The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  “In her dresser.”

  “Was it in a satin case?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can’t let her see this. This is the nightgown she wore on her wedding night. She’s saved it all these years; she showed it to me once.”

  “Oh, God,” he said.

  The three of us looked at each other, and the horror on their faces made me, suddenly, want to laugh.

  I crumpled up the nightgown and stuffed it into the pocket of my husband’s jacket. “Just tell her you couldn’t find a nightgown.”

  “I’ll lend her something,” said Ted. “A shirt, or something.”

  I said to my husband, “Listen, the plan is for us to drive up to your parents’. We’ll come back tomorrow morning.”

  “All right,” he said, and his face mirrored my own relief.

  In the car, driving along the dark roads, my husband asked if I had told my mother about the bank loan.

  I shook my head in the darkness. “I’ll tell her tomorrow. Or the next day.” Then I asked, “Was there any blood?”

  I looked sideways at him. His face was still and tight, his eyes on the road. “A little,” he said. “Not much.”

  “But you—”

  “I got it.”

  “Did you turn on the lights and check really carefully? Because—”

  “I got it all.”

  “Where was it?”

  He glanced at me, then back to the road. “On the baseboard. A little on the closet door.”

  “And the police were gone, when you got there?”

  He hesitated. “No, they were still there.”

  “My father? Was my father—”

  “No, they’d taken him away. There was just a van, I guess it was a crime-scene van, still in the driveway.”

  “Did you go inside it?”

  “Yes, for a minute.”

  “What were they doing in there?”

  “Drinking coffee, filling out reports.” His voice grew softer. “It was sort of cozy. Like a little ship.”

  We didn’t talk, then, for several minutes. I thought of the police, in their little lighted ship in front of the dark, empty house.

  “Kurt wasn’t there, was he?” I asked suddenly.

  “No,” my husband said, surprised.

  We were on the highway now, driving fast, passing other cars. I tried not to think of my father lying in the back of some police conveyance, traveling over these same roads to wherever they were taking him. I tried to think of Katherine and Neil waiting up, in their big calm house, with my son sleeping upstairs. I looked out the window and ahead of us I saw a white Toyota Camry, exactly like my father’s car, in the left-hand lane, just enough ahead of us so that I couldn’t see the driver.

  “Can you go a little faster?” I said to my husband. He glanced sideways at me, and then we went a little faster. But the white car was speeding up, too, as if it sensed that we were chasing it. I watched it pulling farther and farther away. And I saw that no matter how fast we went, the white car would always go faster. We would never catch up to it; I would never know who was inside.

  Suicide: anger about

  I COULDN’T SUMMON ANY UP. NOT FOR THE LONGEST TIME afterward. Not at him, anyway.

  Suicide: attitude toward

  his

  MY FATHER DISAPPROVED OF SUICIDE.

  It’s odd, considering how much I don’t know and will never know about him, that I should know this. I know because he talked about it.

  When I was about twelve or thirteen, a friend of my grandmother’s died with his wife in a suicide pact. He had been a Danish ambassador, and that’s how my parents referred to him, when I heard their somber voices one evening and asked what was wrong.

  Often when I tried to find out what was going on in our house, my parents would tell me it was none of my business. But this time my father sighed, and answered me. “You know the Danish ambassador?”

  I didn’t. I’d never even seen him. I knew vaguely that my grandmother had such a friend, but I’d never known his name, or where he lived, or whether he was a Dane who’d been an ambassador to this country or an American assigned to Denmark. But I nodded.

  “Well, he was very sick,” my father told me. “He knew he was going to die soon, and he and his wife had agreed that neither of them wanted to live without the other. So they killed themselves, in their apartment.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “They—” my mother began; but my father frowned.

  “Never mind how,” he said. “The point is that what they did was wrong.”

  I didn’t understand why. If he’d been dying anyway, and if they’d both agreed that the idea of one of them dying while the other survived was not only unbearable but unnecessary since they could simply choose to die together, then what was so wrong about it? I didn’t ask. I was still stinging from his “Never mind how,” the implication that my asking “how” was either tasteless or irrelevant, or both.

  He went on to say that suicide was always wrong, because you were cutting off the possibility that things might improve. “People assume they know what the future is going to be like,” he said, “but those assumptions can be wrong. I’ve known people who’ve been sick and been told they were dying, but they got better. Either the sickness went away, or the doctor made a mistake in the diagnosis.

  “You can’t throw away your life, no matter how hard it gets,” he said, “because it’s all you have.”

  I was in college, home for a weekend, when my parents told me that Ricky Shellenberger had killed himself.

  The Shellenbergers had been friends of my parents, with two kids about the same age as my sister and I. It was one of those friendships that is actually based on the compatibility of two people—in this case, my mother and Karen Shellenberger—but that insists on the compatibility of two entire families. Look, we’re parallel! Look how well we fit together! Only we weren’t, and we didn’t, quite.

  We were always going over to the Shellenbergers’ house. While the grownups sat in the living room or out on the patio talking—my mother and Karen in animated, laughing voices, on and on; my father and Sherm Shellenberger quieter, more reticent—my sister and I were upstairs with Rachel and Ricky Shellenberger, uneasy and awkward. “What would you like to do?” they would ask, and we’d say we didn’t know. They were polite, deferential, kind. Their rooms were neat and organized, and attested to the worthiness of their pursuits: Rachel’s violin case and music stand; Ricky’s stamp albums and terrarium.

  It wasn’t as if there were no playthings. There were board games, neatly stacked on shelves. There were baseball gloves, jump ropes, a badminton set which was still kept in its original packaging, taken out and then put away again each time it was used, net neatly furled and tucked into its original indentation, shuttlecocks lined up in their individual slots. We had similar toys and games at home, but ours were always in disarray—stray backgammon tiles in the checkers box; a joker in the card pack redesignated in ink as the two of clubs; a suspicion that there weren’t really enough “U”s left to properly serve the “Q” in the Scrabble box, though no one ever sat down to actually count them.

  Rachel and Ricky, with their respectfully maintained toys and their careful manners, were simply too good. My sister and I always felt that our mother was saying, “Why can’t you be more like Rachel and Ricky?” (“Did I tell you Rachel Shellenberger got a scholarship to take lessons at the Hartford Conservatory? If you practiced more, I bet you could get one too.”)

  But though Rachel and Ricky’s goodness certainly appealed to the grownups, it wasn’t just decorative. It was real. Once we were invited to the Shellenbergers’ house on a Friday night. We all stood around the table, and Sherm Shellenberger suddenly began half saying, half singing some words in Hebrew. He went on and on and on. It was formal and fervent. I’d never heard anything like it: my mother’s family was Jewish, but no one ever celebrated anything. The unfamiliarity of it made me nervous, and I started to l
augh. I tried to stop, which only made it worse. My parents glared at me; Karen and Rachel ignored me; Sherm kept on going. But Ricky, standing across the table, gave me a long mild look, vastly kind and a little amused, that seemed at once to understand the reason for the laughter, to sympathize with my embarrassed inability to stop it, and to forgive me for it.

  When my mother told me that Ricky had killed himself, alone in his college dorm room, I remembered that look he’d given me, the detached generosity of it.

  “He must have been very sick,” she was saying. “Because what he did was—he had a knife, and basically what he did was to commit hara-kiri.”

  “It’s a terrible thing,” my father said.

  “The perfect family,” my mother said, shaking her head.

  I was trying to imagine how anyone could disembowel himself. I was remembering Ricky’s calm brown eyes looking at me across that dinner table.

  “Didn’t you always think they were the perfect family?” my mother asked. “What went wrong, do you think?” She kept talking; she kept using the word “perfect,” as if perfection, the thing that had blessed and elevated the Shellenbergers, was the thing that had now undone them, or the thing they were being punished for.

  “Well, I guess there is no such thing as the perfect family,” she concluded. Her voice was hard and brisk; she sounded almost relieved. “Right?” she asked.

  My father and I looked back at her.

  I didn’t say anything. I was just dazed, by the violence and loneliness and mystery of Ricky’s death. I didn’t want to analyze it with my mother, or guess about it, or make emotional observations.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” my father said again. His face was impassive, blank. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

  That was all he said. It wasn’t like with the Danish ambassador, whom he’d disapproved of for committing suicide. He didn’t seem to be blaming Ricky. It was the suicide itself—not the person who had done it, but the act, the fact that it had happened—that was terrible.

  A year or two later, my grandmother was taken to the hospital, in a coma. She was found lying unconscious on the floor of her apartment by some of her students, on the morning when she was to go into the hospital to have her foot amputated, something she’d been fighting against for months.

  My grandmother lived for another six weeks, never regaining consciousness. While she was in the hospital, my mother told me that there was a rumor (originating where? With my grandmother’s students? With my mother herself, whose habit of emotional speculation could be reckless and often uncannily accurate?) that my grandmother had made a botched suicide attempt. That she’d taken pills, but not enough to kill her.

  I asked my father what he thought. His mouth tightened. “Absolutely not,” he said, coldly. “Mother would find the idea of suicide absolutely unacceptable.”

  No discussion. No gray areas; no equivocating. No entertaining, however uneasy, of the possibility that life might, under certain circumstances, become unbearable; and no metaphysical questioning about what the person who found it unbearable was or was not morally entitled to do.

  So what happened?

  Did he change his mind at the end, discarding his long-held principles when he finally discovered, for himself, what it was like to hit the wall of a hopeless and terminal misery, when his own life became unbearable?

  Or maybe he needed to make clear pronouncements against it because he was secretly, helplessly, attracted. Maybe he was like one of those Victorian clergymen who preached against vice and then went out after dark into gaslit London, in search of a streetwalker.

  And although I certainly heard him use the words “wrong” and “terrible” and “unacceptable” in connection with suicide, I also heard him speak of it quite differently.

  “My grandfather killed himself,” he told me once, apropos of nothing. We were sitting together in the living room, listening to music. It was a Sunday morning; I was grown up and married, visiting my parents for the weekend. It was years before he died. This wasn’t foreshadowing; it was just conversation.

  “Really?” I said.

  “He was getting to be an old man, and he decided he didn’t like being an old man and he was going to like it even less as it went along. So he went upstairs, ran a bath, and cut his—”

  I don’t remember anymore what he cut: his wrists or his throat. My father told me this a long time ago. What I do remember is the tone of my father’s voice: matter-of-fact, almost approving. Putting oneself out of the way like this, he implied, using a razor in the clean privacy of one’s bath, had a kind of self-reliant, nineteenth-century honor and dignity about it. A choice was made and was acted on, without dithering or discussion. This act was not one of cowardice or abnegation; it was an adult, fully cognizant assumption of responsibility, the rational culmination of a well-lived life now beginning to decline.

  So here we are, in the kind of paradoxical muddle that seems to be the destination of much of what I write about my father. I thought he disapproved of suicide, but now I’m not sure if that was true; and even if it was true, I’m not sure what it tells me about his death. I’ll never know whether, for him, suicide was a long-considered, maybe even long-resisted, possibility or a sudden brainstorm. I’ll never know what he would have said if I had been able to ask him, a day or an hour or a minute before he died, whether he thought suicide was wrong.

  “Always”?

  “Sometimes”?

  “It depends”?

  “Yes, but I’m going to do it anyway”?

  This is what I do know, or what I believe. When someone dies this way, you’re left with unanswerable questions, unresolvable paradoxes. You have to become a posthumous mind reader. You have to look at the things you know, those small, possibly unreliable and often contradictory scraps of memory, and come up with your own version of the truth.

  Here’s mine. My father disapproved of suicide, except for the times when he thought it admirable. And except for the one time when he found it necessary.

  Suicide: attitude toward

  mine

  IT WAS SOMETHING TERRIBLE AND ROMANTIC THAT POETS DID. It was extreme. It was sad beyond imagining. It was out there, somewhere—I knew it existed, I knew that people did it—but it was remote. It had nothing to do with us.

  Suicide: belief that change of scene might unlock emotion concerning

  IMAGINE A WOMAN, ASLEEP, WITH HER HUSBAND SLEEPING NEXT to her. The quilts are pulled up around their shoulders. It’s very early, still dark, a cold February morning. The phone rings.

  Her husband passes her the receiver. She learns that her father has shot himself.

  Here’s what she feels in the first minutes.

  Nothing.

  They pack a bag and drive to Connecticut, where it happened. They go through the day. Time moves slowly, but still it is moving, carrying her in unnoticed, unwilled increments away from her father. Carrying not just her, but also her mother and her sister and her son and her husband, everyone who knew him. They are all moving forward, away from the place where he stopped.

  That night, she and her husband drive to his mother’s house. For a moment, as they come up the dark driveway, the sight of her mother-in-law, silhouetted in the open doorway, fills her with something that is almost a feeling. Not quite comfort, but the anticipation of what comfort might feel like: an imagined yielding, the luxury of collapsing against something detached and solid. She likes her mother-in-law. But it’s also that this house is neutral, out of the path of destruction. A different place. Things will feel different here.

  But nothing is different. Her mother-in-law is kind. She has some cigarettes in the drawer of her desk. They sit on the couch in the enormous kitchen and smoke them. Brandy is brought. Questions are asked. How did he do it? Did anyone know he was thinking about it? Why do you think he did it?

  She smokes, drinks, answers.

  The house isn’t neutral. The relationships are complicated. Her father and her hus
band’s stepfather were in a business deal together. Money got lost. Her father felt ashamed and guilty.

  Did you know he had a gun? her husband’s stepfather asks her, bending to refill her brandy glass.

  I knew he had a rifle a long time ago, but not a handgun, she answers. Her voice is gentle, numb. No point in blaming her husband’s stepfather; it wasn’t his fault.

  Later, when they are upstairs undressing for bed, her husband puts his arms around her. She just stands there. She says: It’s like he busted through the guardrail. It’s like there was a sign that said DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT, and he went beyond that point.

  Her husband is unbuttoning her sweater. You’re so tired, he says. Come to bed. I’ll hold you.

  You loved him, she says to her husband. Didn’t you?

  Yes, her husband says.

  They go into the bathroom, brush their teeth, spit together into the sink.

  Their son, who is three, is sleeping in the room next to theirs. They stand looking down at him. He is lying in his portable crib, holding his stuffed white bear. His head is turned to the side, his lips flared out like a flower.

  She almost whispers: Will he remember my father, do you think?

  But doesn’t say it. She and her husband both know he won’t remember.

  All day long, she’s been dully curious about the next thing. What will it feel like to see my mother? she thought in the car driving down to Connecticut.

  Then, after she saw her mother: How will it feel when it gets dark?

  Driving to her mother-in-law’s house: Will it be different when we get there?