On August 12th, 1993, my forever 17 year old son decided to end his own life. He didn't leave a suicide note, exactly. The previous evening, he and his younger sister had gotten into an argument about Chris playing his guitar too loudly, and my wife decided to have each of the two to write an essay describing why each thought they were being wronged in the disagreement and why they felt they had it so bad in the family. We found Chris' essay on the coffee table the next morning, and surmised that he had stayed up to write it before going to bed. Since Katie and I were working at the same company at the time, in Menlo Park,and it was her turn to drive that morning, I was able to read his essay on the way into work. It was the usual complaining, we thought, about not having any space to do what he wanted to do, and that his sisters always got away with a lot of things for which he would be punished, and the like. Katie and I just figured it was typical teen-age griping and that when we got back from work, we would sit down with everyone and lay out some further refined ground rules that would attempt to equalize things.
We never got the chance.
Upon reaching work, Katie went off to her cubical to begin working, and I headed off to a sub-contractor's site to upgrade the software in the unit for which I was responsible. The site was about 30 miles south from work so it took me about 45 minutes to get there. As I signed in with the receptionist she told me that I had an urgent phone message from Katie. I used the phone there in the lobby and was put through to her. She wouldn't tell me at first what was going on; at first I thought that maybe something had happened to my mother or to her parents, or maybe to one of my brothers or my sister, or maybe to one of her brothers or sister or their families; the thought that it could involve one of my children never entered my mind. I was finally able to get her to tell me what had happened: A single family friend, from when we lived in Simi Valley, was coming up to take Chris back down there for a week so he could visit with some of the friends with which he was still in contact. The friend arrived, and Zara had answered the door and let him in, then had gone to tell Chris that the friend was there. She knocked on his door several times, and after getting no response, opened the door to find Chris hanging from a chin-up bar that was attached between two ceiling beams, using speaker wire from his stereo around his neck. A chair was overturned on the floor and though it was obvious what had happened, Zara at first thought that Chris was playing a joke on her pretending to be hung (kind of like the stunt that Harold played in the movie Harold and Maud). Then the family friend came in and knew the awful truth. Zara, having more than her share of presence of mind for a 14 year old, called 911 then her mother. Katie told Zara to call her grandparents (Katie's parents) who just live down the street to come stay with her until she could get in touch with me and get there herself. Meantime, I had run into the computer room at the customer's site, babbled out something about a family emergancy and that another engineer from our company would show up to finish the upgrade and all but ran out to my car. I barely remember driving up the freeway at better than 90 miles per hour and now, looking back on the occasion, have to believe that a guardian angel was riding with me on that trip, as I neither crashed, nor was pulled over by a law enforcement officer. One thing that will forever stand out in my mind about that trip home is that the song by Yanni entitled "Nice To Meet You" from his Dare to Dream disc was playing on the radio and that song has a special meaning for me now. Anyway, I beat Katie home, and found the police and EMTs there, as well as Zara, the family friend, and Katie's parents. The police refused to let me into my own house, so I never got to see him before the visitation at the funeral parlor. Another friend from work showed up, having driven Katie from Menlo Park, and Katie and I just stood there, holding one another, in shock.
From then on things were a blur...the visitations, that were attended by something like 200 teenagers, friends of Chris' and Zara's from school, all saying "I can't believe Chris would do this" and "WHY". The funeral mass that was the first time in a long time that we had seen a lot of the relatives...and they too were asking "WHY"
That is the one thing we'll never know, at least in this life. The thing that makes it so difficult to bear is that Katie has her degree in psychology and had been working in various school districts in the area with emotionally disturbed teens, many of whom were self-distructive in different ways; drugs, self-mutilation, suicide attempts, etc. So she was familiar with all of the signs that indicated that an individual was inclined to self-distructive acts, and Chris NEVER showed us any of the signs: he just seemed to be a normal moody, hormonal, stubborn, etc. teenager.
And then, it stopped again. I was informed that my youngest brother completed suicide on January 20, 1998. I read the coroner's report and it appeared that he had been drinking heavily, and from talking to the rest of the family, he had been very depressed for some time over the way his life had turned out. Very ironically, he chose the same method of ending his life that my son used: he hanged himself with a rope tied to the ceiling fan in the room at the house where he had been living.
We held a memorial service at a beach that he and his estranged wife considered a favorite, and scattered his ashes in the ocean.
At least Chris and Jim are at peace now. As for the rest of us, we have been denied having any peace in our lives any more, and I can't say if that will ever happen for us.
If you are feeling suicidal, please check here!!
There are a lot of resources for Survivors of Suicide, at many levels. On the Web, and through e-mail and USENET news groups, the concept of the support group has been brought into the Information Age. On my home page is a link to the Survivors of Suicide Web Ring, which provides linkage to web sites that share the common bond of being set up by someone whose life has been irrecoverably changed due to the completed suicide of a father, mother, child, or other relative, or friends or co-workers. If you know someone that is a Survivor of Suicide that isn't aware of the many resources available on the web and 'net, please point them to the SOS Web Ring home page (either one or two pages up from here).
There is an email distribution list that provides support for survivors of suicide that can be subscribed through this mailto link. Put "subscribe suicide-survivors" in the text of the message.
I have also been collecting some links to resources that deal with suicide and grieving. They are presented here: