Sharing Suicide Experience

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Uncle Howard came through the door at my grandparents’ home, water dripping from his dark green topcoat. It was pouring rain and he’d just run through the downpour to get inside. I couldn’t clearly see his face, because just then he swept the soaked Fedora from his head and swung it to get the water off. I was four at the time, and this is the only memory I have of my uncle, if you don’t count the fear and uncertainty and confusion that soon followed. Uncle Howard chose suicide as the way out of the many problems that dogged him night and day. But he wasn’t here to see the haunting loss in my grandmother’s eyes until her own death some 30 years later. He didn’t hear my mother crying, night after night, for months following the news of his death. He didn’t hear people referring to his sons as “those poor little boys.”

The biggest problem he sought to escape was financial; his business was failing. But his wife still had to rear their two young sons on a greatly diminished income. She had to sell their house and the car. She rented a small apartment, took a lowly clerical job, and rode public transit. Once a year, my mother and her siblings would make up money and send to his widow to pay for the boys’ school expenses and Santa Claus. And every summer, someone would drive the more than 200 mile round trip to collect my cousins and bring them back to our grandparents for two weeks. At the end of that time, someone else would take them home. They would have done all this and more to help Uncle Howard, if he would only have shared his needs.

Uncle Howard didn’t understand that his death didn’t resolve any of the issues that confronted him. If anything, taking his own life only exacerbated those problems and spawned many new and equally serious problems besides. And it gave one small child a brief glimpse into the toll that suicide takes on those left behind. I was too young to understand all the aspects, but I sure wasn’t too young to see and sort of understand the collateral damage that resulted. That was over 60 years ago, and I still grasp the high cost his suicide incurred, but I don’t understand it any better than I did when I was four.