out of his son, survivors still conceal notes, suppress evidence, and pressure coroners to rule the death an accident. Some have even submitted petitions signed by an entire neighborhood attesting to a dead man’s sterling character as proof he could not have committed suicide. More than fourteen hundred years after the Council of Braga refused burial to self-killers, suicides are still technically denied burial rites by the Roman Catholic Church; priests employ the traditional insanity loophole to justify burial in consecrated ground.

  Long after ministers ceased preaching about suicide’s “mark of ignominy,” many survivors still feel branded. “I used to drive down the street thinking I had a sign on my car that said MY SON KILLED HIMSELF,” says Iris Bolton, an Atlanta counselor who travels the country to speak on survivor issues. “Another car would pass me and I would think, ‘Now they know.’” The fact of the suicide can become an identity. “You’re no longer yourself, you’re the widow of the man who killed himself,” says a woman whose husband took a fatal overdose. Although some of the stigma may be more imagined than real, research indicates that the families of suicides are often perceived negatively by others and are offered less support. One study compared the reactions of 119 adults to two newspaper accounts: one of a child’s death by suicide and one of a child’s death by illness. The child’s parents were liked less and blamed more for the child’s death when that death was by suicide. Several years after the suicide of her sixteen-year-old son, a woman says, “Losing my son was painful enough, but the whispers, feeling like a leper, being avoided, having people not look me in the eye or acting like nothing happened, never mentioning the death, changing the subject, people being afraid it’s contagious, as if it may happen to them if they touch me or reach out to me—is almost worse.”

  Many survivors still feel they have something to hide. Twelve years after his brother’s suicide one young man stubbornly insists his brother was murdered, although he offers no suspects and no evidence. His only reason is that it can’t be. Other survivors selectively edit their revelations. “I tell everyone my husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage,” says one woman. “What I don’t say is that it was from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” It is all too easy for survivors to find people who will corroborate their sense of shame. In a memoir about the suicide of his son, journalist James Wechsler described how the police offered to suppress the circumstances of the death. “Even in the numbness of those hours we were astonished at the prevalence of the view that suicide was a dishonorable or at least disreputable matter, to be charitably covered up to protect Michael’s good name and the sensibilities of his family.”

  Even the people closest to the survivor are often eager to pretend the suicide never happened. Families may shut down; friends may keep their distance. The night after they found their nineteen-year-old son’s body hanging in their vacation house, one couple had dinner with their closest friends. They had accepted the invitation weeks before, and despite the shock of their son’s death, they decided it might be comforting to be with the people who knew them best. When they arrived at their friends’ home, their hosts said, “Hi,
how are you, how have you been?” They took their coats, poured them cocktails, served them dinner, chatted about the weather, sports, and politics, served them dessert, got their coats for them, wished them good-night, and shut the door. The entire evening had passed without a single mention of the boy’s death. The friends were afraid to bring it up; the survivors didn’t bring it up because they were waiting for their friends to bring it up. Neither couple thought of anything but the suicide.

  III

  MERRYL:

  THE TORTURE CHAMBER

  UNDERNEATH THE CAR Merryl Maleska continued to scream. Neighbors, thinking someone was being raped, called the police, and within minutes two squad cars, sirens wailing, pulled up to the house. Merryl could hear the gruff voices of the policemen as they approached the car. Assuming she was on drugs, they shouted that they would arrest her if she didn’t calm down and tell them what was wrong. When Merryl’s mother-in-law mumbled something in one policeman’s ear, they softened their approach. Five minutes later Merryl crawled out.

  Supported by her in-laws, Merryl staggered into the house. She couldn’t stop writhing. She clawed at her shirt and ripped strands of hair from her scalp. She was dimly aware that this should hurt, but she felt no pain. She howled that she was going to kill herself. The police, whose presence seemed to Merryl to turn the living room blue, said they’d have to take her to the hospital. Merryl screamed that she’d wait three months and then kill herself when no one was watching. The police said they’d lock her in the hospital anyway. Merryl stopped screaming and stared at them stonily.

  After the police left, Merryl continued to pace, numbly pulling and scratching at herself. She felt unable to move or speak in customary ways; she hunched over, squatted in corners, and twisted her limbs; she felt her body had been turned inside out. “The world was completely wrong now,” she remembers. “How could I stand up and talk and be normal?” When Carl’s brother and sister-in-law arrived, Merryl’s sadness and anger focused on them. “I hated the sight of them instantly. I didn’t want to see them. I had loved Laurie, but now I resented her. She represented everything I didn’t have—the baby, the doctorate, the home, the husband.” When they touched her, Merryl turned away. She knew she was being unfair, but she couldn’t help it. Sometime after midnight they left, and Merryl was alone with Carl’s parents.

  Carl’s parents were, like Carl, quiet, contained, and responsible. They sat on either side of Merryl on the couch and the three of them held one another, swaying and moaning, sometimes just sighing, lulling. Occasionally her in-laws moved about the room as if in a slow-motion dream. Once, Merryl saw them hug and heard her father-in-law murmur, “Our firstborn.” She was flooded with the sudden understanding that Carl was their son as well as her husband. For the first time they were realizing that their son had been deeply depressed. They gently asked Merryl questions about Carl. He had kept so many of his painful feelings from them; until that night they had never known he’d been in therapy. At one point Carl’s father turned to Merryl and asked, “When was he last happy?” Merryl couldn’t respond; the question made her unbearably sad, and she didn’t know the answer.

  From time to time one of Carl’s parents would lie down in the bedroom, but no one slept that night. The sun rose shortly after four. It was June 21, the first day of summer, the longest day of the year. To Merryl the world outside her window seemed strangely garish: “I’ll never forget that dawn. The painful light. Monday morning. People getting into their cars, starting their engines, going to their normal lives.”

  The moment she dropped the phone, Merryl had known in her bones that Carl had killed himself. Later, Carl’s father, who had retrieved the dangling receiver and finished talking to the man at the morgue, told Merryl that yes, it was suicide. Now it bothered Merryl that she didn’t know more. That afternoon in the living room where Carl’s and Merryl’s families gathered, she wanted to know exactly how Carl had died. Her father-in-law got upset; why did she have to know every detail? Merryl’s anger flared. “I knew everything about the way Carl lived,” she said. “And I have to know everything about the way he died.” Her father-in-law walked to the window and stared out. “He hanged himself,” he said quietly.

  Wanting to “protect” her, people tried to keep the facts of Carl’s death from Merryl, but over the next few days she pieced the story together. Carl had driven to the Greyhound station and taken a bus to New York City. He’d gone to the YMCA, probably looking for a room with exposed pipes, but when he found none, he walked down Thirty-fourth Street and checked into a seedy single-room-occupancy hotel near Pennsylvania Station. Sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning Carl hanged himself from the steam pipe in his sparsely furnished room. The chambermaid found him Sunday morning at ten-thirty, at almost the same moment his nephew Carl had been christened in Cambridge, 220 miles away. When the police arrived at the hotel, they found pieces of paper with the telephone numbers of Manhattan gun stores.

  Three months earlier Merryl had noticed an article in Redbook on mourning called “Would You Be Prepared?” She had skipped over it. She’d always avoided anything to do with dying. She was terrified of cemeteries. Now she was the eye of a storm of activity focused on death. Funeral arrangements were made, ministers consulted, relatives notified, and through it all Merryl was treated like an invalid by the two families who had last gathered together to celebrate Merryl and Carl’s wedding. It was decided that Merryl would be moved to her parents’ house on Cape Cod, where she and Carl had spent that first glorious weekend together twelve years before. Merryl’s best friend helped her pack. Her three-year-old son had drowned two years earlier, and she seemed to know how to soothe Merryl. But inside, Merryl was frantic. How would Carl’s body arrive? When would she see him? What would he be wearing? That night Merryl and her mother slept on the mattress in Carl’s study. They had never been physically close, and Merryl was moved and comforted by their silent intimacy.

  On Tuesday morning Merryl was driven to her parents’ house. That same day Carl’s body was shipped from New York City. The following afternoon Merryl visited the funeral home with her mother and two aunts. They stood in the waiting room while final preparations were made. When she heard the case being cranked to tilt the casket into viewing position, Merryl fell to the floor, sobbing. Her mother and her aunts knelt to help her to her feet. Then the door opened and a middle-aged man with a kindly but formal expression beckoned and said, “This way, please.” On a platform at the far end of the next room lay a glistening red metal coffin. Merryl kept telling herself it held some stranger’s body, that it couldn’t be Carl, but as soon as she saw the wavy brown hair, she knew it was Carl. Her mother and her aunts left, and suddenly she was alone with him.

  She studied his face. “I made myself aware of every tiny cell and inch of his body that was visible.” There was a spot of dried blood behind his ear that Merryl assumed must have been left from the autopsy. There were red marks on his hands as if they’d been clenched. She touched his forehead. His skin was as cold as marble. She noticed the small scar near his right eye where a mole had been removed two years earlier. “He was incredibly well preserved, intact and normal-looking. But he seemed different. His jaw was set, and it gave him a determined, angry expression. His eyebrows looked just the same. I had always loved his eyebrows. They were blond and soft and thick, and they looked exactly the way they’d looked when he was alive. And that made me so sad. I was overwhelmed with the terrible feeling that a week ago this person had been so filled with living, and now there were just the eyebrows. As I looked at him I could remember exactly what he was saying the week before at that exact time. I would go over and over the events of the week and be astonished and horrified that it had come out this way, that it ended in this permanent fixture in this coffin.”

  Merryl spent two hours with Carl that afternoon and four hours the next. Sitting on a chair by his coffin, she told him all the things she hadn’t had a chance to say. She reminded him of moment
s in their married life. She told him what was happening now, about all the pain she was feeling. They’d been together almost every day for eight years, and so much of what she felt only Carl could understand. Sometimes she was angry at him, but gently. “Why did you have to do it? Didn’t you remember us?” she asked. “Why, Carl, why?”

  At the funeral Carl lay in a closed casket a few feet from where Merryl sat. Merryl had been very involved in organizing the service: discussing what should be said, deciding where Carl should be buried, talking to the minister about the eulogy. She even changed a few lines in a poem her father had written for Carl and planned to read. She wanted to be part of anything that concerned Carl. But Merryl remembered little of the service: A flautist played something she recalled only as haunting; the minister’s words were a blur. She sobbed hysterically through most of the ceremony. From the back of the church the cries of Carl’s two-week-old nephew seemed to pierce through her own cries into her heart and made her cry even harder. When Merryl stood at the end of the service, her legs shook uncontrollably. A friend, driving away from the church, told her husband that she doubted Merryl was going to make it. Back at her parents’ house, while mourners quietly sipped coffee and ate cold cuts, Merryl lay in bed. A psychiatrist friend of Carl’s spoke to her gently, expressing his concern and saying he’d had no idea anything was amiss with Carl. During the entire hour he talked to her, Merryl held pillows over her head.