Thinking About Suicide

Like everyone else this week, I have been thinking about suicide. My grandmother tried to commit suicide in the 1950s. She slit her wrists the long way, parallel to the tendons, a clue I was later told that she meant this to be her last act.

I did not enter the picture until 1957, shortly before my grandfather died of cancer, leaving my parents, and aunt and uncle to care for my grandmother. “Care” largely consisted of shuffling her from one of our homes to another when she had outstayed her welcome and shuffling her among various apartments and managed-care, halfway, and residential-living facilities.

You name the treatment, therapy, or modality, and my grandmother probably went through it. Electro-shock. Check. Pills, lots of pills. Check. Talking therapy. Check. A psychiatrist at St. Vincent’s in NYC even suggested LSD in the early 1960s.

Her diagnosis, as I recall, was the general catch-all “depression.” How little times have changed? My mother’s armchair diagnosis was that she never grew up, was taken care of by my grandfather, and could not cope with his illness.

By the time I was old enough to be aware that Grammy was loony, she was often living at our house, spending hours at a time in front of television (all the better if golf, a sport of her youth, was being broadcast) or smoking cigarettes at the local coffee shop. She tended to green-shaded sun glasses for both inside and outside use. My parents kept their booze locked in the basement.

I am told that in her day she was an attractive and athletic woman, but never experienced either. She was a burden to my parents, who spend 25 years trying to help her, a distraction to her grandchildren.

It’s not that I avoid bringing friends over when Grammy was staying with us, but there was an unspoken understanding that she was to be endured but not discussed. When I was a junior in high school, she tried to kill herself a second time. But this attempt fell into the feeble, cry-for-help camp of life-ending initiatives.

Even so, the ambulance parked in front of the house on a Saturday afternoon was seen by friends and neighbors, and needed to be explained.

I can’t say I regretted her presence. My parents did a good job at explaining to all of us a young age that she had demons that resisted medical attention. Shortly after my graduation from college, she died at age 75, her last 25 or 30 years a stark reminder of lost opportunity, potential, and joy.

That was more than 30 years ago, and I have hardly spent more than passing minutes thinking about her during those years.

Until this week. I was busy raising a young son rather than listening to grunge rock when Curt Cobain shot himself. I always meant to read Infinite Jest but never did before David Foster Wallace hung himself. I can’t even remember the last Robin Williams movie I watched. It may have been Good Will Hunting. But I always stopped surfing the channels when I saw him on television. His electric mind was always worth watching, notably his appearance on Actor’s Studio.

Williams seemed to be everything my grandmother was not: alive, in the moment, and productive. While Williams could be exhausting, my grandmother was exhausted by life. But both of them were inflicted with a darkness that they could not shake.

Robin Williams’s widow rightfully wants us to remember the joy he brought into the world, but it is also worth pondering the sadness that so many of his fellow travelers feel daily.