I said to my mother, “Do you think there’s a chance he might have gotten some really awful diagnosis?”
“How would I know?” my mother said. “He never told me anything.”
I was taken aback at her choosing this moment to go into this particular riff. “You could call his doctor, and ask. Find out if he’d been in recently, if they’d found something wrong with him.”
“What difference does it make? He’s dead.”
My sister looked at me, and then asked my mother, “But aren’t you curious? If that bulge was a brain tumor, and if that’s why he did it, wouldn’t you want to find out?”
My sister, my husband, Ted, and I kept glancing at one another. We all thought she was being strange, obstinate, obtuse.
“You know, Lee,” Ted said, “it would make sense, wouldn’t it? Maybe he got the diagnosis and just decided the hell with it. Can’t you just hear Paul saying ‘The hell with it’? Don’t you think that’s what he would have said?”
My mother bent her head, shaking it from side to side and gripping the rim of her dinner plate as if it were a steering wheel.
“How do you know what he would have said?” my sister asked Ted.
I didn’t want there to be a fight. Especially not a scuffle in an alley that was somewhere off the main avenue where this whole brain-tumor thing was happening. But I knew why my sister was annoyed. I felt it too. I wanted to tell Ted: Stop making my father a character. We don’t need you to interpret him for us.
“How do you know?” my sister said again.
“I don’t know,” Ted said mildly. “I’m just saying, it’s not unheard of. As a reason for suicide.”
We poked around at our turkey for a few moments, passed the salt, looked at the potatoes. The scuffle was averted.
“Mom,” I said finally. “Why don’t we call his doctor after dinner?”
My mother put her elbow on the table, her forehead against her palm. “Next week. Maybe I’ll talk to the doctor next week.”
“It might be better to do it tonight,” Ted said, lightly stroking the surface of his plate with his fork. My mother closed her eyes. Ted looked at me again.
My father’s body was still at the state coroner’s office. It still existed; it hadn’t yet been released for cremation. If we had any questions about it, we needed to ask now.
“Are they supposed to call you, after the autopsy?” I asked.
My mother flinched at the word “autopsy.” “Why should they? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the cause of death here.”
“No,” I said, looking down at my hands knotted in my lap, turning over and over. “But that bulge you saw on his head—maybe tonight is the best time to follow up on that.”
“Maybe,” my mother said.
“Because there might have been a brain tumor which he knew about, and that’s why he did it. Or maybe that bulge was a brain tumor he didn’t know about, which was pressing on some nerve or behavioral center. Maybe it affected his mood, his personality even—”
“I don’t have to know tonight,” my mother said, picking up her fork again.
She looked at her plate and ate. The rest of us looked at each other. That was as far as we could go. We’d been as brutal as any of us had felt able to be. None of us had felt able to say: The coroner would have looked at the chest wound but he may not have paid any attention to the head. Tonight is probably the last chance to cut him up some more before he is burned.
We finished dinner. My mother went and sat in the living room with Ted. My sister carried some plates into the kitchen, where my husband and I were washing up. “I hate him,” she said.
“Daddy?” I asked.
My sister jerked her thumb toward the living room. “No. Him.”
I took the plates from her and started rinsing them.
“I mean, what is he doing here? Doesn’t he ever go home?”
“Apparently not,” I said, airily; and again I was aware of something that had started happening in the day since my father’s death: I was speaking in his voice.
We kept talking about Ted while we cleaned up the kitchen. We spent a lot of time on the turquoise sweater he was wearing. “Aggressively bright! Aggressively!” we kept saying. We decided he’d worn something aggressively bright on purpose, just to make clear his stance that any kind of mourning was tacky. The word “aggressively,” repeated so many times, started to seem funny. Little bits of spit flew out of our mouths, visible under the halogen ceiling lights, making us laugh. My husband watched us, with a gentle sad look on his face. He wasn’t laughing, and he did most of the kitchen cleanup.
None of us mentioned the bulge, or the doctor, or the coroner. My mother had staked out the response to the brain-tumor question, and the rest of us had lined up meekly behind her.
My husband offered to pursue it. Later that night, when we were lying together in the single bed in my mother’s study, next door to the room where my father had killed himself, my husband asked me whether I would like him to call the coroner in the morning.
I was lying stiffly in his arms. After a while I shrugged. The bulge speculation had been so dazzling, so plausible at dinnertime, but now, at midnight, it had burned itself out. I didn’t want my husband to check with medical experts, to dig for a definitive answer. I was already pretty sure what the answer would be, and I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to hold on to the very slight possibility that the brain-tumor theory might be true—that there might be a simple, rational explanation for what my father had done.
Suicide: deviation from chronological narrative of
UP UNTIL NOW, I’VE PRETTY MUCH BEEN STICKING TO A STANDARD linear way of telling the story of my father’s suicide. I’ve adhered to chronology: first this happened, then that happened.
I’m not going to be able to keep it up.
Late in the afternoon, on the day after my father’s death, my husband and I drove to the local Unitarian church to see if we could arrange to hold a memorial service there in a few days. We met with a young minister who was solicitously eager to let us use the building.
“Was your father’s death sudden?” she asked me.
I said that it had been.
“Oh, how hard for you. Was he very old?”
“Sixty-one,” I said. By this point I was bracing myself.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “That’s young. What did he die of?”
“He shot himself.” I said it fiercely, almost proudly, with childish defiance. Take that, you earnest minister, you. I wasn’t seriously worried that she might rescind the offer of the church once she knew we were going to use it to eulogize a suicide; it was more the simple playground need to find someone to punch after having been punched myself.
She winced. I could see her squaring her shoulders, preparing to wade in with some pastoral counseling. “Do you know why he did it?” she asked.
People had been asking me that all day, at my mother’s house. I had tried, obediently, to respond. Um, he was having some business problems. Um, we don’t really know yet.
In one sense, I knew exactly why my father had done it. I felt as if I were standing on a mountaintop looking down at the entire topography of his life, a landscape of hurts and failures and physical ailments and disgraces and shames and exhaustion and hopelessness that was suddenly—from this new, high vantage point that had become accessible only with his death—fully visible for the first time. I realized already, looking back at the moment yesterday morning when I had first learned of his death, that in addition to my genuine disbelief, I had also known that what I was being told was true—had known it so deeply and clearly that his suicide didn’t even seem like news. It felt like something I’d known about for a long time, which was only now being confirmed by an official source. At the same time that I’d been thinking, “Oh no!” I had also thought: “Of course.”
I knew, but I didn’t know.
I knew, but I couldn’t explain what I knew.
I knew
, but I also thought it was possible that what I knew was wrong.
When the minister asked if I knew why he’d done it, I shrugged. “I think there were a number of different reasons.”
Poor woman, she kept trying. “Do you think he might have been depressed?”
I snapped, “Gee, I guess he must have been.”
All of us—she, my husband, and I—stood there for a moment and let this piece of rudeness dissipate in the air, like cigarette smoke. It hadn’t made me feel any better to respond with sarcasm to what had seemed like a spectacularly stupid question. But I couldn’t find the energy or grace to apologize, either. She and my husband went on talking, about what time on Monday the church was available and where people could park once the lot was full. I stood there feeling a new kind of loneliness. I saw that the question that would accompany my father from now on, asked by people who had known him and by people who hadn’t, was going to be “why?” It was a naive, simplistic question. There could never be an answer—certainly not a neat answer that began with the word “because.”
“Because he was depressed”?
“Because he had business problems”?
“Because he had business problems and family problems, and was depressed”?
All of the above. None of the above.
I might figure out all the reasons and add them up, but I still wouldn’t get the answer my father had gotten when he’d done the same piece of math.
What was it about him that made him add up the reasons and come up with dying as the right answer?
Had he been adding up reasons? Was it possible to arrange rational causes in a column and arrive at an irrational result?
Was his death a rational act, or an irrational one?
Was his suicide a decision he made, or a force beyond his power to control?
Did he have a choice?
But let’s be honest here. I did not stand in the church vestry formulating all these questions while my husband and the minister discussed parking arrangements. The only question I recognized and acknowledged that day was the simple, dumb, inescapable “why” that the minister had raised. It was a question I scorned because it seemed beside the point, a question only an outsider would ask.
And yet it’s the question that has obsessed me for the past fifteen years.
The other questions—whether or not he was rational, whether he had a choice—came later. They didn’t appear suddenly, or in dramatic settings. If they had—if I’d been driving on a snowy highway one night and had narrowly missed being sideswiped by a truck, and had pulled my car over to the side of the road and sat there shaking and suddenly remembering what my father’s business partner had told me about how my father had nearly been sideswiped two days before his death, if I had sat there and thought My God, now I know exactly how he felt!—if there had been a lot of incidents like that, then I could write this as a chronological narrative. If my understanding of my father’s death had been a straightforward pilgrim’s progress, a journey from bewilderment to insight with well-marked stops along the way, then it would make sense to start at the beginning and continue to the end.
But it wasn’t like that.
The story of my father’s death—what I think led up to it, and the impact it had on my family—is a messy one. A lot of things bore down on him for years, and a lot of things changed after he died. If you take it year by year—chronologically—not much happens. It’s when you begin to look at it thing by thing that the story starts to emerge.
It’s a crooked, looping, labyrinthine story. You walk into the maze, pick a path, and follow it as far as you can, until you hit a dead end. You realize: no, that’s not it; or that was partially right, but not entirely. Or maybe you don’t hit a wall—maybe you make it all the way through to the exit, but then you start wondering if there are other paths that would have worked, too. You realize you haven’t figured out the entire maze yet, and that’s your goal. You want to know the whole of it.
So you keep going back to the beginning. Or to a beginning, anyhow. The fiendish thing about this particular maze is that there are so many different beginnings, and an infinite number of possible places to end.
Suicide: factors that may have had direct or indirect bearing on
expensive good time
MY MOTHER IS SEVENTY-NINE; MY FATHER HAS BEEN DEAD FOR fifteen years.
“Sometimes I dream about him,” she said, the last time I went to visit her.
“What kind of dreams?” I asked.
She shrugged and shook her head.
I asked her what he was like, in the dreams.
“He’s okay,” she said, after thinking for a moment. She sounded faintly surprised. “He’s young. He’s okay.”
She is in a rehab place. She woke up one morning about three weeks ago, got out of bed, and fell. Her legs were numb. At the hospital they found swelling around the spine, pressing on the nerves. They decided it was a virus, maybe a rare reaction to a flu shot. They pumped her full of steroids, antibiotics, and tranquilizers. After a week they moved her over to the rehab wing. Every day she has to dress herself, and a big pulley hauls her from her bed over to a wheelchair. “They really push you here,” she says, annoyed. She still can’t walk or stand.
“How did I get to be an old lady, alone in this terrible place?” she asked me over the phone last night.
I said, “I know, it must be really scary.” I thought, Stop trying to make me feel guilty. “But I thought you said the care there was good.”
“I don’t mean that this hospital is a terrible place,” she said. “I mean in life. How did I get to be alone in such a terrible place?”
She would sometimes call me in the morning, after he died, to tell me she’d dreamed about him the night before. “It was terrible,” she would say.
She is sitting at a table in some business place, a conference room. One of the walls is made of glass, and he is standing on the other side of the glass, in his raincoat. The other people at the table tell her: He’s a codfish salesman.
She cries out: But I don’t want to be married to a codfish salesman!
Behind the glass, he turns and begins to walk away from her.
No, come back, I didn’t mean it, it’s all right. I don’t mind if you’re a codfish salesman!
But he keeps walking away.
“Then I was awake. And I wanted to go back in and fix it?” she said, as if asking a question: did I know what she meant? “But the dream was like the glass wall. I couldn’t find a way to get back in.”
Ted Tyson started off as a customer. My mother had been working in real estate for a few years, since my father’s string of business failures had convinced her that she needed to make some money of her own and build up a bank account, separate from his. She was in her early sixties then; Ted was probably ten years younger. He came up from New York to look at houses and told my mother he didn’t want to ride in her station wagon, no fun; instead he’d drive her, in his Jeep.
She called me that night. “It was fun,” she said, a little breathless. “You’re high up, and you feel like you’re going to fall out. And you know how twisty the roads here are? Well, he was talking away the whole time—and looking at me while he talked. I’m surprised we weren’t killed.”
Ted was a handbag designer. He made leather purses, with gold interlocking “T”s for clasps. And he made little jeweled evening bags that were shaped like things: dragonflies, and teapots, and slices of watermelon. His bags showed up in W and Vogue a lot, my mother said. Actresses were sometimes photographed carrying them.
“Have you heard of him?” she asked me.
“No,” I said.
“He’s very well known. Huh. Daddy hadn’t heard of him either. I said, ‘Paul, everyone’s heard of him.’ And Daddy said, ‘Well, I haven’t. So shoot me.’”
Ted bought an old farmhouse and then asked my mother to help him decorate it. She said she didn’t know anything about decorating, and he said, “Oh, sure yo
u do. Look at your house.” She said that he must know tons of professional decorators in New York, and he rolled his eyes.
“He told me to stop being boring,” she said to me over the phone.
The next thing I remember her telling me was “Daddy really likes him.”
Ted was coming over for dinner fairly often—“He’s a bachelor, he gets tired of cooking for himself”—and after dinner he and my father would sit in the living room and talk. About history, about music.
“Ted looks up to Daddy,” my mother said. “His own father is horrible—cold and distant. And then of course Daddy knows so much. Ted is sensitive about never having finished college—he left after a year to be a model in New York. So he got one kind of education, but not the, you know, not the conventional school kind. I think he admires Daddy’s erudition.”
“I really want you to meet him,” she kept telling me, on the phone. “I think you’d really like him.”
“She said it again,” I told my husband. “How we’re going to really really like him.”
“I can’t wait,” he said.
We met him that year, at Christmas. He was there on Christmas Eve. We got there late; we’d had a long drive down from Boston, with bad traffic and fog and the baby crying a lot of the way. And for the last five or six miles, I told my mother, we’d been stuck behind a red sports car that had been going so slowly I wanted to scream.
“I hope it wasn’t you,” I said to Ted, who looked startled. I was startled too—at what I’d said, and at the tone in which it had come out.
The Suicide Index Page 6
