Look Closer

“My mother committed suicide eighteen years ago,” I say. “They called it an accidental overdose. I think my father actually believed that. I can tell you, I wish I did, too. I really do. Because an accident—well, it’s a tragedy, it stinks, it’s awful, but you don’t blame yourself. An accident is just, well, one of those random things. But I know better. Her overdose was deliberate.

“My mother was a brilliant law professor and a marathon runner. She loved life. She loved everything about life. She had a terrible singing voice, but it never stopped her from belting out songs. She had a corny joke or play on words for every situation. She had this laugh like a hyena that was so infectious. And she was the smartest person I’ve ever known.

“But then she had a stroke, a severe one, and she lost so much of what she had. She couldn’t teach any longer. She couldn’t run or even walk. She was confined to a wheelchair. She was on heavy medication for all kinds of things, including drugs for pain. My father—well, my father wasn’t exactly the Florence Nightingale type. He wasn’t a caregiver. He hired someone to take care of Mom, and I tried to help, too, while I was starting college in Chicago.

“Then our financial situation cratered. We had some money, actually a good amount, but my father made some bad financial decisions and we lost it all. We were broke. He was a lawyer, and he could scrap for money, but not enough to afford a full-time caregiver. It was just too expensive. So we had to let the caregiver go.

“My father, well, he said the only realistic thing to do was to put Mom in some facility or nursing home. I didn’t want that. I said I’d stay home from college. Skip a year or two and take care of her until we figured something out.”

I sigh. “My mother overdosed on pain meds. It was probably a combination of reasons. Losing her functionality, losing her ability to do all the things she loved, the thought of not being in our house with us, and it’s probably fair to say that the stroke robbed her of some of her cognitive reasoning. I can’t put a finger on exactly what put her over the edge.”

Actually, I can. But I’m going to leave that part out.

The secrets, the lies. I don’t tell people that part.

I don’t tell them that my father broke my mother’s heart. That he cheated on her. That in her final days, my mother knew that her husband no longer wanted her, that she not only had lost the functionality of her body and part of her brain, but she also had lost the love and loyalty of the man who had promised to devote himself to her through thick and thin, for better or worse, ’til death.

I don’t tell them that I knew my father was cheating, that I caught him, that I didn’t tell my mother because I knew it would crush her, that I was complicit in his betrayal, that I could have tried harder to stop him, that if I had, everything might have turned out differently.

I don’t mention that part because it sounds an awful lot, ahem, like a motive to kill my father. And that investigation in St. Louis remains unsolved. Ain’t no statute of limitations on murder.

“I didn’t know how to handle her death,” I say. “I did some dumb things, got into some trouble. I spent some time in an institution. I’m lucky it wasn’t worse. It wasn’t until I stopped lashing out and started listening that I was able to get my head above water again. I talked to all kinds of therapists, who explained to me that we look at suicide through this prism of control. We think we can control other things and other people. So when someone we love takes their own life, we think we could have stopped it. We think we had control, and we blew it. We are so unwilling to give up this notion that we control things and people around us that we’d rather feel guilt over the suicide than admit that we didn’t have that control in the first place.”

This advice, in my experience working with other survivors, is spot-on. It helps most people. Not me, but most people.

No, the person who healed me was Vicky. And I healed her. This is where we met, here at Survivors of Suicide. Her loss of her sister, Monica, had been much more recent than mine, but when we talked, just the two of us, we helped each other. We got through it. We made a pact.

A plan of attack, Vicky called it, declaring war on our grief.

—

It happened on a Thursday night. The next day would be my last day working at my dad’s law firm that summer, before I started at U of C as an incoming college freshman. I’d saved up some money I made that summer and bought him a present. It was a little thing, nothing bigger than a small trophy, the scales of justice in gold, the words law offices of theodore dobias engraved in the wooden base.

I waited until the end of the day to pick it up. He thought I’d left for the day and gone home. Instead, I’d stopped at the jewelry store to pick up the order, killed some time downtown waiting for everyone to leave the office, then snuck back up to the office after seven.