Runs Through It

Suicide not only runs “in” families, it runs through them.

Suicide not only runs “in” families, it runs through them.

— Laura Miller

The reasons for suicide are always distracting. But the reasons don’t seem to predict who is going to go through with it, versus who is only taking you to the brink.

A tragedy can befall upon three different people: one who insists on moving forward, another who will snuff themselves out, and yet another who will threaten death so convincingly that others don’t know the difference anymore.

The first time I heard the phrase, “suicidal gesture,” I was outraged. What do you mean, gesture? I believed each one, every time!

My mom set the suicide clock in motion so frequently that by the time I hit puberty, I wanted her to get it over with. I knew it was probably my fault . . . she’d cried that aloud. So be it. Call the devil, save my seat, let the deed be done— at least the suspense would be over.

I fantasized, a thousand times, the quiet of sitting in our apartment, an apartment we’d inevitably just moved into, after her threatened death, the fait accompli. I would imagine it all being over. So still, so absolutely silent, for a period of time before I would call 911 to come to our apartment. I wouldn't want the peaceful moment to end. I would imagine this silent aftermath over and over again; it was a comfort when the threat was live.

The last time my mom tried to kill the two of us, was a few days after she got a letter in the mail from a lawyer. The attorney had been trying to find her for a year, which I found impressive— that she had disappeared us so effectively that no one in her immediate family had a clue what our address was.

The attorney had finally contacted my father, who had been at the University of California at Los Angeles for twelve years since their divorce. I guess my mom trusted my dad with our whereabouts more than anyone she was related to. Thus, the lawyer discovered our Canadian location: Edmonton, Alberta.

The attorney’s letter informed my mother of her father’s death, as well as her sister’s. Fannie had died first. Jack Halloran was buried in the Veterans Cemetery, and had left each of his children two hundred dollars. That shocked me, because I was under the impression he had nothing to offer anyone, least of all his eldest daughter. I didn’t even know he was alive— I’d never heard her mention him except to say: “My father abandoned us when our mother died, and then our Aunt Tessie came to get us from the convent and keep the older kids together.”

But, my adorable aunt Frances— there was no further information in the letter. No burial information— I still don’t know where my aunt lies. She was so young; in her 30s, and she’d had three sons. What happened? I had a feeling.

Whatever was missing, or whatever was well understood, my mother tore the letter in two. She was gunning for something right then. I crawled under the bed for awhile, suspecting a blow up, but then decided getting myself over to school was even safer.

I remembered my favorite photograph of my aunt Fannie, which my mom had also torn up, a long time ago, before I was born. Sometime later she had painstakingly scotch-taped it back together.

Fannie was the “pretty one,” my mom said— and that was impressive, because my mother was beautiful. In high school, Fannie had snuck out of the house wearing my mother’s favorite sweater, to pose for annual class photo. She looked great in it; her smile was like a movie star’s.

Frannie and Betty Jo, 1950s when my father was stationed in Germany army base

When my mom found out about the borrowing, discovering the photographic print of the occasion, she was so enraged she tore it up into little pieces.

“It was the only nice thing I had,” she said— referring to the sweater. Another one of those “reasons” that always seemed to end every discussion. I examined the photo as best I could. The sweater is grey wool, store-bought, and utterly undistinguished to my eye except that a slender pretty girl is wearing it like it belonged to her.

I found the photo in my mother’s old shoebox. My aunt’s warm smile and the lights in her eyes were frightening to look at with all the rips and tears so clearly visible, the yellowing tape barely holding it all together.

A couple nights after the lawyer letter arrived, I was lying awake on my sofabed. I couldn’t get to sleep, I kept thinking about our white Persian cat we’d left back in the States. His name was Swithin— we’d named him after mischievous Uncle Swithin in theThe Forsythe Saga.

Swithy was pure white, deaf, with blue eyes, and enchanting. I’d never had a pet before. My mom said we could feed him, if he didn’t eat too much and stayed outside. I would give him my canned peas from supper if I could sneak them into a napkin.

When Mom told us we were moving to Canada in 1970, it came as such a surprise. She said it was because of the Kennedy and MLK and Malcolm assassinations, the war, that this country made her sick. True enough. But she said that all the time— why Canada now? I was suspicious— I was almost 12 and I didn’t take her story at face value anymore.

I saw a letter on her sewing table from the University of Alberta offering her a librarian job. She had been substitute-teaching in high school for years. I knew she wouldn’t change her mind.

We had just adopted the little white cat. I was on the swim team and the coach had given me a red, white, and blue American flag swimsuit to compete in the summer races at the public pool. The same July, my mom allowed me to find out that I had $75 in the bank, from all the five dollar bills that had accumulated in my name from birth to First Communion. She’d suggested that I buy a bike— I’d never bought a candy bar before.

And then, it was over. One memorable afternoon, she said we were moving to Edmonton, that this country was abominable, that there were no jobs here, and she’d sold my bike to help with the moving expenses. And the cat couldn’t come.

My first bouts of insomnia were in Edmonton, Alberta, a week into our new abode. We lived in a tall apartment building on 82nd Ave, the main street bordering her job at the university library.

I missed holding our kitten and hearing him purr, wondering if he could feel himself purr even if he couldn’t hear it. I worried that he was hungry, that no one was taking care of him.

It’s odd that I remember that part so clearly. Missing the cat. I have a detailed memory of the minutes before I crept into my mom’s room, into her bed, and told her tearfully that I missed Swithy so much.

“That’s it, that’s enough!” she said. “You make me sick.” She pushed me off the mattress and kicked on her shoes, while I wheezed and apologized.

She pinched the top of my arm and dragged me out of the door.

I remember her grip on my arm— and her disgust at my blubbering. I was pathetic, I knew it, but I couldn’t stop. If only I hadn’t said anything about the cat, or crawled into her bed like a baby.

I told her I needed my glasses, I was blind without them. I couldn’t see the stairs we were taking to the parking garage, and I kept tripping.

“You won’t need them in the bottom of the river,” she said.

I was tripping, but I couldn’t slow her down. I remember the grey cement of the stairwell and the underground garage where all the tenants’ cars were parked. Dark grey cement, and that same hard color in her eyes.

My mom pushed me into the front seat of the VW. I popped out, protesting. She pushed me in again. It was like a jack-in-the-box. Of course she won, or I gave up too soon. Was she really stronger than me?

I yelled, “But where are we going?”

She said, with the kind of satisfaction you only imagine in perfect victory: “I’m driving us into the river.”

The Saskatchewan River in Edmonton is frozen in parts, most of year. Really, everything is frozen, from September to May. You wouldn’t have to even crack the ice to die in the river, it’s so cold— and I was still in pajamas I’d grown out of.

I didn’t know what my mothers drowning plan was, but she seemed to be soaring.

When I stopped pushing the door back, the last time, I was yelling, “I don’t want to die.”

That’s when she laughed the hardest. She said it was too late. “Too bad!”

The car started slow out of the garage, but then she hit the gas. She ran a string of lights on 82nd. I was afraid to grab the wheel or whatever it is that movie heroes do when someone evil needs to be pushed out of the driver’s seat. My thoughts got small, and slow. Was this the relief I’d imagined so many times? Was the aftermath beginning now? The great silence.

It was glacial. I had all the time in the world to think. I had regrets, and complaints. I wished Mom had just taken pills this time, like before, or the razor in the tub, where it was warm. Fannie had taken her life — but how? I felt so sorry for myself because I was going to die cold, but it was like feeling sorry for someone else— I couldn't sense my limbs anymore. No more tears. I didn’t have a private conversation with God, because we all know how those had gone before. He never shows up. There was something about being 14, in frozen Edmonton, in 1972, where I saw the emptiness of these last moments rather clearly. The windshield wipers were pushing the snowflakes this way, and that, like little cards shuffled from one end of a deck to the other.

The car screeched and spun— we plowed into a curb, and my head hit the dash. It wasn’t the river, but blood poured out of my nose. It was wonderfully warm.

I heard the door slam. The car was stuck half-cocked in a snow bank. She was walking away— my mother was walking fast on a dark trail close to the river, and I saw her step right up to the one of the first doorways with a porch light. Then she disappeared. I couldn't see much without my glasses, but I was glad they hadn’t broken.

I don’t know how long I sat there by myself. No one walked by— it can be lonely at night in Windsor Park. It was that January where it was 40 below for 40 days and everyone wore a button afterwards to brag about it. Coming so recently from California, I was fascinated by snowflakes, the way I’d once been thrilled with four-leaf clovers. I liked to watch the way each one pasted itself to a window pane before it submerged under another, and another.

Was it hours or minutes that went by? I became curious and impatient again, two signs of life. I crawled out, walked to a door I guessed that she had stepped to, and rang a bell. It was dark wood house, I remember the Beatles lyric passing through my mind as I pushed the button: “Isn’t it Good?”

A middle-aged Japanese woman came to door, reminding me of our old landlady Mrs. Koyamatsu, in Pasadena.

“I’m looking for my mother,” I said, and Mom appeared at the door, on cue, as if the taxi had arrived.

“Oh yes, Susie, there you are, what are you doing in your pajamas?” My mom laughed as if I needed a fashion remedial.

I have never seen anyone so brilliantly “carry on as if nothing had happened,” but then, I’ll never be fourteen again in Edmonton with blood on my flannel p.j.’s, a black eye, a busted lip, with my mouth hanging open and my glasses gone.

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