The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  He had gotten on the elevator with us the first night, when my mother and I were heading down to dinner. “Oh, you must be new,” he’d said to her. “Do you play bridge?”

  “I used to,” she mumbled, sunk in her misery at being in that place. “But I don’t remember the rules.”

  “Nobody does,” the man said briskly, and strode off the elevator, as much as anyone can stride in a walker.

  His name was Doug. A week or two later, he invited my mother to play bridge. She was nervous beforehand, but she called me afterward to tell me it had gone well. “It was me, Doug, another man, and then this woman who always wears gaucho pants. She’s completely senile, but she’s a fantastic bridge player. She never makes a mistake. Doug calls her ‘Gaucho Girl.’”

  “He’s eighty-two,” my mother said, “but he is such a flirt. You should see him work a room. He comes into the dining room, and he flirts with the lady with multiple sclerosis, and then he flirts with the one who has Parkinson’s, and then he flirts with Gaucho Girl. It takes him forever to make it to his table.”

  “People do pair off here,” my mother said. I was down for a visit, and we were eating together in the dining room. My mother, in an undertone, was giving me a rundown on the couples sitting at the other tables.

  “Okay, at the end there, that’s Norma and Frank. They met in here. I think he may have very early Alzheimer’s. They sit together, but they never talk to each other. I think they just like the feeling of being a couple.

  “Ah. Then we have Honey Johnson,” she said.

  I looked over at the table she’d jutted her chin at, where a dazzling, gently smiling woman was sitting with a tall concave man. He was in a wheelchair and had an oxygen tank at his feet. “She’s gorgeous,” I said.

  “Can you imagine what she must have looked like at twenty? You’re never quite sure, when you talk to her, if she’s all there. But Amicangelo certainly seems to like her.”

  “Is he her husband?”

  “No, that’s Don Amicangelo. She’s with him all the time. I hear his family doesn’t approve.”

  “Oh—she’s from the other side of the tracks?” I asked, and my mother laughed.

  “Now, the next table, they did come in together, they’re married. Betty Ann and Howard. She’s got the loudest voice in the place. The other night Howard fell trying to get up from the table, and Betty Ann just stood there saying, in that voice of hers, ‘HOWARD FELL. HOWARD FELL.’ And Doug called across the dining room, ‘So pick him up, Betty Ann.’”

  “I was asking my physical therapist about sex,” my mother told me over the phone. “Can you believe it? Can you believe your seventy-nine-year-old mother wants to talk about sex?” She was giggling. “Not that I have anything going on personally at the moment, though you never know . . .”

  “What did the physical therapist say?”

  “Well, that there’s a lot of it. Sometimes they have to ring the call button afterwards, because they need help getting up off the floor.”

  I laughed at that, and she did too.

  “I think he really likes me,” she said of Doug once, over the phone. And then, in the next conversation: “No. Nothing is going to happen. We’re just friends.”

  “He’s a jerk,” my mother said. She had called me very early one morning and asked if she could tell me something upsetting, something that had kept her up all night.

  “Why?” I asked, dismayed: I’d been so happy to think of her with this sizzly little flirtation.

  “There’s this new woman here. Antoinette,” my mother spat out the name. “She’s going after Doug. And he likes it.”

  “What do you mean, going after him?” I asked.

  “She stalks him. Wherever he goes, there she is. She practically knocked me down yesterday—I’m in the walker, but she uses a cane, so she’s faster.”

  I drove down and took her out for a Sunday lunch. “It’s okay,” she said, in a lackluster way, when I asked her about Doug. “We’re friends, I guess.”

  “And what about Antoinette?”

  “Oh.” She gave a dismissive wave with her hand. “She’s not his type.”

  She ate a little more of the Moroccan chicken she’d ordered. She was happy to see me, and to be eating out in a restaurant, but she seemed lower than she had. I asked about some of the other people whose names I had come to know on my visits to her over the last few months.

  “Norma and Frank?”

  “She had to leave, because she ran out of money.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Somewhere cheaper,” my mother said. “A Medicaid place, I guess. You don’t ask, and nobody tells you.”

  “And what about Frank?”

  “They moved him to the Alzheimer’s unit.” She put down her fork. “You remember when I moved in, how it just looked like a bunch of old people? But you get to know the stories, and it’s like you’re all in the same boat together. Amicangelo is in the hospital,” she went on. “Honey dumped him out of his wheelchair.” In answer to my questioning look, she said, “It was an accident. She was taking him out for a walk, and she didn’t see the curb.”

  I asked her if the bridge group was still meeting.

  My mother toyed with her chicken. “No, that broke up. Doug insisted on playing by his own rules, which somehow always worked to his advantage. The rest of us got fed up. And then Anna Pierson died.”

  “Who’s Anna Pierson?”

  “I told you about her. She always wore—”

  “Gaucho Girl?”

  “Right,” my mother said.

  5. The possibility of contentment

  But after all, things worked out with Doug. They were in love, my mother said. “It’s physical,” she told me, and I tried to smile in a way that would applaud this and at the same time discourage further details. They sat at a table for two in the dining room. They took naps together in the afternoon. They listened to Frank Sinatra. “Can you imagine what Daddy would say if he knew I would end up liking Frank Sinatra? ‘Why are you listening to junk?’”

  She told me Doug was no-nonsense. He’d owned a small business, which had been very successful. He knew his way around. “You promise not to get mad at me?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “In some things Daddy knew his way around. He could get a taxi in the rain, he could talk to the waiter. But in some things, in some big things, he just didn’t know his way around.”

  “I’m not mad,” I said. It was the shortest, and most neutral, conversation we’d had about my father since his death.

  Her ability to walk had not improved much, and she was in a wheelchair a lot of the time. A year had gone by since the morning when she’d first been paralyzed. Nobody was saying “temporary” anymore. But she said she was happy—the first time I’d ever heard her use that word about herself. “Being in love helps,” she told me. “So does being on an antidepressant.”

  She decided to sell her condo. She was ready, she said.

  My sister and I went and spent a week there, sorting out her stuff. Some of it—a few of the “museum-quality pieces”—had already been moved to her room at the assisted living place. Some of it went out on consignment to an antiques dealer, who annoyed my mother by opining that the “museum-quality pieces” were actually good nineteenth-century reproductions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture. Some of it my sister and I divided.

  I took my father’s small collection of wooden Buddha statues. Two of them had been in our house for as long as I could remember; he’d brought them home from India when I was little. And one had been given to him on his sixtieth birthday, a year before he died, by my aunt Irene, who said she wanted him to have it because he was the most serene person she knew.

  I took my mother’s cut-glass bowls, and my grandmother’s chipped-gilt mirror, and a chair that my father used to sit in when he listened to music. The chair had come in a shipment from Germany years ago, after my father’s grandmother had died. In my child
hood it was covered in a shredded old tapestry fabric, but now it wore muted fake needlepoint; my mother had had it reupholstered when she and Ted were in their decorating phase.

  I remembered when that German shipment had arrived, a sudden city of crates in our small living room. The crates were full of things that spoke, in a way both tangible and elusive, of my father’s childhood, the foreignness hidden beneath his familiar making-pancakes-in-his-bathrobe-on-Saturday-morning self. There were silver hairbrushes, and linen towels, and miniature portraits of ladies with powdered hair, and medals that the Kaiser had given to my great-grandfather, who had been a cabinet undersecretary of some sort. There were seventy-two place settings of Limoges china, which my sister and I now divided.

  “What am I going to do with thirty-six place settings?” my sister asked, kneeling on the living room rug wrapping plates in newspaper. I remembered watching my parents unpack the china, my mother saying, with a dismay that even then I could tell masked a giddy delight at the abundance, the richness that was emerging from the crates: “What in the world will I do with seventy-two place settings?” The memory was so clear that it seemed as though it had just happened, as though time had folded to allow that moment to immediately precede this one.

  “Careful!” I could remember my mother saying, as she and my father unpacked and my sister and I threw the brown packing paper into the air. “Careful! We don’t want to lose anything.”

  Suicide: “things” folder and

  IT TOOK ME A FEW WEEKS TO GO THROUGH THE BOXES I’D brought back from my mother’s condo. I hung pictures, arranged furniture, fit my parents’ books into my shelves. I had the silver basket that my mother served the peanuts in, when I was little and they had people in for bridge; and I had my grandmother’s smoky, chipped-gilt mirror. My father’s Buddhas smiled on a table in my living room.

  Then one Saturday afternoon, kneeling on my living room floor going through a box, I pulled out a manila folder, on the tab of which my mother had printed the words PAUL—“THINGS.”

  What were “things”? I wondered, sitting down and opening the folder; but I think in some way I already knew.

  autopsy

  First there was an envelope from the chief medical examiner of Connecticut: the postmortem report on my father. Someone named Ira J. Alpert cut him up, the day after he died, beginning at 8:00 A.M. and ending at 8:30.

  “The body,” I read, “is that of a well-developed, well-nourished white male appearing the stated age of 61 years. The upper and lower extremities are symmetrical. The back is straight. The external genitalia are those of a normal male. The deceased is balding in a normal pattern of male baldness with sparse white hair. The teeth are natural. The eyes are gray. The deceased has a wedding ring on the left fourth finger. The deceased is clad in a blue and white shirt, tan sweater, brown shoes and socks, brown pants, and belt.”

  Their matter-of-factness, your vulnerability. Here are the clothes you were wearing, and here’s what your body looked like underneath them. Your back, your penis, your balding head.

  bullet

  Under EVIDENCE OF INJURY, the typed copy read: “There is an entry-type gunshot wound located on the upper right maxilla with several avulsed teeth associated with the entrance wound. Associated with the wound is a recovered bullet in the vertex slightly to the left of midline. It is a medium caliber, lead alloy bullet labeled with a ‘K.’ In addition two small fragments are recovered from the brain. The brain is markedly disrupted and hemorrhagic due to the gunshot wound.”

  Your teeth were smashed. Your brain was “disrupted.”

  drugs

  They screened your blood for cocaine, opiates, and benzodiazepines. You were clean.

  fee

  A letter from the chief medical examiner’s office, dated two weeks after you shot yourself, stating that sufficient data were not yet available to certify the cause and manner of your death.

  But then, a week later, they were ready to commit. The cause of death had been determined: “Gunshot wound of head.” The manner of your death had been classified as “Suicide.”

  Official records of these findings could be had for a fee of $6.00.

  guns

  A photocopy of a document certifying that my husband went to the police station five days after your death and, “for safety reasons,” turned in some guns and ammo—a Winchester rifle, a Marlin, two gun-cleaning kits, and five boxes of cartridges. I found them in the back of your closet.

  If I’d found them a week before, when you were still alive, they’d have seemed silly to me. “Um, Dad, what are all these rifles doing here? We haven’t shot targets in years.” And you would have reassured me that they were perfectly safe, no one even knew they were there. Or you might have looked at me coldly and said, “None of your business.” Or I might have assumed you would say that, and so if I’d happened to find the guns, I would have said nothing.

  search warrant

  There it was again, the document that was lying on top of the washing machine the day after you died, MURDER, it said on the first page.

  The second page granted the police the warrant, citing “personal knowledge based upon their experience and training that crimes of violence involve a struggle, a break-in, a use of weapons or other instrumentalities, and/or the element of unpredictability. That the person or persons participating in the commission of a violent crime is in contact with the physical surroundings in a forcible or otherwise detectable manner. That there is often an attempt to alter, destroy, remove, clean up, or cover up evidence of a crime. That traces may be left in the form of blood, semen, saliva, physiological fluids and secretions, hair, fiber, fingerprints, palm prints, footprints, shoe prints, weapons and firearms including pistols, rifles, revolvers, shotguns, hatchets, axes, cutting instruments, cutting tools, blunt force instruments, projectiles, ammunition, bullet casing and fragments, dirt, dust and soil, paint samples, glass and plastic fragments, marks of tools used to gain access to locked premises or containers and items containing traces of any of the above-mentioned articles.”

  seized property

  A receipt of items taken from the house by the police the morning you died:

  White envelope containing ledger sheets

  Colt Police Positive special .38 cal. handgun

  .38 cal. shell casing

  Four live bullets

  Gunshot residue kit

  Yellow tissue

  Yellow tissue? Did you keep the bullets, or the gun, wrapped in yellow tissue paper? Was there a crumpled sheet of it lying on your lap, or the floor, or the footstool?

  Or was “yellow tissue” a piece of your brain?

  By the time I’d gone through the whole “things” folder, I was crying. I cried for a long time.

  It had never occurred to me that the other shoe might turn out to be, after all, the original shoe, dropping again, years later, when I was awake and available to feel it.

  Suicide: thoughts on method of

  IT’S CLASSIC.

  It’s what military officers do, after they’ve disappointed themselves, or their superiors, or their men. It has a dry, noble, tragic, Prussian precision. You’re dealing with yourself coldly and fairly. The punishment for disgrace is execution.

  Your sense of honor, of impassive justice, leaves no room for mercy here. No whimpering, no pleading, no mitigation. No consultation necessary: the case is quite clear. You do what needs to be done. It’s stylishly understated, almost quiet.

  A bullet to the head.

  It’s violent.

  You imagine it deafening, red, boiling-hot. It’s like a comic book: the bright colors, the crude outlines, the words in capital letters: BANG! SMASH! CRUNCH! You think “smithereens.”

  You crave the explosion.

  It works.

  Put it in your mouth and pull the trigger. Voilà.

  None of this botched, messy, angry, pathetic waking up in the hospital. “Do you know why you’re here? You’re here because you tried
to kill yourself.” And you’re stuck with that. Your secret hanging out there, white and naked, like your ass in the not-quite-closed hospital gown. Not dead, but everyone knowing you wanted to be. A new failure for you to add to all your others.

  A decision you now have to make all over again.

  It’s irrevocable.

  Once you’ve pulled the trigger, it’s done. You can’t change your mind.

  Not like swimming out from the shore, or taking pills, or wrapping your head in a dry-cleaning bag, or sitting in the car with an exhaust hose threaded through the window, or using a knife or a razor—all those methods that allow for second thoughts: what am I doing? In the midst of killing yourself, you might begin to consider emergency rescue plans. Swimming back. Throwing up. Unwrapping the bag. Opening the car door and getting out. A tourniquet, a call to 911.

  Even jumping allows for vacillation (no rescue possible there, but all that awful time to regret it on the way down).

  With the gun lying on your tongue, the deed and the result are pretty much simultaneous.

  There’s no separation between action and oblivion.

  It’s available.

  You already own it. It’s right there on the top shelf of the closet.

  You bought it years ago, to protect your family.