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This is my conversation with my friend Patty about her father’s suicide and the shadow it cast over her life in the forty-five years since his death. Her story shows how refusing to talk with children truthfully magnifies their pain and hurts their ability to deal with loss.
I was going on fourteen when my father took his life. My mother told me he had had a heart attack. I was in shock. Partly because no one told me the truth.
But I knew he had killed himself. There had been an earlier attempt and I knew about that. He had been seeing a psychiatrist. Very unusual for people in the projects. My parents had had a big fight the day before he did it. So I knew. He killed himself with car exhaust. I steamed open the death certificate when it came. The cause of death was carbon dioxide asphyxiation.
That was very resourceful of you, steaming open the death certificate.
I closed up. I stopped talking. There was nobody in the household to share the grief with. Not my mother, not my oldest brother—he was engaged then. He was out a lot with the woman he was engaged to, drinking, bowling. Our middle brother was away at college. He had a breakdown after my father’s death. But I only knew that later. My mother wouldn’t talk about that either. So I was alone in a house where nobody talked.
When I went back to school the girls kept their distance. It was a Catholic School and suicide is a mortal sin. I felt judgment from the nuns. I don’t know what they told the other girls but they acted as if I had the plague. And they had started hanging out in a group with boys. I felt I had missed the boat. So I faked interest in boys, and makeup, and drugs. But I didn’t talk much and I wasn’t very popular. Some of the boys teased me for not talking. It was awful. I just wanted to not be in my house with my mother.
So I had to learn how to manage socially after my father died. I still feel that’s something I have to work at. But I did have a really nice first boyfriend when I was fifteen.
My parents had always fought a lot; my father moved out and returned more than once. He had been beaten by his father as the oldest son and fought his father trying to protect the others in his family. Then he beat my oldest brother. My mother quarreled with my father about that, trying to protect her son.
Later I learned that my father’s suicide note blamed her for not loving him and for turning me and my brothers against him. I had stopped speaking to him because he complained to me so much about my mother and put her in a negative light. It wasn’t honorable how he talked about her. I didn’t want to hear it. I blamed him. And I ignored him.
It took me a long time to tell anyone about my father. It was such a weight off when I did, later in high school, when I had friends.
How has all of this affected you over the years?
I still feel I struggle socially. And there’s extreme sadness that comes over me. I didn’t grieve until I was in college. I felt guilty and responsible because I had stopped talking to him. I felt I had no right to grieve because I was part of the cause of his death.
A result of my father’s suicide has been that suicide has seemed like an option; a very available option if things were too hard. He modeled it. And I worried that my brothers might see it as an option too. In college, I fell apart after my second boyfriend broke up with me. I felt devastated, broken. I thought I wouldn’t be able to have relationships. At first, it seemed like I was grieving my breakup, but then I realized I was grieving my father. It was as if he had just died.
My middle brother had told me to call him if I ever felt like killing myself. After the breakup, I was calling him every hour, saying, “I can’t go on, I want to die, it hurts so much.” He wanted me to go into a hospital. And the counselor I was talking to at the college did too. So I committed myself to the hospital and stayed there for a couple of weeks. I felt a lot of shame that I couldn’t be happy or normal. My mind couldn’t focus.
At the hospital, I soon recognized they had nothing much to offer me. I saw people who were always coming back. I didn’t want that. I realized I had to make a commitment to myself that I was going to live. Nobody gives you that; you have to give it to yourself. And I did. Two of my professors became father figures. I let them know what was happening and they were kind.
I still have a hard time managing my feelings when I have a loss. I feel like I’m all alone again. Divorcing my husband was hard for that reason, even though I was breaking up the marriage. But I think also that my fear of loss made me choose someone who wasn’t really in love with me, who I wasn’t really in love with. And nobody has seemed right since then. I do well on my own. I have things I love to do, that I care about.
I wish I had been older when my father died, so I could see more clearly what our relationship was. He spent time with me, but he didn’t see me. He didn’t speak about my ballet or my art. He used me to be happy with after the two boys. I was cute. He got me my first library card and took me to the library. When I outgrew our local library he took me to one farther away.
If I had been older when it happened I could have judged his character better. He was negative about everything and complained a lot. Both my parents were enraged and miserable.
I told each of my sons when he reached the age of eighteen about my father’s suicide, and then I had the same worry about them as about my brothers—that they might see suicide as a possibility. I get fearful if they’re struggling with relationships, if they’re depressed.
For years I used to lose control of my emotions on the anniversary of my father’s death and feel a lot of sadness. It’s just in the past few years that it hasn’t grabbed me by the throat.
I think it was hardest on my oldest brother. He used to fight back when our father beat him. But he beat his own daughters. Now he has a very narrow and what looks to me to be a sad life… still married, but depressed... He doesn’t take care of himself and looks so much older than he is.
My middle brother ended up finishing college. But the stutter he had as a child came back after my father’s suicide. In the last ten years, it’s been better. And he’s been with a good woman for fifteen years now.
