A family’s denial may take physical form. After a suicide some families build a “shrine” to the deceased, leaving the room exactly as it was, the bed unmade, the schoolbooks on the desk. When one couple bought a new house three months after the suicide of their sixteen-year-old son, the mother insisted on setting aside a bedroom for her dead child. Two years after his son shot himself, one man keeps his son’s half-empty cereal boxes in the kitchen cupboard; in winter he sometimes checks his son’s bedroom “to see if it’s warm enough.” Others try to erase all traces of the dead one from the house, throwing out all his possessions, “sanitizing” his room as if he had never been there. In his poem “The Portrait,” Stanley Kunitz, whose father swallowed carbolic acid a few weeks before he was born, described such denial:
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
At some point almost everyone who has lost someone to suicide wrestles with suicidal thoughts of his own. To the survivor there is no statistic more chilling than the research that shows survivors to be at eight times higher risk for suicide than the general population. At survivor support groups one of the most frequent questions is, “Is suicide inherited?”
As we have seen, there is no convincing evidence that suicide, per se, is genetically transmitted; there are other reasons why survivors have an unusually high suicide rate. First, while people are not born with genes for suicide, some are born with a genetic susceptibility to depression or other psychiatric conditions associated with heightened suicide risk. Second, after a death of any kind the risk of suicide increases. Widows and widowers, for instance, during the first year of bereavement have a risk of suicide two and a half times as high as married people in their age group. Third, once a suicide occurs in a family, it introduces itself as an option. “Before, we didn’t live in a world where people killed themselves,” says a man whose brother shot himself. “Intellectually, we did, but we didn’t believe it really happened. Now, we live in that world where it does happen so we’re more apt to think of that possibility.” Suicidal thoughts may be prompted by an identification with the deceased, a yearning to join the lost loved one, or a desire to atone for feelings of guilt. Those thoughts, however fleeting, may make a survivor even more bewildered and frightened. “When my brother shot himself, I thought the world had gone crazy,” says one young woman. “I felt a little crazy myself. In our family I was always ‘the wild one’ and my brother was ‘the quiet one.’ That terrified me because I thought, “He did it, and he seemed so much more together than me.’” She shakes her head. “I thought of suicide a lot. I was scared to death, but I wouldn’t talk to anybody about it. I knew suicide wasn’t hereditary, but I was afraid that one day I’d run off and shoot myself just like my brother.”
Experts believe that suicide is more likely to occur in surviving families where the first suicide is not talked about and the guilt and anger are allowed to fester. If not dealt with openly, the influence of a suicide may be felt further down the line. Suicide can be a learned reaction to stress, a coping technique that, once used in a family, can act as a sort of role model. Adults tend to repeat the type of violence—or the type of love—they experienced as children. Just as children physically abused by their parents tend to become abusive parents themselves, suicide by a parent may beget suicidal behavior in children. The poet John Berryman never forgave his father for killing himself when the younger Berryman was eleven. “I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave / who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn,” he wrote in “Dream Song 384.” In 1972, forty-six years after his father’s death, Berryman jumped to his death from a Minneapolis bridge. “In a modesty of death I join my father,” he had written in one of his later poems. In 1961, thirty-three years after his father had shot himself, Ernest Hemingway shot himself at age sixty-one. Eleven years later his younger brother Leicester, who had been the one to find their father’s body, shot himself, too. One year after her father’s suicide a thirteen-year-old Illinois girl fatally stabbed herself, leaving a note: “I am drawn toward death like a bee toward honey, like Juliet toward Romeo, like a baby girl toward her Dada.” Long after his suicide attempt, A. Alvarez realized that he had been introduced to the option of suicide in childhood:
I see now that I had been incubating this death far longer than I recognized at the time. When I was a child, both my parents had half-heartedly put their heads in the gas oven. Or so they claimed. It seemed to me then a rather splendid gesture, though shrouded in mystery, a little area of veiled intensity, revealed only by hints and unexplained, swiftly suppressed outbursts. It was something hidden, attractive and not for the children, like sex. But it was also something that undoubtedly did happen to grownups. However hysterical or comic the behavior involved—and to a child it seemed more ludicrous than tragic to place your head in the greasy gas oven, like the Sunday roast joint—suicide was a fact, a subject that couldn’t be denied; it was something, however awful, that people did. When my own time came, I did not have to discover it for myself.
For some survivors the sense of identification with the suicide can become so strong that their own suicide seems almost inevitable, a destiny to fulfill; they don’t choose suicide, suicide chooses them. That sense of identification was brought home to me when, at a suicide prevention conference, I met Jean, a chipper, frizzy-haired, middle-aged Michigan woman who works with disturbed adolescents. When I asked what brought her to the conference, she answered brightly, “I come from a suicidogenic family.” Seeing my questioning look, she explained, “My family produces suicides. It generates suicides. It passes them on.”
Jean was thirty-one when her brother killed himself. Three years later her mother killed herself, leaving a note blaming her daughter. Jean’s father was an alcoholic; her grandfather, who was overweight and had heart problems but refused to follow his prescribed medical regimen, “probably killed himself—after all, you don’t have to put your neck in a noose to commit suicide.” After her mother’s death, Jean herself was twice hospitalized for suicide attempts. “Although I didn’t want to die, I felt that killing myself was the right thing to do because my mother had done it. I felt it was my fate.” After many years in therapy, Jean no longer believes that her suicide is inevitable, but she is convinced that it is part of her legacy. “It’s not hereditary, but it’s contagious,” she says matter-of-factly.
While admiring Jean’s frankness, I found her ready acceptance of her “suicidogenic” heritage unsettling and the word itself a bit frightening. The concept of “contagious” suicide may be the only way she can deal with her family’s tragedies, but I wonder how thin the line may be between believing in that fate and embracing it.
On the other hand, for some survivors, a suicide can serve a preventive role. They are steered away from suicidal thoughts by their firsthand knowledge of the pain their death would inflict on others. “Before my brother killed himself, I’d considered suicide myself,” says a young musician who was twenty-five years old when his older brother shot himself. “I used to think my suicide would say to the world that life in the modern world is too much to bear. But my brother’s death made me see how futile suicide is. It makes no statement, it just gives people grief. And now when I get depressed
and thoughts of death come up, they don’t continue long because I think, ‘How could I put my family through a second suicide?’ “
While a suicide loss is painful whether the survivor is a parent, child, or spouse, the nature of the loss may have a different quality for each. A parent may feel more guilt, a spouse, more anger. A sibling often feels confusion about his role in the family. Grandparent, friend, teacher, therapist—each role brings its own special pain. But the effect on children may be the most destructive of all. Studies show that the loss of a parent in early childhood plays a key role in subsequent psychological development; if that loss is by suicide, it can be devastating. “For children,” concluded the National Academy of Sciences report on grief, “the suicide of a parent or sibling not only presents immediate difficulties, but is thought by many observers to result in life-long vulnerability to mental health problems.”
After a suicide children feel many of the same emotions as adults: denial, anger, confusion, and fear. Guilt can be intense. “Kids are apt to take the blame for any death,” says Sandra Fox, former director of the Family Support Center at the Judge Baker Children’s Center in Boston, which provides counseling for children and families coping with loss. “They feel they might have been responsible for it because of something they thought or wished or said or did or didn’t do. And unconsciously, kids can very much wish their parents dead: ‘Daddy, why don’t you go play in traffic and die so I can carry off Mummy to a castle and marry her.’ Now, if Daddy happens to die, the child thinks it’s his fault.” Children may have had hostile feelings toward the parent; they may have misbehaved immediately before the suicide; they may feel they might have prevented it—if only they hadn’t quarreled with their brother, if only they had stayed home instead of going out to play. They may feel guilt because they didn’t know whom to call after finding the body or didn’t open the windows of a gas-filled room. Or they may feel guilt at merely being alive when their parent is dead. In his work with survivors of the Hiroshima bombings, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton described the “survivor guilt” felt by those who were not killed. The suicide of a parent, Lifton believes, may produce similar pangs in a child.
Children are even more apt to be left alone with their grief than adults. Intending to shield them from pain, well-meaning parents rarely level with their children about death. The subject is either avoided or explained in euphemisms, leaving children’s imaginations to fill in the blanks. A study of thirty-six children who had lost a parent to suicide found that half of them were never told the truth; some learned the real story only when they overheard adults talking about it or read the obituary in the newspapers. In a study of forty-five children between the ages of four and fourteen who had lost a parent to suicide, therapists Albert Cain and Irene Fast found that more than a quarter knew intimate details about the death yet were told it was from natural causes. One girl saw her father’s body hanging in the closet; her mother insisted that he had died in a car wreck. A boy who had seen his father blow himself to pieces with a shotgun was told that he died of a heart attack. Two brothers who found their mother with her wrists slit were told she had drowned while swimming. When the children contradicted their elders, they were made to feel ashamed for making such statements and told they had merely had bad dreams or had confused reality with a television program.
Such lack of honesty following a suicide can be calamitous to a child. Cain and Fast found that distorted communication contributed to a broad range of symptoms: delinquency, running away, psychosomatic disorders, obesity, neurosis, and an incidence of psychosis three times that in other childhood bereavement cases. In addition, because the children had received the message that they should not know or talk about the suicide, they often felt conflict about knowing and talking in general, with resultant stammers, stutters, shyness, and learning disabilities. Other research has described the effect of unresolved grief in later life. Psychiatrist T. L. Dorpat, in a study of seventeen patients he began treating an average of sixteen years after a parent’s suicide, found that unresolved grief had left a malignant residue: guilt, depression, arrested development, self-destructive behavior, and preoccupation with suicide.
The suicide of a parent need not be crippling if discussed openly and honestly. “What’s mentionable is manageable,” says Sandra Fox, who believes that early intervention with bereaved children can help avoid later problems. Fox encourages parents to explain clearly and directly what happened and why, giving honest information (appropriate to age) about the cause, helping children understand that the dead person is not coming back and that the child’s sadness and anger are normal. Fox is often asked at what age a child should be told about a parent’s suicide. As soon as they can talk? “Before they can talk,” says Fox. “I don’t mean you tell a two-year-old, ‘Your daddy hung himself in the basement.’ You start by explaining that Daddy died, and dying means we’re not going to see him anymore the way we knew him here on earth. His body has stopped working. Then, as kids are ready and ask ‘How did he die?’ or ‘Why did he die?’ you add the fact that it was a suicide. Children feel guilt after any death, and it’s important to tell the child, ‘You may think there’s something you said or did that made your dad kill himself, but I want you to understand that’s not what happened. Your dad killed himself because he had problems that he couldn’t find any way to deal with.’” Fox pauses. “You have to deal with it immediately, although you certainly will have to rework it later, too, as kids understand more. But don’t wait.”
The devastating effect of a parent’s suicide on a child—and the kind of communication that may best relieve it—may be seen in the story of Mary and Karen Vitelli. At noon on an exceptionally hot day in early fall, Mary and Karen were sitting with their mother, Linda, at the kitchen table in their apartment in a Boston suburb. Karen was five years old, Mary ten. A shy, intelligent girl who enjoyed helping out around the house, Mary had heated up SpaghettiOs for lunch. Their mother was sewing a patch on a pair of Mary’s pants so they would be ready in time for the new school year that began the following Monday. Mary would be entering fourth grade; Karen would be starting kindergarten. As Mary and Karen teased each other over lunch, their mother suddenly stopped sewing, threw the pants onto the table, hugged her daughters, and went upstairs.
After lunch, Karen asked Mary to give her a shampoo. Mary said they had better ask their mother. They went upstairs and knocked on one of the two doors to her bedroom. There was no answer. That was strange—their mother never took naps during the day. They tried to open the door, but it was locked. They went to the other door, and by throwing all their weight against it, they were able to squeeze into the room. A couch had been pushed against the door. “Where’s Mummy?” Mary said. Karen pointed to the other door and said, “Why are her feet hanging there?”
Their mother, her belt around her neck, her flip-flops still clinging to her feet, was hanging from the hinge on the door. “Why did you do this?” Mary screamed at her mother. “You promised you’d never leave us. Why did you do this?” She tried to lift her mother down, but she couldn’t. Her shoulder ached for weeks. She ran to the telephone, looked up the number of the body shop where her mother’s boyfriend, Chris, worked, and called him. “Come home,” she said. “My mother’s dead.”
In fact, Linda was not quite dead. When Chris arrived, he gave her CPR while Mary called the ambulance. At the hospital Linda went into a coma. The children stayed with their grandmother Rose, and the three of them wept together. A few days later the doctors told Rose there was no chance that Linda would live, and it was agreed she would be taken off life-support equipment. When Rose told the children, Mary was furious. “You can’t do that,” she shouted. “You lied. Everybody lied. You said she was going to get better.”
Although some of the family thought it would be needlessly traumatic, Mary and Karen insisted on seeing their mother’s body, and the following day Rose took them to the hospital. Linda’s body lay on a bed. The life-suppor
t systems had been disconnected. A psychiatric nurse was there to answer the children’s questions. “Why did you make my mommy die?” Mary screamed. The nurse gently explained what had happened, but Mary continued to sob hysterically. Later, the nurse asked them whether they would like the clothes their mother had worn that day. “No, no, no, no,” Mary whispered to her grandmother. “Don’t take them.” Rose asked the nurse, who was crying by now, to burn them.
Karen and Mary moved in with their grandmother, a compact, brisk, pragmatic woman who worked as a hairdresser. Divorced when Linda was five, Rose had raised three children on her own. She had been close to Linda, her only daughter, who had married at sixteen and endured nine years of her husband’s drinking and verbal abuse before getting a divorce. In the past year Linda had found a new boyfriend and a new career, but the pressures of starting over at twenty-seven had apparently overwhelmed her. Though Rose was crushed by her daughter’s suicide, her own grief was put on hold as she cared for her daughter’s children. Karen seemed to be handling it well, but Mary was torn between her anger at and her love for her mother. Although she agreed to attend the wake, she refused to go to the funeral or to the cemetery, and when Rose tried to tell Mary how beautiful the service had been, she wouldn’t listen. She asked Chris whether he would get a new girlfriend and he said yes, someday. “Well, never bring her here,” Mary said. In fact, he never did get another girlfriend; a year later he shot himself near Linda’s grave.
Over the following months Mary experienced the classic responses of stigma, fear, anger, and guilt. Three days after the funeral the new school year began, and Mary went back to school wearing the new clothes her mother had bought her. When she came home, she told Rose, “Some of the kids are coming up to me and saying, ‘Your mother hung herself.’ I want to go to a different school.” Rose told her to hold her head high and deny it. Both Karen and Mary refused to go upstairs without their grandmother, and for several months the three of them slept in the same room, where they could comfort each other when one of them woke from a nightmare in tears. Mary was filled with anger. She didn’t want anything around that her mother had given her. She refused to say anything nice about her mother, and if Rose mentioned Linda, Mary frowned. One day Rose overheard the children arguing. “I don’t know why she did it,” Karen was saying. “Because we were fighting,” said Mary. Rose rushed in. “No,” she said, “that’s not it at all.” She explained that their mother’s death had nothing to do with them, that their mother had been troubled for reasons of her own. But Mary felt guilty for not saving her mother. “I tried to get her down, Grandma,” she’d say, “but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.” Rose attempted to reassure her: “You’re only ten—I couldn’t have done it either. You did wonderfully to call Chris.” Mary was unconvinced. She had recurring nightmares in which her mother came back to punish her for not saving her life.
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