Three times a week Merryl and her therapist talked about Carl. Her therapist helped Merryl realize that the qualities she loved in Carl had not been an illusion. “While there were times Carl should have spoken out, times when he was self-effacing and suffering from a lack of confidence, he had a very gentle, sincere, and responsible way of being,” says Merryl. “And if he could have worked through it, if he could have lived, all those good qualities would still be there.” Slowly, a picture of Carl began to take shape, of a thoughtful, caring, but troubled man whose high standards had led to great successes—and to great pain when he believed he had fallen short of his ideals.
Merryl’s therapist told her about something she called the “all-or-nothing” phenomenon. She explained that certain people, for various developmental reasons, see things as all-or-nothing situations. When they are flooded by negative feelings, any hopeful feelings are often completely forgotten. The person is swept by a black feeling of total hopelessness that may put him at risk for suicide. “As soon as she started talking about that, it clicked,” says Merryl. “That’s the way Carl was, with his projects, with his job search, and with his dissertation. That perfectionism came even in little things, like baking bread. If it didn’t come out exactly right, he was deeply upset.” That all-or-nothing quality was also evident in Carl’s diary, which Merryl read after his death. In Paris, two nights before he was to fly home from his junior year abroad, Carl had written of the turmoil he felt at the thought of trying to reintegrate himself, with his growing political activism, into the campus he had left as an honors premed student. His life seemed to be changing faster than he could control. As he wandered through the streets of Paris that night, he thought of throwing himself into the Seine. He labeled that journal entry “I want to die.”
Although the entry made her inexpressibly sad, it gave Merryl a small measure of understanding, even comfort, to know that Carl’s thoughts of death had existed before she’d met him. “I’ve gone over all this with my therapist, and we feel that something snapped about ten days before he died when he became convinced that there was a fatal flaw in his dissertation,” says Merryl. “And that if the dissertation was lost, he was, too. I think that ten days before his death—on some unconscious level—he’d made his decision to kill himself.” Gradually, Merryl was able to separate her actions from Carl’s. “In the last weeks of his life he was on a separate track. Although I wanted to believe that I could have some control over that, I really don’t think I existed for him during that time. In a way that’s a relief; understanding that helped ease my feelings of guilt and responsibility. But it’s hard to come to terms with the idea that not only are you not responsible but that you probably didn’t even matter to the other person at that point.”
With the help of her therapist and her friend Judith, Merryl worked out a metaphor that helped put those last weeks into perspective. “It was as if Carl was underwater, and his friends and family and I were on the surface, calling down to him. Occasionally, he would come up and communicate with us. But what was going on for him inside was the part of the water we never see: the undertow, a powerful force churning away down there that we couldn’t touch. Suddenly, at the end, that undertow swept him away. It just literally overcame him.”
Merryl became increasingly immersed in her exploration; at one point she planned to write an in-depth study of Carl’s life. But in early February something nudged her from her obsession and eventually helped her to understand that she had come further in her grieving than she had realized. On the subway one day she bumped into an old acquaintance. The man, also an editor, had always liked Merryl, and after this chance encounter he asked her out. They began seeing each other. At times their dates were eerie when comparisons to Carl flew to her mind: driving together in his car, Merryl would look over and be astonished that the man next to her wasn’t Carl; walking the dogs, he would be dragged out the door the way Carl had been; when they kissed, she was surprised not to have to lift her head—Carl had been much taller. Merryl was frightened to be feeling something for someone other than Carl but was pleased to realize that she could feel at all. It was the first time since his death that she had thought for more than sixty minutes about something other than his suicide. Merryl began to take better care of herself: she had her hair cut and curled, she wore her contact lenses again, she ate more, and she went shopping. She had lost so much weight that none of her clothes fit, although she hadn’t cared until now. As the relationship grew, all the things that had been ripped from Merryl by Carl’s suicide seemed possible once more.
Two months after they met, the man left Merryl for a younger woman. Merryl was devastated, but the obsession of the larger grief had been relieved somewhat by the smaller, newer one. By the time the relationship was over, Merryl no longer kept a running tally of the number of days since Carl’s death.
From what she had read, Merryl knew that the first anniversary of Carl’s death might be difficult, so she made elaborate preparations. After an impromptu ceremony at the grave with her parents and Carl’s family, she drove to Eastham, a small town on Cape Cod, where she spent the night in a hotel. The next morning, exactly one year after Carl’s death, she went to the beach with the contents of the suitcase Carl had taken to New York, which had been lying in her parents’ basement, unopened, until this week. Now, sitting on the shore among the sunbathers, she spread these things on the sand in front of her: his watch, wallet, and wedding ring. She sang several of her favorite songs. She listened to the waves. She felt she had come a long way since the sight of the sea had meant only one thing: a way for her to die. She felt proud that she had gotten through the year.
In August, fourteen months after Carl’s death, Merryl met a new employee at work whom she liked immediately. Ten days after they met, he asked her out. Merryl accepted. On their first date Merryl told him about Carl. “I knew this man was probably going to mean something to me so I wanted it out on the table,” she says. “He had to know how much it affected me. I was nervous about telling him, but he was very understanding. We talked a lot about the guilt I felt and the loneliness.” Nathan was sympathetic; he had lived a quiet, solitary life in western Massachusetts and knew what it was like to be lonely. Later on during that first date, he asked Merryl what she’d been reading lately. “Other than books about suicide,” said Merryl, “nothing.” It took a few minutes for the conversation to recover.
Merryl was more cautious this time. “I kept saying to myself, ‘I don’t want to get involved yet—I’m not ready for this, I’m still too vulnerable.’” But she had grown stronger in therapy, and the more she saw of Nathan, the more she was drawn to him. Like Carl he was sensitive, introspective, and well-spoken. Like Merryl he was fascinated by writing and language. He was a computer buff, a sports nut, and an amateur historian. When he took Merryl to visit Old Ironsides, the American frigate from the War of 1812, Nathan was such a knowledgeable, enthusiastic guide that half a dozen tourists abandoned the official tour to follow him. One night Merryl and Nathan went to a showing of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. As they kissed and hugged playfully in the dark theater, Merryl had a sudden sense of unreality. “Could I be enjoying life again?” she wondered. “Could this really be me?”
One day in October, about two months after they had met, they spent the day at the beach. At the end of the afternoon Nathan went ahead to get Merryl’s car. As Merryl walked toward the car and saw a man’s silhouette in the driver’s seat, she had a moment of confusion. “I looked through the window, saw that silhouette, and thought, ‘It’s unbelievable seeing someone else drive the car that Carl and I bought together two years ago.’ I had thought no one else would ever sit in that driver’s seat. It was eerie. When I got in the car, I shook my head, almost to clear it. Then I looked over, and there was Nathan. I was happy to see him, and I touched his hair gingerly but affectionately.” One night, so they wouldn’t hear about it secondhand, Merryl called Carl’s parents and told them she had met a man sh
e was serious about.
In May, Merryl and Nathan decided to move in together. Merryl spent evenings and weekends in July packing up the Brookline apartment. Everything Carl owned was still untouched. Before she started, Merryl took photographs of the apartment, to record the way it had looked when she and Carl had lived there. And then she began to dismantle the scene of their life together, room by room. She started with the living room, which held the fewest memories. Next, she packed up the dining room, then the kitchen, then the bedroom. The bedroom wasn’t too bad: Carl had kept his clothes in a closet in the study. After prolonged internal debate, every item wound up in one of three piles—one to go to the new apartment, one to be given to Goodwill, and one to be thrown away.
She saved the study until last. Almost everything Carl owned was in this room, undisturbed since the day he had died. From her reading she knew all about how bereaved people build shrines to the dead and get “stuck” in grief, but her therapist had agreed it would not be inappropriate for her to keep a box of Carl’s clothes. Now Merryl sat on the floor holding up shirts and sweaters she knew so well, trying to decide which to keep, which she would never see again. She saved a green-and-blue-striped Indian bathrobe she had made him for Christmas four years before, one that he’d often studied in; she saved a soft, green velour shirt that reminded her of their Chicago years; she saved a baggy, white mohair sweater she had knitted him during their first year together. When she had stuffed one large carton full and marked it “Carl’s clothes,” she realized she’d chosen something from each phase of their life together.
It was almost midnight by the time she turned to the old wooden desk where Carl had spent so much of his last eight years. Next to the desk stood the research for his unfinished dissertation—eighteen index card files, enough to catalog a small-town library, crammed with white cards carefully hand-printed with quotations from psychology books, alphabetized and cross-referenced to other cards and to the hundreds of books on Carl’s shelves. Merryl sat on a packing crate and stared at the scene of Carl’s failure, unable to face it, wishing she hadn’t left it to the end. It was midnight, and the movers were due at eight. Then, carefully, as if handling precious, dangerous specimens, she transferred the contents of Carl’s desk and files whole into boxes, without stopping to sort through them. The desk drawers took six boxes; the files filled eight. By three in the morning, when Merryl looked up, their home had been broken down to a skyline of stacked boxes. At four o’clock, exhausted, she drove to her new home in Cambridge.
Four hours later the movers arrived, and by that evening eight years of Merryl and Carl’s shared life had been scattered to various destinations. A truckload went to Cambridge. Three carloads of clothes and shoes went to Goodwill, so much that it wouldn’t fit into the hopper at the shopping mall. The elderly attendant refused to accept the overflow until Merryl, desperate, told him that her husband had recently died. His annoyance disappeared. “He must have been so young,” he said sadly, and waved her ahead. Their bed went to Merryl’s brother, Carl’s desk to her brother’s girlfriend. The puppets Carl made for his dissertation research—the elephant, the pilot, the truck two feet long—went into a corner of her father’s house at the Cape. Clothes too old for Goodwill, battered suitcases, dead plants, and a seven-foot stack of second-class mail addressed to Carl that had never been thrown out filled thirty green trash bags that lined the sidewalk in front of the Brookline apartment like a lumpy plastic hedge. The Department of Public Works arranged a special pickup because there was so much to haul away. When Merryl drove by the house the next morning, it was gone.
VI
A SAFE PLACE
“I’M MERRYL MALESKA. My husband committed suicide a year and a half ago.”
“I’m Peter Courtney. Our daughter Lisa committed suicide six years ago just before Christmas.”
“I’m Liz, Peter’s wife.”
“I’m Eileen Dowcett. My husband and I lost our son Philip five years ago.”
“I’m Rona Marks, and my only daughter committed suicide three months ago.”
“I’m Joyce Oldham, and my husband committed suicide thirteen months ago.”
“I’m Bailey Barron, and our daughter committed suicide four years ago.”
“I’m Stanley Barron.”
“I’m Jean Clark. My husband committed suicide three years ago last January.”
“I’m Tom Rossi, and my brother Rick committed suicide eight years ago.”
On a winter evening nineteen months after Carl’s death, Merryl Maleska and ten other people were seated in a semicircle in a small room in a three-story redbrick building in Somerville, Massachusetts. They were members of Safe Place, a support group for survivors of suicide. Group “facilitator” Tom Welch, a young Roman Catholic priest, began the meeting with his customary introduction: “Each of us comes to this circle with a private urgency, even agony and sorrow. Perhaps others we love are carrying their own burdens and aren’t always available to comfort us. Let us use this time to create an opportunity for each to share, giving room for silence if that is appropriate, understanding that each has strengths to cope with his or her life, yet all are enriched by compassionate and understanding hearts.”
Welch looked around the semicircle at each member of the group. “I wonder if someone might begin by sharing a concern they are presently dealing with.”
There was a pause, then Bailey Barron, a middle-aged woman with short blond hair, began, “Fredi committed suicide four years ago . . . today,” she said slowly, looking at her hands. “I didn’t realize it before we came tonight. It was a Monday, a rainy Monday. . . . It brings back a lot of things. You go through the whole procedure again. Holidays are rough, anniversaries are rough.” She shrugged. “Every day is rough.”
Welch said gently, “Has anyone else recently experienced an anniversary?”
Peter Courtney, a compact, muscular man in a flannel shirt, nodded. “We’re coming very close. Lisa was on a Monday. It was snowing, cold and snowing. I was out on the boat, working, and when I came home, I found out. It’s coming right back again now. A couple of weeks.”
Joyce Oldham, a prim middle-aged woman in matching blue skirt and jacket, smiled politely. Her earrings trembled. “Just a month ago it was a year for me that my husband killed himself, and I was very depressed.” She gave an anxious, apologetic laugh and looked to either side for support. “Does it get any better after the years go by?” She scanned the room nervously.
“Not better,” said Bailey softly, staring at the floor. “Different.”
Merryl Maleska was fortunate in having parents, relatives, friends, and a therapist who were unusually sensitive to her needs. Because the subject of suicide makes many people uncomfortable, survivors often have difficulty finding support. A survivor’s need to analyze the suicide may seem unquenchable, and even the most sympathetic friend may eventually find it difficult to listen. But the need to talk may continue long after friends and family have had enough. Some survivors feel that even their closest friends cannot truly understand unless they have themselves lost someone to suicide. It was this need that drew Merryl to Safe Place.
More than one thousand survivors of suicide, ranging in age from twelve to eighty, and coming from as far away as Maine and Vermont, have attended meetings of Safe Place since it started in 1978. Some have lost parents, some husbands, some wives, some children, some grandchildren, some friends. One woman first came to the group a few days after her son had killed himself; another woman first came to the group thirty years after her father had killed himself. Safe Place meets twice a month. People may attend as many or as few meetings as they like. Some come once, find it overwhelmingly painful, and never return; others attend every meeting for years. Most come for a year or so, then gradually stop, perhaps returning for meetings around birthdays, holidays, or the anniversary of the death, when wounds tend to reopen.
When they first hear about Safe Place from a friend or a counselor, survivors are ofte
n resistant to the idea, perhaps because of some stiff-upper-lipism, perhaps because they stigmatize others as they themselves have been stigmatized—something must be wrong with the people in the group because, after all, someone in their family committed suicide. “When a friend told me about Safe Place, I said no thank you, my husband and I weren’t up to it,” remembers Arlene Feltz, whose son had hanged himself a few months earlier. “But deep down we felt we didn’t belong to this kind of group. I don’t know what kind of people we thought they would be—derelicts or something.” She laughs. “Somehow I just felt they would look different.” When the pain didn’t let up, Arlene and her husband decided to try Safe Place. Sitting in a group of twelve people, Arlene, who had always been terrified of speaking in public, was anxious and mute. As the meeting started, there was a pause, and suddenly Arlene was shocked to hear herself talking about her son. “I don’t even remember what I said, but that meeting was the biggest uplift since his death.”
For many survivors, attending their first Safe Place meeting is like happening upon an oasis. “It was literally my salvation,” says a woman who came to the group two months after her husband shot himself. “It was the first time I felt that life might go on.” It may be the first time new members have met anyone else who has lost someone to suicide. It may even be the first time they have ever said the word suicide out loud. Merely being in the same room with other survivors can be tremendously painful—and tremendously liberating. Tom Rossi, a young priest, came to his first meeting three years after his younger brother’s suicide, still dogged by feelings of guilt and low self-esteem. “I looked around at the other people and thought, ‘It happened to them, and they look like nice, normal people, so maybe I’m not such a horrible person, maybe I could be a nice person, too.’”
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