As she built a new home, another shared life, Merryl was occasionally swept by waves of fear. “The more I begin trusting someone again, the more afraid I am that I will lose everything again,” she told me. “Whenever Nathan is late coming home from a trip, I get worried. If he says he’ll call at eight, I’m petrified by nine. I’m just waiting for the worst, for someone to call and say, ‘There’s been a problem.’ We were at the beach not long ago. At the end of the afternoon when we got back to the car, I realized I’d lost an earring. Nathan went back to look for it. It was a long way back to where we’d been sitting, and it was getting dark. He was gone a long time. I got scared that he would disappear into thin air. It was totally irrational; I knew that, and he came back, of course, but I was terrified. When you’ve had things taken away from you, you are constantly reminded of how fragile life is.”
Merryl was forcefully reminded of that when her mother died of cancer a year and a half after Carl’s death. Although not unexpected, it was a shock. Merryl’s father was overcome with grief, and Merryl made most of the funeral arrangements—with the same home that had handled Carl’s death. “The funeral director couldn’t believe I was back and that I was functioning,” she said. “The last time he’d seen me I was prostrate on the floor.” Her mother was buried next to Carl. “It’s one of the most important pieces of land in the world to me,” she said. “Before Carl died I was afraid of the word death, and since then it seems as if I’ve lived in cemeteries.” She chuckled wryly. “Now sometimes I feel more at home there.”
For a year and a half Merryl had done little else but think about Carl’s life and death. “My relationship with Carl spanned thirteen years—almost my entire adult life up to that point—and his suicide just blew my life open when I was on the verge of so many things,” she said. “I thought that Carl’s suicide would define my life for a long, long time, but it’s no longer primarily how I define myself. It’s a major part of my life, but it’s no longer the one thing I’m waiting to tell someone. There are lots of pure moments free of Carl—laughing with Nathan or at work. And that’s a long way from the night I heard he died when I didn’t think I’d be able to live.”
In therapy Merryl was still piecing things together about Carl, but gradually she and her therapist focused more on Merryl. For so long her life had seemed bound to Carl’s life and his death. “My grief for Carl heightened a lot of the things I need to deal with in myself. I’m trying to come to terms with being a separate person and having a sense of my own self-worth. That’s been a big part of separating myself from Carl and going on with life without him. I started feeling I was worth living for, whether or not I had Carl or any other man.” Though she kept the black plastic bag of Carl papers in her top desk drawer, she rarely looked at them. After not missing a meeting of Safe Place for more than a year, Merryl began attending only rarely. When she did, she was looked up to as a sort of role model, as someone who had come through. Sometimes she saw someone who had come to Safe Place for the first time, “looking like a waif,” and she shivered, remembering her own first meeting.
Merryl still thought of Carl every day. And though she no longer went out of her way to talk about him, she didn’t go out of her way not to. “If somebody asks me where I got my car, I can say, ‘Oh, Carl and I bought it,’” she said. “I don’t unravel anymore. Or if I do start to unravel, I can put myself back together.” When Nathan and Merryl were invited to the christening of Nathan’s niece, Merryl was terrified she’d be undone by echoes of the christening party for Carl’s nephew, the party that never took place. She was cautious but comfortable. She even held the baby. She got back in touch with Carl’s brother and sister-in-law, who sent her a snapshot of Carl’s nephew. “To me he looks a lot like Carl, which is a little eerie,” she said. “But it didn’t overwhelm me.” One day she came across the pink bathrobe she had worn during her first months of mourning, and she touched the knots her nervous fingers had made of its stray threads. On weekends at her father’s house on the Cape, Nathan liked to work in the study, Merryl’s former “torture chamber.” Merryl sometimes stood in the doorway and watched him. Though the studio couch was folded up, the clock with its insistent red digits still sat on its shelf. “And for a moment that hollow feeling at the pit of my stomach comes back. But then it’s just a room again.” She paused, then added, “But it’ll never be just a room.”
When Merryl visited New York for the first time since Carl’s death, she decided to walk past the hotel where Carl had died, which she had seen so many times in her imagination. As she stood on the sidewalk and looked at the small, ugly, gray building, she was flooded with sadness. Dirty curtains billowed out of open windows. A painted advertisement was peeling on the side of the hotel. “It was no place for a man of Carl’s magnitude to die,” said Merryl. “But painful as it was, I felt better having seen it. I felt I’d faced down a demon that had been haunting me.”
Most of Carl’s things that Merryl had saved from the Brookline apartment lay in a corner of the basement. The suitcase Carl had taken to New York. The box marked “Carl’s clothes.” The portrait Merryl had given him for his thirty-second birthday. The inscribed glass biology prize Carl had won as a sophomore at Tufts, his fraternity “paddle,” his master’s diploma. Ten eight-foot-tall card files with thousands of neatly lettered file cards. One dozen boxes marked “Carl’s files,” containing his dissertation. “I will part from these things eventually,” said Merryl. “There will come a time in my life when I’m not going to cart around Carl’s work, but that time hasn’t come yet.” Upstairs, in the right-hand drawer of her desk where she kept the Carl papers, Merryl kept an envelope with a lock of Carl’s hair she had saved. One day, she opened it and held the brown curl in her hand. “I saw some gray in it, which I’d seen before, but it made me wonder—would his hair have been gray by now? What would he be like? He was only thirty-three—he had so many stages of his life to go through. He was a man who was still unfolding. What would he have been like when he was old?
“Carl will always be a part of me,” said Merryl, whose face still lit up when she talked about him. “I’ll probably never know anyone else with his intensity and perception. He was so gentle, yet he had a way of cutting through things.” She looked away. “I get a tremendous gripping feeling sometimes—at Christmas when I’m writing to his parents or when I’m looking at pictures of him. Suddenly, it will come back—that sense of what a good, rich, deep person he was. I think of the immense waste. It comes over me in an almost nauseating way. The loss of him not just from my world but from the whole world.”
VIII
A PLACE FOR WHAT WE LOSE
“WE FIND A PLACE for what we lose,” wrote Sigmund Freud to Ludwig Binswanger after the death of his friend’s son. “Although we know that after such a loss the acute stage of mourning will subside, we also know that we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else.”
Some say survivors never recover from a suicide. “Life is back to normal, but normal is different now,” says a man whose son hanged himself. “Normal will never be the normal it was before a year ago.” A man whose teenage daughter killed herself two years ago says it helps him to think of his grief as a physical handicap: “Some people can’t see, some people can’t walk, and I can’t seem to enjoy life,” he says matter-of-factly. As Tom Welch told me, “We never really essentially get over anything. We resolve it in such a way that we can go on.”
Certainly, the sheer weight of the pain eases with time. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert describes a young widower’s passage from suicidal depression to something approaching normalcy:
Ah well, slowly but surely, one day chasing another, spring on top of winter, autumn on top of summer, it leaked away, drop by drop, little by little; it left, it went away—it sank down, I should say, because there’s always something stays, at the bottom, so to speak . . . a
weight there, on the chest! But it’s the same for all of us, we mustn’t let ourselves go, and want to die just because others are dead.
During this slow healing, signs of recovery may seem minute. One mother visits her son’s grave three times a week instead of daily; another dreams of her son once a week instead of every night. “For a year and a half my daughter was the first thing I thought of when I opened my eyes in the morning,” says one woman. She smiles faintly. “Now I can make coffee before it hits me.” Yet this gradual increase of pain-free moments may be fraught with its own dangers—the pangs of “recovery guilt” many survivors feel for not thinking about the suicide twenty-four hours a day. “It’s like if I go on with my life, I must be an awful person,” says Tom Rossi. “There’s that tug that if things start to go well, then maybe I should punish myself, because what kind of person am I if I can be happy and he’s dead?”
Even when the tide of everyday experience takes the edge off the pain, wounds are often reopened. The anniversary of the death may be particularly difficult; merely being asked how many children one has can be devastating. “Sometimes I say, ‘I had three but I lost one,’” says a woman whose nineteen-year-old son hanged himself. “Sometimes I say two, but then I feel dishonest, as if I’m denying him.” A year after their son killed himself, one couple was desolate when they received his license renewal application in the mail. Another couple, months after their son’s suicide, received a Christmas card from his therapist, who had forgotten to remove the boy’s name from his computer mailing list. The spring following the suicide of her daughter, a woman burst into tears when she saw purple tulips blooming in her yard; she had forgotten her daughter had planted them. “My hands are just like my mom’s,” says another woman. “Every time I look at them for the rest of my life I’m going to think of her suicide.”
Three years after their daughter’s suicide, Liz and Peter Courtney built a one-room addition to their house. As the contractors tore down the walls, Liz grew increasingly anxious. Some days she exploded at them for their seeming inefficiency; at other times she felt helpless, unable to answer their simplest question. She would come downstairs in the middle of the night, pacing off dimensions, fretting about what furniture would go where, calculating how the addition could be made less expensive, wondering whether the project was a mistake. One day Peter was horrified to find her beating her head on the banister. “I can’t stand it,” she moaned. “I want to give up. I want to die.”
In retrospect, Liz, who went back to Lisa’s therapists for help, believes she had a nervous breakdown. “I couldn’t stand any more destruction,” she says. “Lisa had hurt herself so badly, and I felt this house was being hurt, too.” At the same time her despair helped her understand how her daughter must have felt. “I never wanted to take my life, but I sure wanted to get out of that pain. And I thought, now I know what feeling awful feels like. Really awful. Really, really awful.”
Six months later the addition was completed. “All of a sudden everything lightened,” says Liz. “It was the climax; it just came out, and then the worst was over. I look back on it as being Lisa. It was the final hell. And I’ve felt so much better ever since.”
Many grief counselors believe that healing after a suicide can begin only when the survivor realizes that the question why will never be answered. In a survey by Betsy Ross, the founder of an Iowa City support group called Ray of Hope, more than two hundred survivors were asked whether their explanation for the suicide had changed since the death. Over 70 percent said it had not, but they insisted that their relentless questioning was necessary regardless of the results. “I had to search for a reason even though I think I already knew I wouldn’t find one,” said one survivor. “He had to do it,” said another. “I knew that then, and I know that now. I just don’t know why. I may never know why, but I couldn’t accept that at first and I can now.” Observes Tom Welch, “The search for the reason why is part of what people need to do, but finally they understand that no answer is ever enough. Healing and a sense of self-worth come only when one draws away from feeling responsible for the death. When people learn a way to let go, to give permission for what’s already happened to them, only then will they be able to move on.”
After a suicide, a person’s entire life is often seen through his final act, as if it discredits all the good things that came before. “The suicide totally changed the way I viewed our relationship,” says a young woman a year after her husband hanged himself. “I really felt we were a model couple, and that’s almost embarrassing now. I would like to be able to say to people, ‘My husband and I had a great relationship,’ but I feel too humiliated to do that.” As Tom Rossi told me, “I remember my brother as a happy person—he taught me more about life than anybody. Yet when I tell people about him, about all the good things, I have to have him commit suicide at the end. It’s so odd. I have to create him and then destroy him.” A more accurate balance is restored only as the survivor works back through the bad memories and the good memories begin to resurface. “It may be a picture or a movie or a piece of music,” says the widow of a man who shot himself four years ago, “but now those things remind me of the good times, not the bad.” The widow of a man who jumped from an eleven-story building wrote, “I want Dick’s death not to be bigger than his life.”
Any death shakes our faith in our own world and in the order of the world around us. But suicide in particular forces survivors to question their most basic assumptions, a process in which they may ultimately learn some important things about the person they have lost and about themselves. “I thought I knew my husband,” says a middle-aged lawyer. “I was so confident that I understood him and that I understood the world.” She shakes her head. “My husband gave me the gift of my beginning to realize how powerless we are, how little we control, and how we have to accept that.”
Some survivors speak of positive changes that emerge after a suicide, of families drawn closer together, of becoming more sensitive, loving, attentive, and compassionate. Some speak of the painful lesson of realizing that we can never truly know someone else, that in some way each of us is ultimately alone, and that life is a mystery. Some describe finding inner resources they did not know they had. “The pain I feel is offset by the knowledge that the very worst thing in life has happened to me, and I have survived,” says one man. “Maybe we’re never quite the same people we were before,” says a woman whose son shot himself. “But maybe that’s not all bad. Maybe we wouldn’t want to be that person.” In the years since her son’s death she has led a survivor group, returned to graduate school, and started to write. “I’ve become a kinder human being. I listen more closely to people. I try to use the positive approach.” Her voice slows with each item on the list. “I’m aware of the good things, but I’d give them up in a minute if I could have him back.”
IX
MERRYL AND CARL
FOUR YEARS AFTER CARL’S DEATH Merryl decided she was ready to sort through the eight cardboard boxes she had packed so hurriedly that final night in her Brookline apartment. And so every weekend for three months she sat in her study, door closed, sifting through the details of her past. Some of it she discarded, some she put aside to send to Carl’s parents, and some she placed inside the steamer trunk she had bought to hold the memories she chose to save.
In one box Merryl found evidence of her first year of grieving: dozens of sympathy cards; stubs from bills she had paid; the program from a play she had attended with her friend Judith; a diary she had bought and never written in; comforting letters from her mother. Other boxes held the fragments of the last few months of Merryl’s shared life with Carl: dried flowers they had saved from Carl’s sister’s wedding; ticket stubs from Merryl’s business trip to Chicago four weeks before Carl’s death; notes for a speech Merryl had given that Carl had attended; a baby picture of Carl grinning and splashing as his mother bathed him in the sink; a baby picture of Merryl that had faced Carl’s on her bulletin board; a photo
graph of Carl’s Swedish cousins that his mother had sent him a week before his death; pictures of Merryl and Carl at a family reunion; a card saying “Happy Sailing” that Merryl had been on the verge of mailing to Carl’s recently remarried uncle; Merryl’s work schedule for the months of June and July; Merryl’s clipboard with a long list of things “To Do”; stray notes and clippings for his dissertation that Carl had thrown away in those last weeks; invitations for the christening party for Carl’s nephew; tickets for a play they planned to see in July; the novel Merryl was reading at the time of Carl’s death.
Then Merryl came across a thin, white folder. She winced, knowing what was inside—Carl’s picture from the pigbook. When Carl’s mother had learned how much Merryl loved that photograph, she had had an enlargement made. Merryl had kept it in her desk in the Brookline apartment, and as she worked, she occasionally took it out and looked at it. Now, as she held the folder in her hands, she shivered: “I knew I was going to look right into those eyes again.” When she opened it, she felt blinded for a moment. There was Carl at age seventeen, looking exactly as he had looked twenty years ago when Merryl had first found his picture and vowed to marry him. “When I looked into those eyes, I remembered Carl in the early way, how I worshiped him. And that shock of attraction and wonder all came back.” She gazed into Carl’s eyes and thought, “How innocent, how soft, how full of hope, that faraway look, your eyes looking into me. I see in that look all the looks I was to come to know in you; you were a person coming to be. . . . How much did you know then? You cared so much about life, you wanted so much from it—why did it go awry for you? Those eyebrows, so full . . . oh, how you hurt me. And how I loved you.”
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