One day the children’s father, angry that Rose had won temporary custody, called Mary. “What are you and your grandmother trying to do? Do you want me to kill myself, too?” he said. Mary came into the kitchen, where Rose was fixing dinner. “He’s going to kill himself,” she said. Rose, numb and exhausted, said, “So what?” Mary was matter-of-fact: “Well, then you might as well kill yourself, and I might as well kill myself.” Rose answered without thinking, “Not today—I have too much to do.”
That afternoon Mary asked Rose if they could visit the grave. When they arrived, Karen laid the roses they had brought on the grave, but Mary, frightened, refused to go near. Nevertheless, Rose was encouraged. “When she asked to go to the grave, that’s when I knew she was going to deal with things.”
A few weeks after Linda’s death the three of them began seeing a therapist, together and separately. Under his gentle questioning Mary opened up. By the second session she was describing every detail of her mother’s death to him. She discussed her recurring nightmares and fears that her mother would come back and punish her for not saving her life. The therapist helped Mary and Karen practice what to say to their classmates when they were taunted about their mother hanging herself: “Mummy went to the hospital, went into a coma, and never came out of it.” Over the following months he convinced them they were not responsible for their mother’s death, and gradually their fears began to subside.
A year after their mother’s death, the children’s nightmares stopped. Mary and Karen were still afraid to go upstairs to the bathroom alone at night, although they now did so in daylight. Mary’s anger eased. She remained reluctant to go to the cemetery, and during a visit on her mother’s birthday she kept her distance from the grave. When Mary was very young, her mother had knit her a blue sweater, which Rose kept in the hope chest. One day, Rose took it out and asked Mary if she wanted to wear it. “No,” said Mary. “Right now, I wouldn’t want to wear it, but maybe someday I will.”
V
MERRYL:
THE JIGSAW PUZZLE
IN SEPTEMBER, Merryl began keeping a chart of how she felt. The chart’s range was from “suicidal” to “bearable” to “acceptable,” and Merryl’s graph made precipitous daily zigzags. At the office she was still barely functioning. She couldn’t concentrate; she spent all her time thinking about Carl. Gripped by a new worry, a “thought whirl” or a flash of guilt, she would call her mother and talk for an hour. The people in nearby offices heard her weeping but weren’t sure what to do. “My supervisor was wonderful, but a lot of people didn’t speak to me,” she says. “I never felt ostracized, though. They just didn’t know what to say.” Neither did Merryl. “People asked me how I was, and I didn’t know. I couldn’t say ‘fine,’ and I couldn’t say ‘I want to be dead.’ I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t smile. For four months I never changed my expression. A friend told me it looked like a bomb had blown up in my face.”
Merryl still thought of suicide—or, more accurately, of death. One day in Boston she stepped heedlessly in front of an oncoming trolley car. When she boarded, the conductor shook his head and said, “Next time you do that, the insurance company will pay the fare.” Merryl looked at him. “That’s exactly what I want,” she said. She moved slowly to the back of the car. “I didn’t even know what I was doing,” remembers Merryl. “But if I’d been hit, I wouldn’t have minded.” Merryl invented a game: each day, if she could think of one reason to be alive, she would put off dying until the following day. “One morning, I found myself thinking that the autumn leaves were pretty, and I thought, ‘I would have missed that if I’d killed myself, so I’ll stay alive until tomorrow.’”
Merryl moved into a room over her friend Judith’s garage. Judith, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, had lost a close friend to suicide several years earlier and had been one of the first people to call Merryl after Carl’s death. She seemed to know just what Merryl needed. Sometimes Merryl would go into her office and talk; other times she’d huddle in a corner and cry quietly while Judith worked. Under Judith’s wing Merryl began to go out occasionally, to a lecture, a museum, or a concert. “I felt safe with her,” says Merryl. “I could face things. She was like my Seeing Eye dog.” Sometimes Merryl sat at home with Judith’s husband, an engineer, and listened to him discuss his work. “He could talk for hours about very boring subjects—the concrete used in making bridges, how to build the girders in a skyscraper—and it was just what I needed to hear.” By late October the zigzags on Merryl’s chart began to settle in the bearable/acceptable range. In November, Merryl laughed for the first time since Carl’s death.
Meanwhile, Merryl continued trying to make sense of Carl’s suicide. She started jotting down some thoughts about Carl on scraps of paper. Because she was having difficulty separating what had actually happened from what her guilt suggested had happened, she wrote down everything she could remember of those desperate final weeks. Gradually, she recorded many things: incidents she remembered, ideas about Carl’s personality, notes from her therapy sessions, raw expressions of wanting to die. Merryl sorted them into three piles: ideas about Carl’s character, feelings of guilt, and the details of her day-to-day agony. If she felt strong, she might pick a piece of paper from a pile and pore over it. She dated all her notes. Often she would realize that a question she had written in November she had already asked in October—she had been over that same angle months before, but the wound had reopened. Soon she had hundreds of scraps of paper, which she kept in a black plastic bag she carried everywhere. She and Judith called them “Carl papers.” Once, when she accidentally locked them in her car in a friend’s driveway, she slept over that night so she could hear if someone tried to break into the vehicle.
Before Carl died it had never occurred to Merryl to read anything on the subject of death. Now her bedside table, once lined with books on maternity, was crowded with books on suicide, bereavement, and widowhood. Even the most basic information fascinated her—that, for instance, four times more men kill themselves than women. She quickly devoured the entries on suicide in her father’s four encyclopedias. On weekly trips to the library she and Judith would meet at the checkout desk at closing time, Judith with eight books of poetry, Merryl clutching eight books on death. In bookstores Merryl gravitated toward the psychology and sociology sections. Working in the college division at Houghton Mifflin, she had access to a room filled with shelf after shelf of psychology textbooks. She began to stay late after work, alone in the office, looking up suicide in the index of each textbook and reading about depression, self-esteem, and personality theory. She filled another black plastic bag with copies of articles to reread. She learned about Freud and the death instinct, about anomic, egoistic, and altruistic suicide, about the wish to kill, the wish to be killed, and the wish to die, about lethality indexes, ambivalence, and the cry for help.
“I read everything about suicide I could get my hands on,” says Merryl. “I was always hoping that the next book would have the answer and was always afraid it would do me in. . . . Only rarely did it help, and some of it hurt.” Her mother had told her that hanging was a quick death, but in an encyclopedia she read that suicide by hanging usually takes eight minutes because the body does not fall from a height, as it would in an execution. Merryl couldn’t stop shivering for days, thinking of the pain Carl might have felt. In The Social Reality of Death she read that a “validating significant other” can mean the difference between life and death for a suicidal person. Merryl was devastated, suddenly certain that she must not have been a “validating significant other.” One day in August, she came across Too Young to Die, a book on adolescent suicide. She read parts of it in the bookstore and felt she was going to vomit. “It stressed the significance of external events and said that if you had recognized the clues, you could have saved the person,” says Merryl. “I was frantic. This book seemed to say that it was really my fault after all, that I could have saved Carl.” Merryl ran upstairs to her office and cal
led three friends and her therapist before she began to calm down. “Everything I had put together in two months was coming apart,” she says. She was back at square one, reminding herself that she had gotten him help, she had called a psychiatrist. Merryl gradually began to erect responses so that when a wave of guilt washed over her, she wouldn’t be defenseless. One of the things that made her feel worst was the list she had given Carl in Chicago of the twenty-five states she was willing to move to. If she hadn’t made those stipulations, she told herself, he’d still be alive—and she would buckle with self-blame. But as she went over and over it, she began to respond more rationally to her self-accusations. She made a mental list of reasons why she should not feel guilty, and when guilt struck, she would recite the list to herself like a mantra:
1. Bad things could have eventually happened to Carl there (like not getting tenure), and he might have gone into despair at that point and killed himself.
2. If we had moved there, I might have been miserable. Then, if he’d gone into despair and killed himself, I would have blamed myself even more for having complained.
3. I had a right to have some influence on where we would live. We had been in Chicago six years solely for his work.
4. Carl agreed to this plan; he could have insisted on his own plan or even moved on his own if it was that important.
5. I did become more flexible when things began going so badly in Boston and was willing to put his career first completely—but who could know that by that point it would be too late? My perspective is all off now that I know his life was at stake. At the time I made the list I thought we were negotiating with usual and normal stakes and consequences.
Even as Merryl started to cope with feelings of guilt, the sheer ache of missing Carl would flood her: the way his eyes lit up as he laughed; the determined way he walked; his boyish pleasure when he surprised her with a gift. And then there was the loss of the life they had been building together. “What hurt worst is that we were on the verge of so much,” says Merryl. “Carl was finally finishing school after eight years of graduate work, and we were thinking of buying a house. Everything was so oriented toward life; there were books all over the house about pregnancy and motherhood. And then every one of my dreams was shattered in a split second, in one phone call. And because we’d been trying to have a child, it felt almost as if there had been two deaths.” Guilt over the baby issue gnawed at Merryl. “One of the things I went over and over was, if I had gotten pregnant, would Carl have stayed alive?” Later, her mother-in-law introduced her to a woman whose husband, a graduate student, had killed himself when she was three months pregnant. Her son was now seven. While this helped Merryl realize her pregnancy wouldn’t have saved Carl, the overpowering feeling of loss remained—she wasn’t pregnant, she didn’t have a child, and now she’d never have Carl’s child, maybe never have a child at all. “I was thirty-four and it seemed as if every woman in the world my age was pregnant,” she says. “My best friend was pregnant, my two sisters-in-law were pregnant, and a half dozen other friends were pregnant. We had all been on the same track together—college, career, marriage, babies, and here I was a widow and they were all pregnant.” For a long time Merryl couldn’t bear to think of Carl’s nephew, and when she saw babies on the street, she had to look away.
Christmas with Carl had always been special. They had lit candles in the windows, decorated trees with favorite ornaments, and opened the doors on Advent calendars together every December for eight years. This year Merryl spent Christmas with her parents, who had problems of their own. Her father was recovering from a hip replacement, and her mother was suffering pain from advancing cancer. The three of them, wanting to get far away from New England, flew to New Orleans. It was Merryl’s first trip since she and Carl had vacationed in Nova Scotia ten months before his death. On the way down, Merryl welcomed each sudden altitude drop or sharp tilt of the plane—“If I were taken away,” she thought, “it would solve everything.” In the elevator delivering them to their room in an antiseptic, high-rise, downtown hotel, the bellhop said, “It’s Christmas Eve; what are you doing here?” Her father answered quietly, “We’re here because it’s Christmas Eve.”
The holiday was a nightmare. “We had an abysmal, horrible time,” says Merryl. “I told my parents it was a good thing the windows were locked because we were on the fortieth floor and I really felt like leaping.” The day after Christmas they went to the zoo. They made a pathetic trio. Merryl’s father was in a wheelchair, pushed by Merryl’s mother, who wheezed and occasionally cried out in pain. Merryl, hunched over, wrapped in a scarf, wearing glasses (since Carl’s death she hadn’t worn her contact lenses), looked as if she were in disguise. As they made their way slowly through the zoo, Merryl noticed a young couple strolling toward them, arm in arm, as chipper as a honeymoon couple in an advertisement. The man looked familiar; Merryl realized that she and Carl had known him at the University of Chicago. From the startled look in his eyes Merryl thinks he recognized her. But they passed each other without speaking. On the flight home, seated across from a young man who looked like Carl and was dandling an infant on his knee, Merryl broke into sobs so loud that people craned their necks to see what was wrong.
In January, Merryl moved back into the Brookline apartment. Nothing in it had changed since the day Carl had died. The pencils on his desk were still sharp; his wastebaskets were still filled with notes from his work; his clothes still hung in the closet; his laundry still sat in the hamper; his shoes still sat under his desk; the novel he had been reading still lay on the night table; the calendar in the bedroom was still turned to June.
Over the following months Merryl spent as little time in the apartment as possible. She left the shades drawn except to admit enough light for Carl’s plants to survive. She never went shopping, always ate takeout, never used the dishwasher, never vacuumed or dusted. She ignored the growing pile of second-class mail addressed to Carl. She never opened a closet or a dresser drawer; she kept her clothes in piles on the bed she had shared with Carl. She slept on a mattress in Carl’s study, where she built a sort of cocoon in the shadow of his desk. Next to her pillow she kept Carl’s pajamas and her nightgown from the last night they had slept together. Next to the mattress she arranged an intimate circle of belongings on the floor: her alarm clock, her journals, the Carl papers she was working on, her thirty-third-birthday card from Carl, and a pad of paper on which she kept a tally of the number of days since his death.
In many ways Merryl’s own life had stopped in June. For almost a year she didn’t watch television, see a movie, or read a “normal” book. “Part of it was that everything seemed so trivial, but a lot of it had to do with the way Carl died,” she says. “I couldn’t pick up anything that had a story in it without wondering why these people didn’t commit suicide.” She never made phone calls, although she didn’t mind getting them. Faced with groups of people, she sought out a room’s corners. “I lived a sort of marginal, weird existence. I was living out of shopping bags. If I met someone new and I was asked to explain my life, I would say that I worked at a publishing house and so on, but I really felt like screaming, ‘You don’t understand! I don’t know who’s who and what’s what, and I don’t know who I am.’”
To understand who she was, Merryl felt she had to understand Carl. Until she made some sense of his suicide, she knew she would be unable to move on. Each night after work she took out her Carl papers from the black plastic bag that was by now overflowing and spread the folded yellow pieces of paper on the dining room table, hoping that from all that raw material some answers might emerge. She would stay up late trying to fit together fragments of Carl’s life like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. “It would take me two hours to fit one little incident in,” she says. She made flow charts with arrows swirling around events in Carl’s life, trying to trace the path that had led to his death. Sometimes she went into the study or the bedroom and stood exactly where she had stood seven months ear
lier, and then she replayed aloud the words they had spoken. “I had this immense need to find out why this person would choose to die when there are so many people in the world who don’t,” says Merryl. “When a person commits suicide, all his qualities have to be reexamined in light of his death. And that’s true only of this kind of death. Someone who dies in an accident is still the same person—you don’t go back and analyze their character, wondering who they really were. All the characteristics of the person I’d lived with and loved for eight years—his gentleness, his amazing rapport with children—got thrown into the air. How did they fit in with someone taking his own life so violently? Everyone thought of that gentleness as a good thing, but now I wondered whether it was all just suppressed anger.” Sometimes when Merryl passed Carl’s portrait on the living room wall, she would stop and gaze at those eyes and wonder who this man really was.
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