My theme photo: looks like a soaring cathedral ceiling or the inside of a tower perhaps--perhaps others have other ideas. It seems infinite although it is not.
Note: This is my first attempt at a blog. I am still trying to add elements, so please excuse things that looked unfinished. I appreciate feedback.
Note: This is my first attempt at a blog. I am still trying to add elements, so please excuse things that looked unfinished. I appreciate feedback.
I have wanted to start this blog for some time. It's been ten years, two months, and fourteen days since my husband committed suicide. I still feel that my grief goes on, without end, although I do not think of him everyday now as I used to--just almost every day. I still have moments when I relive the horrible hours after I heard the news.
My husband of 27 years, Tim Wiles, chose one of the hottest days of the summer in our Midwestern weather zone, a day on which I was over a thousand miles away attending a conference, to jump from a six story parking garage. The audience of the local NPR, many of whom were friends and acquaintances, heard the news before I did--with the time change between EST and Mountain Time. As serendipity would have it, I called my sister after I had been doing some sightseeing in Park City Utah, and heard her crying when she answered my call. In between sobs, with a terrible cellular connection, she told me. Stunned, I stumbled to my hotel room, then called the desk and asked to be connected to a colleague and friend attending the same conference and told her. I wasn't weeping; I was numb. Then chaos and blurry scenes of teachers milling around in the lobby.
My colleagues arranged a red eye flight from Salt Lake City to Indianapolis. I eventually calmed down enough to call my next door neighbor (who told me how my husband had died) to ask for a pick-up at the airport. Then five days of a total blur. Operating on auto-pilot.
I have just read Carla Fine's insightful book No Time to Say Good-bye. She writes honestly about the ways in which the suicide of a loved one strips you raw, lacerates and tortures a person. The word "haunt" comes to mind, but even that is not strong enough. The survival one lives feels like a limbo of sorts--one is here, on earth, and yet one feels as if the body is not really living. Numb? yes. Frozen? yes. I should have read Fine's book as soon as I could have after my husband's death, but I did not--nor do I have any idea why I did not.... It was recommended to me, by the same cousin who reminded me of the recommendation just a few months ago, now ten years later. So I ordered it and could not put it down.
I read it every day for four days whenever I had an hour. I jotted down sentences, reread parts, meditated on it.
I am going to pause here. I will be writing two or three times a week--and I invite any readers to respond. I need to have an ongoing conversation with any of you who also need it. I have put it off long enough. You do not have to have lost a husband or a spouse; any loss to suicide deeply penetrates us and stays with us--always.
Mary McGann
My husband of 27 years, Tim Wiles, chose one of the hottest days of the summer in our Midwestern weather zone, a day on which I was over a thousand miles away attending a conference, to jump from a six story parking garage. The audience of the local NPR, many of whom were friends and acquaintances, heard the news before I did--with the time change between EST and Mountain Time. As serendipity would have it, I called my sister after I had been doing some sightseeing in Park City Utah, and heard her crying when she answered my call. In between sobs, with a terrible cellular connection, she told me. Stunned, I stumbled to my hotel room, then called the desk and asked to be connected to a colleague and friend attending the same conference and told her. I wasn't weeping; I was numb. Then chaos and blurry scenes of teachers milling around in the lobby.
My colleagues arranged a red eye flight from Salt Lake City to Indianapolis. I eventually calmed down enough to call my next door neighbor (who told me how my husband had died) to ask for a pick-up at the airport. Then five days of a total blur. Operating on auto-pilot.
I have just read Carla Fine's insightful book No Time to Say Good-bye. She writes honestly about the ways in which the suicide of a loved one strips you raw, lacerates and tortures a person. The word "haunt" comes to mind, but even that is not strong enough. The survival one lives feels like a limbo of sorts--one is here, on earth, and yet one feels as if the body is not really living. Numb? yes. Frozen? yes. I should have read Fine's book as soon as I could have after my husband's death, but I did not--nor do I have any idea why I did not.... It was recommended to me, by the same cousin who reminded me of the recommendation just a few months ago, now ten years later. So I ordered it and could not put it down.
I read it every day for four days whenever I had an hour. I jotted down sentences, reread parts, meditated on it.
I am going to pause here. I will be writing two or three times a week--and I invite any readers to respond. I need to have an ongoing conversation with any of you who also need it. I have put it off long enough. You do not have to have lost a husband or a spouse; any loss to suicide deeply penetrates us and stays with us--always.
Mary McGann
2: 4 October2013
This blog is for me, for my son, now 25 years old and scarred by the loss of his father to suicide. My son is adopted which makes the loss a double rejection. He is still very angry, and I understand that.
I am certainly angry too, but I am most angry for what my husband’s suicide has done to my son: experiencing such a loss at 15 was particularly hard, although it would have been difficult at any age.
Not only was my son so deeply affected but there were many people scorched by his choice to end his life by jumping off that building. His mother, who had already lost her youngest son to suicide 22 years before my husband died, was quietly devastated. His sister, his brother, former students, former mentors and professors who had considered him brilliant, colleagues—many of whom were shocked, having had no inkling of his 30 year struggle with the demons of bi-polar disease (he hid it well from anyone outside the family) were all stunned.
In the aftermath of my husband’s suicide, I did go to grief counseling with a private therapist. I was also regularly seeing a medications managing psychiatrist for an anti-depressant prescription—the same psychiatrist my husband had seen to manage his medications. I was told there was no survivors’ group at the time. Oh, I knew about the Samaritans—I had seen their sign on the bridge in the town I had grown up in. But when I asked about groups for survivors, none of the professionals I consulted had any suggestions. So I muddled along. My family doctor was really supportive and helpful, —often talking with me longer than he had time for. My friends were great. One dear friend called me every day for months after my husband’s death, just to make sure I was okay. People would see me in the grocery store or on the street and ask pointedly, “How are you?” I knew they were trying to be kind and did not know how else to show concern, but it got to the point that I wanted to have a t-shirt made that read” How the Hell do you think I am? Some people, usually my husband’s university colleagues would see me and turn the other way, pretending not to see me. Now after ten years, I realize that some friends whom I thought were friends to both of us, have dropped me, perhaps blaming me for my husband’s death.
Meanwhile, at that time in the summer of 2003, my son was at his most sullen, most oppositional stage—something that would have probably happened anyway when he was 15, but was exacerbated by what he had suffered. I wanted to help him but he was not going to accept help from me. He did continue with counseling and was on Adderall (he had been diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) when he was 10. Although my son is not my husband’s biological child (we adopted him when he was ten months old), he has since been diagnosed as being borderline Bi-Polar.
My son's anger was, like the anger of many teens, often aimed at the person closest to him—in this case me. He was so hurt himself he just had to strike out. Four years ago I signed up for the “Out of the Darkness” march against Suicide held in October by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP)—a group I had never heard of until I saw some of the publicity for the march. I mentioned it to my son, and to my surprise he wanted to join me. My two closest neighbors (who deeply felt Tim’s loss) also joined us. It was three miles and I was in terrible shape but my son stayed with me until I completed the first half. At the starting area of the March, some survivors shared their stories. There were huge groups of extended families and friends who were far more organized than I with t-shirts with pictures, signs, and banners. The stories were moving; the tears flowed. I was surprised and touched that my son wanted to march with me. The March was held on what would have been my husband’s 62nd birthday. Carla Fine writes that ” with each anniversary of my husband’s suicide, I am overcome by the irreversibility and irrationality of his loss.“ I understand that feeling very well—on the anniversary of his death, on his birthday, on holidays we celebrated. Even that day of the Suicide Prevention March, that irreversibility engulfed me. I certainly was comforted by the marchers’ stories, by their devotions to the memories of the person they had lost: there were over 500 people there but still I felt overwhelmed by irreversibility of their losses and my own.
As I reflect on my husband’s suicide, I cannot help but think of the suicide of my paternal grandfather, George, whom I never knew but who was, by all reports, charming, handsome, personable, and talented. Known for his Irish tenor voice and virtuosity at several musical instruments, especially the piano.
Supposedly, my grandfather who had not always charmed his wife, my grandmother as he was a womanizer and a drinker, had been staying in a hotel in Fall River, Massachusetts. He was a salesman of textile machinery and his territory was Massachusetts and Rhode Island—at that time the heart of the textile industry in the North. It has never been clear to me if there was a precipitating event or even moment; he no doubt suffered from undiagnosed depression as I am certain my father who drank heavily must have. [The story was told to me by mother who had heard parts of it from my Dad, parts from his sisters, and probably had conjectured parts of it. However, a solid practical German American, my mother had none of the Irish embellishing imagination of the McGann side of the family. ] My grandmother was furious at him for killing himself, leaving her with 4 children 16 and under—and I understand that fury now.
How my grandfather died is still unclear. The first version (heard from my mother) had him turning on the gaslight jets and not lighting them. But as an adult I asked my aunt, my Dad’s sister about it. My dad had hedged on whether or not his father had actually committed suicide. Had my father still been alive when my husband died, I might have been able to have an honest conversation with him about it—but he died three years before my husband.
So family myths, rumors and conjecture surround suicides. Anger and misunderstandings all abide.
3. 11 October 2013
Today, October 11 would have been my husband’s 66th birthday, so this is the tenth birthday he has been gone. He loved having people make a fuss over his birthday—when he received a large number of cards he would happily display them on the mantle in the living room. In his early days in Bloomington, a great college town with great bakeries, his mother, a fan of birthdays herself would order a cake at a local bakery, to insure that her bachelor son would have a cake. After we were married I would make one or we would go out to dinner. A few times I threw a party if the day fell on the weekend.
So today…is not just another day although I do not think of it as sadly as I did the first few birthdays after his death.
I asked my son what he thought we should do—and since he will be working that night, I suggested we think about what to do to honor the day. In the past, on the anniversary of his death, I have taken flowers to the sixth floor of the parking garage, the last place on earth where he stood. His ashes have been scattered in several places he loved—the Atlantic Ocean, Lake McWain in Waterford, Maine, and the Baltic Sea, and some of his ashes are interred under a rose colored marker in a quiet hillside cemetery in Norway Maine. So visiting the sixth floor of the parking garage is perhaps not as morbid as it sounds. Then again morbidity is in the mind of the beholder.
Was I surprised when my husband committed suicide? Yes, and no. I knew he suffered from the depressive end of bi-polar disease, although there were a few times when I saw him go through the manic side, for example impulse buying of something he would rarely use (a rowing exercise machine he used twice). But usually the down side showed. He was actually diagnosed in 1986, but in looking back from then he and I could see a pattern had been growing for thirty years.
My husband experienced his first fill blown depression in 1967 when he was studying in Tubingen Germany on his junior year abroad. He had had a great semester ending with a two week stay at Christmas with his cousin who was in Dublin that year. They had made a hilarious Christmas dinner, gone to pubs, and sought out sites connected with James Joyce, one of his favorite writers. Then he came back to Tubingen alone. He went through a deep depression which he convinced himself was homesickness, and decided to cut the year short and return to the United States. His parents accepted the idea that he was terribly homesick—he had rarely been out of Maine until his senior year of high school and then his matriculation at Antioch College in Ohio. He was also 16 years old when he first attended college, intellectually ahead of his class, but not emotionally. He literally crashed when he returned to Tubingen.
When he returned to Antioch in time for the following quarter he plunged into his classes and then a co-op job [Antioch had a schedule so that students worked (called co-operative jobs) one quarter or ten weeks, then returned to campus and class the next.] That year his co-op job was in Connecticut at Manchester State Hospital where he was aide in a ward for functioning but mentally disabled young men. Although his career path would not point in the direction of the mental health field, he thrived at the job. Looking back, I can speculate that helping boys more disabled than he would ever be was somehow uplifting. He focused on their needs rather than his depression and by the time he returned to the Antioch campus, it had lifted... He remembered the routines at the training school vividly and talked about them with me. They called the routine cleaning up the boys were required to do “milieu therapy” and for years we referred to our Saturday morning house cleanings as “milieu therapy.”
Back on campus he threw himself into classes—Antioch students usually spent five years on a Bachelor’s degree with the co-op schedule, but Tim was able to finish in four years—going on cooperative jobs all over the country—in Hillsboro California as a counselor at a public school year around enhancement camp, as a counselor at a foster institution in Boston, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton. Later, he would fondly reminisce about all those jobs especially the McCarter Theater tech internship—for theater was a great passion. He also involved himself in theater productions on campus, and the inevitable graduate school applications. His Antioch teachers recognized him as brilliant, intellectually curious student, and although Antioch at that time gave no letter or number grades, his records from completed courses demonstrated that brilliance. He applied to top graduate schools in English and Comparative Literature: Stanford, the University of Chicago, Yale, and when accepted, chose Stanford. He received a National Defense Scholarships and loans, and worked summers; he taught as a graduate teaching assistant. In 1968 he headed west and began his PhD work. And again he would speed through his graduate program, winning a National Defense Fellowship to go to Poland to do research on the avant garde theater created by Jerzy Grotowski. In Poland he refined his Polish language skills—he had become fascinated with Polish culture and theater under the tutelage of an international an Polish émigré scholar and dramaturg at Stanford.
As always a bit of a wunderkind (he started first grade at 5), Tim finished graduate school in four years, applied for jobs and invited to interviews, and when offered positions at three prestigious universities, chose to begin teaching at IU/Bloomington. He was practical and clever enough to know that earning tenure at Princeton would be impossible, since top tier Ivy League universities had established “revolving bottoms” in Humanities departments. The start of a promising academic career began in the fall of 1972 when he left a summer of jogging daily on the beach and typing his dissertation. That hard exercise and constant sun seemed to nourish his mental health for starting in Bloomington on a high note, perhaps too high, and tanned and healthy. A young woman, Denise, with whom he had a happy relationship, had left Stanford to move to New York City and she alone was disconcerted at his taking jobs in the Midwest. His first semester he taught his specialty, Avant Garde Eastern European drama, and seemed to be starting off well. The first year sped by as he acclimated to life as faculty member. I met Tim that fall, at the Graduate Student welcome party, and he himself looked like a grad student. He was 24, tanned, and the California sun had bleached his longish blonde hair. He looked like a surfer.
In October he threw himself a 25th birthday dinner, making Beef Strroganoff on a three burner stove in a tiny campus apartment. I was there along with four or five faculty couples whom he had come to know. The Beef Stroganoff was excellent. His mother had ordered a sumptuous, decorated chocolate birthday cake. The party was joyful.
The year passed; during his second and third year in Bloomington he and several graduate students in Folklore sublet a house from a faculty member teaching abroad that year. That fall torrential rains cause flooding in the basement of that house and the graduate students were not proactive in helping deal with the problem. Tim’s frustration with the graduate students’ passivity and irresponsibility increasingly frustrated him. That pattern of extreme frustration with situations or people he could not control would plague him most of his adult life.
But we also had one of our first dates in the fall, 1974—a trip to Indianapolis to a Herbie Hancock concert. It was a thrilling concert and I enjoyed the evening and Tim’s amazing knowledge of music and jazz. My brother had been killed in a motorcycle accident in August and I had moved to a job at the University of Cincinnati, but Tim had contacted me—perhaps feeling badly about my brother’s death. He was very kind, and I saw a compassionate side of him. He had taken me out to dinner in late July to congratulate me on getting a job in that very tight job market. Then, in October had called me to invite me to yet another birthday party, and then came the concert date—which I saw as a “just friends” date—remembering the Stanford girlfriend who had moved to New York.
All that academic year, the Indiana University Office of International Programs had been negotiating with the US State Department to establish an American Studies Center at Warsaw University—and in that Cold War era there were funds to establish cultural and academic exchanges with Communists countries. IU asked Tim to go to Poland in the first three weeks of January, 1975 to actually begin the setting up of the Center. But just before he left he had attended the Modern Language Association Conference, the biggest international gathering of English, modern Language, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature scholars in the world--held at that time the weekend after Christmas. He had stayed with Denise, the girlfriend, but while he was there she told him that there was no future to the relationship with him in the Midwest and her committed to staying in New York City. He was crushed, but had little time to brood as he left for Poland almost immediately.
The work in Poland as well as one could expect in a Communist country where getting things done required bribes and patience. It was still the Cold War, after all. Tim felt he had not accomplished enough.
In mid-January he flew back to Bloomington to resume teaching and he found himself paralyzed with depression. He crashed. He went to the Chair of the Department, a compassionate and wise academic who would go on to a career ending as Academic Vice President and Provost of the University—and he told his him he could not teach, and that he wanted to leave the profession. Wisely, the Chair arranged for a medical leave with continuance of medical benefits and put Tim in contact with the first psychiatrist he would ever see, a doctor who directed the University mental health center. He prescribed mood elevators (Elavil) and strenuous exercise. Tim began long, arduous bike ride around the hills of Monroe County. He worked hard on his therapy. At that time, there was little medical discussion of Bi-polar disease and the idea never came up. Tim had gone a rocky time—the girl he was sure he would marry had dumped him, the Poland trip was not a huge success (although the American Studies Center he helped establish exists today in independent Poland); he also was probably exhausted from having no inter-semester break, and experiencing severe jet lag.
Later that spring of 1974, Tim also contemplated a first suicide attempt. He rode his bike out to a Fire Watch tower in Brown County State Park and climbed to the top, thinking for an hour about jumping. He changed his mind and biked the 16 miles back to town. I believe he shared this with his therapist, but I do know that for certain. He told me about it years later.
When I heard from a friend teaching at IU that he was covering Tim’s large freshman literature lecture course, and was soliciting volunteers to lecture, I volunteered to give a lecture on Jean Anouilh’s Antigone.
I also called Tim after the lecture and offered to take him out to dinner: I did not want him to think I was shunning him. I found out later that he felt many people were avoiding him because they did not know how to handle or address his illness. He also told me at that time that he felt embarrassed, that he had let the department and his students down. I responded that an illness is an illness—and that it was not a question of letting anyone down. Like most people, particularly at that time, his family had not ever talked about mental illness as a real illness—it was something to be swept under the rug. This was probably February or March and he was beginning to feel better. We had a wonderful time, talking about our families (each dysfunctional in its own way) literature, music and a range of topics. I found out he was a fan of opera and I told him about the summer opera series in Cincinnati—and we offhandedly made plans to see an opera.
COMING IN NOVEMBER:
(from www.afsp.org)
Did you know that the Saturday before Thanksgiving was designated as International Survivors of Suicide Day by a congressionall bill sponsored in 1999 by senator Harry Reid (himself a survivor of his father's suicide)?
Spread the Word Each November, on International Survivors of Suicide Day, those who have lost someone to suicide come together in healing events all over the world to share information and mutual support.This is the only international program of its kind, and our goal is to reach every person affected by suicide loss. Can you help us to spread the word? The following are some ways you can help to get the word out:
International Survivors of Suicide Day:
A Day of Healing for Bereavement after Suicide
Saturday, November 23, 2013
DVD broadcast available with English, Spanish, or French subtitles
Each year in November on the Saturday before American Thanksgiving, survivors of suicide loss around the world join together at hundreds of local healing events to view a DVD program about suicide loss. During the program:
Find out everything you need to know to organize your own gathering at www.afsp.org/survivorconference.
www.afsp.org/survivorday.
4. 18 October 2013
Tim and I did attend an opera in Cincinnati, The Flying Dutchman, and a few days later he asked me to marry him. Considered the tragic idea of marriage in that opera, it's a bit ironic. By then his depression had faded; he was excited to return home to Maine during the warm months and excited to start teaching at the start of fall, semester. Neither he nor I were aware that his depression had been part of a pattern. He had not connected it with the depression that sent him from Germany during his junior year, and only several years later would we see the pattern emerging when he was finally diagnosed with Bi-Polar disease in 1986.
We were married in July of 1976 in Newport, Rhode Island, my home town. We would remain married for 27 years until he died. For the most part we were happy. and in the early years, were blithely unaware of the demons that would eventually surface.
Yesterday, I had lunch with an 84 year old friend, Helen,whose son committed suicide six years ago. We compared our stories and reactions –reactions that were similar. When I think of my husband standing on the highest level of that six story parking garage, looking over into the alley below, I wonder what he is thinking. I wonder what he is feeling. I once talked at length with a friend, Rona, now long dead from illness not suicide; Rona had become debilitated by bi-polar disease and was not working at the time. It was at a time in my life when I, too, was ill although doctors finally discovered that I had developed Adrenal Gland failure (Addison’s disease)—an auto-immune disease. Rona was sure I was experiencing a deep depression, and I did seem very depressed. I could not eat, I slept very little, and I had lost weight and felt exhausted all the time. These symptoms could have been part of a depression—and certainly I was experiencing a physical breakdown as my adrenal glands slowly were dying. Rona told me of a suicide attempt she had made a year before, and I remember her saying that she was at the time so depressed, so immersed into a black hole that nothing else seemed to matter. She did not have children, nor was she married at the time. After Tim had died, I thought about that—had he too been immersed in a black hole? Had his mind been so pushed by the emotional tornado that afflicted him, he had not thought of me or his son? He had written notes on yellow lined post-its—notes that gave no significant answer to the thousand questions we are compelled to ask after something like this. He simply wrote to me: “Mary —my love, I just could not hold on any more.” To David he wrote “ I love you. Please take care of Mom, grow up to be a good man, and someday I hope you will forgive me.” Helen’s son had not left any notes, any written explanation or goodbye. Notes or letters written at such a time could hardly do what we want them to. Helen, too, said she often pictures her son before he actually died, trying to know what was in his mind and heart.
It may not have mattered, but we want it to matter. No note or explanation would be enough to fill the void, the hole left by the person who seems compelled to take his/her own life. We want notes; we want explanations; however what we really want is to talk them out of it. We want to turn back the clock, to make it not so.
In April, 1981 my husband called me in Columbus, Ohio where I was working, to tell me that his younger brother Tris had shot himself. Until then I did not fully realized the ramifications of Tim’s depression.
I did not know Tris very well—he was at the time twenty five, eight years younger than Tim, the youngest of the four children. Tim’s parents were devastated, understandably. He had been seeing a psychologist, had been experiencing depression, but he had seemed to be recovering. He was dating a young woman he liked a lot; he had a solid job at a tool and dye making factory near his home, in Norway, Maine. His brother, Tom, the second oldest had found him. No note. No explanation.
There was little discussion that I know of, beyond what Tim told me. I was an outside. I had been married to Tim five years. I had met Tris a few times; he had come to visit once in 1979. Tim loved him of course, but they had not been close with the age difference between them. I felt very sad for my husband’s family. They bore the tragedy quietly, with dignity. They were, after all, a Yankee family who did not discuss their private pain and feelings. I knew the pain of losing a younger brother as I had lost my brother, John, to a motorcycle accident in 1974. While the grief caused by a random accident is different than the death caused by suicide, it seemed an odd coincidence that we both lost our younger brothers—despite the different causes of death.
For Tim, Tris’ death seems to have impelled him to want a child. We had been discussing having children (we were both in our mid-thirties) so we knew we had to make the decision quickly given my biological clock. But we were scheduled to teach in Warsaw, Poland for Fulbright and Indiana University for the school year 1981-2. I was not eager to deliver a baby in a hospital in a country where there were major shortages of everything including disinfectant cleaners and common medicines. We had to put plans for a family on hold—and we would not address those plans again for several years.
We did not bank on falling in love with Poland and Polish culture; we did not expect that we would participate in and witness a major historical upheaval. Our lives were changed for the better by our stay there. We ended up staying in Poland until July 1983.
I look back now, and realize that we often did not plan our lives very well. We were still relatively young and felt life would remain the same forever. As two people holding Ph.D.’s in English, our plans were often, at least in my case, decided by the ever changing job market. I was so lucky. In my first job at the University of Cincinnati, I had created and administered a Developmental English program for freshmen whose English skills needed improvement. It was the age of almost open admissions and high school English programs had not kept pace with the demands of universities—at least that is how universities saw it, but they were willing to help students close the gap. Skill and practice at teaching written composition was a job skill much in demand. And that skill earned me several great jobs, at good schools. However I was never going to be hired at Indiana University Bloomington where my husband taught. That meant I would always be working away from husband. And that is exactly what happened until August 1990 when I started a job at a small, comprehensive university in Indianapolis and could live with Tim in our home, with the toddler whom we adopted in February, 1989.
In the mid-eighties I was teaching at a college in Rhode Island. I called Tim to tell him about a job I heard of for someone with his qualifications within commuting distance of Providence. His response was lack luster to say the least, and I realized he must be experiencing another depression.
The next day I called him back and we had a long discussion. I told him I would have to think about leaving him if he did not do something—a pattern was beginning to emerge, although I do not truly know how aware of it we were. I just knew something had to change, particularly if we were to contemplate parenthood. After Tris’ suicide I became worried that Tim might do the same thing. I had never realized how such a death could overshadow so much. When my husband went through these depressive incidents he was unable to think of himself in a positive way. He saw himself as inadequate in every thing, especially professionally. This was far from the truth. His book had been critically acclaimed when it was published in the late seventies, his teaching evaluations were positive, he was professionally accomplished. We had heard of a medical doctor/psychiatrist (there were very few of these in town at the time) who was specializing in helping people who thought they might have Bi-Polar disease. The doctor was testing lithium levels. Evidently either my threat or the depth of his depression propelled Tim to make an appointment. He was diagnosed as being Bi-Polar and, in looking at the family history, the doctor felt that there might be a genetic pattern. The doctor prescribed lithium. Within a few weeks, Tim was emerging from the depression which had practically paralyzed him. For seventeen years, lithium helped him maintain his equilibrium.
Years later, as I look back over the eighties, I realize how much Tris’s death affected us. How unresolved Tim’s grief must have been. I thought for awhile that Tim could not possibly want to inflect the same pain again on his mother. I know now that it must have had the opposite effect on Tim—possibly allowing him the choice. What I do know is that suicide never goes away, never leaves us. As David Sedaris writes in reference to his sister's suicide, "Doesn't the blood of eery suicide splash back on our [the family's]faces?
5. 24 October 2013
A.Alvarez wrote The Savage God in 1970 in an effort to fathom his friend Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Plath a brilliant young poet killed herself when she was 30 in 1963. In The Savage God, Alavarez, a poet, essayist and literary critic, wrote a literary history of suicide, but also probed the suicides of two famous writers, Plath and Ceasar Pavese. Alavarez concluded that Plath’s suicide was really an attempt, a call for help and that’s eh had not meant to succeed. Biographers and other writers have disputed that claim. But Alvarez was also probing his own attempt at suicide a few years before he had written the book.
The historical survey of suicide and attitudes toward suicide is particularly instructive. Still, in 2013, the twenty-first century, suicide is still treated as a crime, it is so stigmatized the survivor families of suicides feel the shame and the stigma, to the point of lying about the cause of death or hiding it.In David's Sedaris recent essay in The New Yorker, he tells us that his sister Gretchen's obituary of Tiffany, the sister who filled herself recounted that Tiffany "had passed away peacefully at her home." Obituaraies of suicides rarely state that the deceased has killed himself or herself.
Alvarez summarized the evolution of suicide as a taboo. It is somewhat surprising to read that suicide was not a Christian taboo until the sixth century when in reaction to a heretical cult, the Donatists, a group which sought out suicide as a means of martyrdom and thus achieving sainthood, the Roman Catholic Church applied the sixth commandment to suicide which became defined as self-murder, and thus a mortal sin. Thus the early Christian, succeeding the Roman Empire took on the stoic, even accepting attitude toward suicide. St. Augustine, the foremost theologian and Doctor of the Church of the sixth century, denounced suicide as a "detestable and damnable wickedness” (quoted in Alvarez). Augustine’s authority led to the Council of Braga (562) to denounce suicide and to decree that the rituals of the Church would be denied suicides. Later in 693 the Council of Toledo, was to proclaim that even by attempting suicide, people should be excommunicated. The Middle Ages were fascinated and obsessed with death and it’s terrible details. Dante would reflect the terror of the church by relegating suicides to a desolate punishment in the seventh circle of Hell. One would assume that the shame of suicide, the fear of others knowing that that shame is part of our families originates from this era. Once when I brought food to a family whose had killed himself, I reminded the mother that I would not be the last to bring comfort food and that was the custom in the region in which they lived (as it is in many areas to bring food to homes of the bereaved). She dismissed the idea and told me “I do not want people to come and laugh at me.” I was stunned by this comment. I did not think anyone who would go to the trouble of bringing food would do so to mock the family. Sure enough within the next few days, many dishes arrived at that woman’s door. But the woman must have been feeling the terrible shame Christianity tells us to feel.
As someone who was raised Catholic, I grew up familiar with the stigma and taboo against suicide. I remember how the story of Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ for 30 pieces of silver was viewed. The nuns told us that Judas’ great sin was the despair of suicide, not his betrayal of Christ. The nuns pointed out that Judas’s suicide was a total repudiation of God’s love for us and our hope in redemption. I can remember when my mother told me of a man in town who committed suicide she lowered her voice and showed real shock. That man was a good person, a guy who was a few years ahead of me in Catholic school; he was often an altar boy at the 8:30 Sunday children's Mass. The authorities had found his abandoned car, his shoes, socks, watch and wallet parked near the Newport Bridge (since then renamed the Pell Bridge). His body was never recovered. His mother was an impeccably dressed, pleasant person whom I knew more from seeing at Church than I actually knew her. My parents knew her but not well; I cannot say I knew no more but what I saw in Church. Later, the rumor was that the man (around 28 at the time, I think) had identified himself as homosexual and could not face the stigma (this was forty years ago) and his mother’s horror. His fear and despair must have been great. He had brought up in a Church that vilified homosexuality and suicide, but for him the only way out was to kill himself. I felt so sad for him.
Someone just emailed me and asked me how I thought we could destigmatize suicide: I know what I chose to do when my husband died. The memorial service (not funeral) I planned celebrated his life. One speaker spoke of depression and how brave he thought Tim was to go to work every day, to continue teaching and living for so many years. When one newspaper representative told me the paper was printing the cause of death, I agreed wholeheartedly. and in every obituary I mentioned my husband’s struggle with depression. I never lie about how he died. I want people to know that he had a good life, was a successful scholar and teacher, and that he suffered from a terrible illness that finally defeated him in the end. That disease, and his death, are part of who he was and what should be honored. Sometimes it’s a conversation stopper but when people appear embarrass for asking I tell them that they did not know when they asked and that I am not ashamed of it. I try very hard to put these people at ease. We have finally reached the point (I hope) where we do not feel ashamed to say someone died of cancer (although I knew a friend from an eastern European culture who would not say the word “cancer” when her mother was dying of it—she even went to the trouble to put her mother’s cancer medications in other bottles so her daughter would not find out. She told me that there was still terrible fear and superstition around discussing cancer in her culture---and this was 2001!!
In the mail today came a bonanza of books that I had ordered from Alibris.com—the postage was not much but it totaled more than the bill for the books. Several were unavailable at other sites—possible out of print. All are about suicide and survivors’ stories. I have chosen to first read Mariette Hartley’s Breaking the Silence (1990). I do intend to publish an annotated list of such books. Reading them has been very helpful to me.
6. 31 October 2013
Mariette Hartley’s book, Breaking the Silence, disappointed me. Perhaps because she is a film and TV star, she seems to focus it more on herself and her development as an actress, rather than her life as a suicide survivor. Of course, one cannot split oneself in two either. She is both.
Hartley was twenty two years old, living in Los Angeles with her parents, when her father, Paul Hartley a brilliant and creative former advertising executive and graphic artist, shot himself in the head in the room next to where Hartley and her mother were eating breakfast. Paul Hartley was also an alcoholic and Hartley and her mother were planning to take him to a sanatorium that day. He did not die immediately, but was rushed to a hospital where he subsequently died. Hartley initiates the chapter about her father’s suicide with the question so many of us survivors ask:
“I don’t know if I will ever be able to understand why Dad did what he did. For many years, I took it personally. Then for a long time, I felt responsible. Not only responsible, but that I had caused it…When someone drinks, you know he’s running away from his feelings, but you never know what those feelings are. So you fill in the script…” (Hartley, 1988, 150).
The question “Why” continues—whether there is a note or no note (Mariette Hartley’s father did leave a sort of note); whether the person has been depressed. We know that—it’s a state—but not an answer to “Why?”
The connection between alcohol and suicide is strong. A former student of mine, we will call him Michael, shot himself with his grandfather’s antique pistol. Michael was an artist and art educator. He had stayed home with a cold and called in sick to his student teaching practicum at an arts magnet high school. He had started drinking in the morning, as evidenced by the bottles in his room in his parents’ basement. But what I remember about Michael was his brilliant, brooding art; his soulful writing (he had taken an advanced composition course from me) and his quick wit. He and a buddy used to stop by my office to talk and we were usually laughing in a few minutes. When I heard the news, I was truly stunned.
When I returned home after my husband’s suicide, everything was as he had left it the day before: he had been writing checks and paying bills—his characteristic yellow legal pad list of checks he had written and mailed was there. There was a note on a yellow posit-it, “Today I paid these bills and my life insurance premium.” I guess he thought I might wonder if the insurance was paid up—but it had been the farthest thing from my mind. There was also a wine glass that had a dried bit of red wine in the bottom—had my husband drunk glass of red wine to muster courage? I will never know. It could have been from the night before. Tim was not a big drinker, and in fact in the weeks before his suicide he had hardly drunk anything. We had gone to two cookouts that week and at each he had had a half a beer.
Alcohol is also a slow form of suicide; it is a legal drug that kills many over the long term. When I think of my father, who was an alcoholic, but died of melanoma that metastasized—I am certain he was self-medicating his chronic depression. But he must have known how destructive alcohol is—he watched his alcoholic brother die of cirrhosis of the liver. And their father, who was a heavy drinker, had committed suicide when my dad was 16. Mariette Hartley’s father had always been a heavy drinker but in the months before his suicide he had taken to drinking constantly:
“Nearly one-third of people with major depression have an alcohol problem, according to one major study conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In many cases, depression may be the first to occur. Research shows that children who are depressed are more prone to develop alcohol problems once they reach adolescence. Teens who've had an episode of major depression are twice as likely as those who aren't depressed to start drinking alcohol” (Depression Health Center, WEBMD.com). A.Alvarez documents the alcohol he consumed the week before he tried to kill himself with barbiturates (Christmas week).
In the United States we have created a culture of alcohol. We say, after a stressful day of work, “I really need a drink.” We convince ourselves that alcohol relieves us and relaxes us.
But alcohol can cause us to lose sleep. Alcohol can send us into the depths of depression. Alcohol can suppress any inhibitions or fears so that self murder is easy.
7. 05 November 2013
July 17, 2003: The day my husband took his own life. One of the hottest days of the year. Over 93 F.
From my journal, kept sporadically in the months after Tim died: I keep seeing him fall, in that space between the garage and the row of houses. No one saw him fall. A workman returning from lunch to painting a sorority house stumbled on him. He must have been a mess. I could not see him. I was too afraid. I knew he was ill, very ill, but I had asked him, before I left for Utah, if he was suicidal. He lied that he was not. I think he was planning it for when I was away.
His clothes were bloody and they must have cut them off at the hospital where they took him. It was summer. I imagine he had on shorts and a t-shirt. He was very practical and I imagine the clothes were old. I did not identify the body. Later, looking in the closet and drawers I could not envision what was missing. The coroner, a family friend, had done that and told me he would not advise me seeing him. His arm was fractured, with a bone protruding. He face was covered with lacerations and bleeding. He had landed in the alley between a row of large sorority houses and the parking garage. A workman who had been remodeling one of the sororities found him and called 911.
His body was transported from the hospital to the crematorium. I never saw him. I did not want to see him so battered. My son wanted to see him but I did not want him to have nightmares of seeing his father like that him. Was I wrong? I do not know. I suppose if we had a kind of calling hours or wake where there was an open casket; the mortician could have made him look “normal.” When I went to my dentist a few weeks later, she told me that Tim had had a temporary crown put in a week before he died; then he had lost it and called for an appointment to replace the temporary crown. Then at 11:30 a.m. the day he died he called and left a voicemail canceling his appointment which would have been at 100 p.m. The medical examiner put the time of death at 1:13 p.m. Our beige van was the only car parked on the top, unshaded level of the parking garage.
I do not regret choosing not see my husband’s body. It would have added to my nightmares. For a long time I had a dream of me being with him when he went over the edge of the parking garage which was not a very high barrier at all. Interestingly enough, his mother had the same dream. He had parked in the garage every day for years. In the winter when the garage was full he had often parked on the top level. Had he planned all this? I do not know, but knowing him I suspect he did.
The University had sent him to Poland on program administration for almost the entire month of May. He returned to Bloomington during the last week of May, and went off almost immediately to the wedding of a cousin in Connecticut where he knew he would see his mother, his sister and her husband and many of his relatives. Since I was going to be teaching in Greece for a large part of June, I asked him not to go—but he really had wanted to go. I think now that he had wanted that last time to see them, especially his mother and sister. While he had been in Poland he had seen every good friend we had from our time there in the eighties: he had even written to friends in Europe he would not see. I saw a copy of one letter, a five page hand written letter he had sent to his mentor, professor and friend at Stanford who had since retired in Berlin. The letter was a sort of apology to his professor who had always thought Tim was brilliant. In it Tim wrote that he had chosen not to pursue a scholarly career on literature and theater, but felt that our family was his great work, and thus what he had chosen over a high-powered career. He did not seem to express regret at the choice, he was just explaining it. André sent me a copy of the letter, and I talked with him on the phone. He did not feel he had ever judged Tim for not becoming a famous scholar. Tim had judged himself, and somehow he felt in his heart of hearts that he might have disappointed his mentor.
Tim’s illness may have prevented him from realizing the talented potential he had shown as a graduate student and young faculty member. Yes, he had published a revised version of his dissertation with an important publisher, the University of Chicago Press. He had published scholarly articles in journals like The Yale Drama Review; he had presented papers at many conferences. But it never seemed quite enough. Tim also would not ever ask for a raise or even ask a chairperson to review his low salary. When he died, Tim had taught in the IU English Department for thirty one years, and his salary was lower than mine at a smaller institution where I had much less seniority. Because IU is a state institution, the salary levels were regularly published. A few times I suggested he talk with his chair about his salary, but he never would consider it. He simply could not assert himself on behalf of himself, although he could plead a case for others. But I also fault the chairman of his department at the time of Tim’s death. The chairman was in a branch of the same field as Tim (Modern Drama) and despite Tim’s list of accomplishments and a record of distinguished service to the university,, the chair made a point to make him feel inadequate. And the Chair had a great deal of influence on salary levels.
Bi-polar disease is insidious: the people who suffer from it convince themselves that they are worthless unless they experience a manic episode and then they are lying on top of the universe. Tim rarely had manic episodes. He would swing from a normal mood to a deep, black hole of depression.. My mother-in-law remembers Tim’s first major adult depression—in 1975—when he returned home in January and told her he was leaving the academic professions and that he knew he was not able to be successful. That was very far from the truth, but the illness made him believe it. S9on after that, the chair of the English department called him at his parents' home in Maine and asked him to return to Bloomington: he told him he had arranged for Tim to see a psychiatrist who was Direcetor of the Indiana Unievrse Mental Health Center an that he had also arranged for Tim to keep his medical coverage. That chairman, wise and compassionate refused to allow Tim to quit. He was the wisest and most compassionate chair TIm ever worked for.
How does this disease grow and evolve? It has creates a terrible feeling in its sufferers. I have read so many books. I have talked to people who have it. It is in the DNA, in some people’s genetic code. Yet, I am still stymied by its nature.
This blog is for me, for my son, now 25 years old and scarred by the loss of his father to suicide. My son is adopted which makes the loss a double rejection. He is still very angry, and I understand that.
I am certainly angry too, but I am most angry for what my husband’s suicide has done to my son: experiencing such a loss at 15 was particularly hard, although it would have been difficult at any age.
Not only was my son so deeply affected but there were many people scorched by his choice to end his life by jumping off that building. His mother, who had already lost her youngest son to suicide 22 years before my husband died, was quietly devastated. His sister, his brother, former students, former mentors and professors who had considered him brilliant, colleagues—many of whom were shocked, having had no inkling of his 30 year struggle with the demons of bi-polar disease (he hid it well from anyone outside the family) were all stunned.
In the aftermath of my husband’s suicide, I did go to grief counseling with a private therapist. I was also regularly seeing a medications managing psychiatrist for an anti-depressant prescription—the same psychiatrist my husband had seen to manage his medications. I was told there was no survivors’ group at the time. Oh, I knew about the Samaritans—I had seen their sign on the bridge in the town I had grown up in. But when I asked about groups for survivors, none of the professionals I consulted had any suggestions. So I muddled along. My family doctor was really supportive and helpful, —often talking with me longer than he had time for. My friends were great. One dear friend called me every day for months after my husband’s death, just to make sure I was okay. People would see me in the grocery store or on the street and ask pointedly, “How are you?” I knew they were trying to be kind and did not know how else to show concern, but it got to the point that I wanted to have a t-shirt made that read” How the Hell do you think I am? Some people, usually my husband’s university colleagues would see me and turn the other way, pretending not to see me. Now after ten years, I realize that some friends whom I thought were friends to both of us, have dropped me, perhaps blaming me for my husband’s death.
Meanwhile, at that time in the summer of 2003, my son was at his most sullen, most oppositional stage—something that would have probably happened anyway when he was 15, but was exacerbated by what he had suffered. I wanted to help him but he was not going to accept help from me. He did continue with counseling and was on Adderall (he had been diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) when he was 10. Although my son is not my husband’s biological child (we adopted him when he was ten months old), he has since been diagnosed as being borderline Bi-Polar.
My son's anger was, like the anger of many teens, often aimed at the person closest to him—in this case me. He was so hurt himself he just had to strike out. Four years ago I signed up for the “Out of the Darkness” march against Suicide held in October by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP)—a group I had never heard of until I saw some of the publicity for the march. I mentioned it to my son, and to my surprise he wanted to join me. My two closest neighbors (who deeply felt Tim’s loss) also joined us. It was three miles and I was in terrible shape but my son stayed with me until I completed the first half. At the starting area of the March, some survivors shared their stories. There were huge groups of extended families and friends who were far more organized than I with t-shirts with pictures, signs, and banners. The stories were moving; the tears flowed. I was surprised and touched that my son wanted to march with me. The March was held on what would have been my husband’s 62nd birthday. Carla Fine writes that ” with each anniversary of my husband’s suicide, I am overcome by the irreversibility and irrationality of his loss.“ I understand that feeling very well—on the anniversary of his death, on his birthday, on holidays we celebrated. Even that day of the Suicide Prevention March, that irreversibility engulfed me. I certainly was comforted by the marchers’ stories, by their devotions to the memories of the person they had lost: there were over 500 people there but still I felt overwhelmed by irreversibility of their losses and my own.
As I reflect on my husband’s suicide, I cannot help but think of the suicide of my paternal grandfather, George, whom I never knew but who was, by all reports, charming, handsome, personable, and talented. Known for his Irish tenor voice and virtuosity at several musical instruments, especially the piano.
Supposedly, my grandfather who had not always charmed his wife, my grandmother as he was a womanizer and a drinker, had been staying in a hotel in Fall River, Massachusetts. He was a salesman of textile machinery and his territory was Massachusetts and Rhode Island—at that time the heart of the textile industry in the North. It has never been clear to me if there was a precipitating event or even moment; he no doubt suffered from undiagnosed depression as I am certain my father who drank heavily must have. [The story was told to me by mother who had heard parts of it from my Dad, parts from his sisters, and probably had conjectured parts of it. However, a solid practical German American, my mother had none of the Irish embellishing imagination of the McGann side of the family. ] My grandmother was furious at him for killing himself, leaving her with 4 children 16 and under—and I understand that fury now.
How my grandfather died is still unclear. The first version (heard from my mother) had him turning on the gaslight jets and not lighting them. But as an adult I asked my aunt, my Dad’s sister about it. My dad had hedged on whether or not his father had actually committed suicide. Had my father still been alive when my husband died, I might have been able to have an honest conversation with him about it—but he died three years before my husband.
So family myths, rumors and conjecture surround suicides. Anger and misunderstandings all abide.
3. 11 October 2013
Today, October 11 would have been my husband’s 66th birthday, so this is the tenth birthday he has been gone. He loved having people make a fuss over his birthday—when he received a large number of cards he would happily display them on the mantle in the living room. In his early days in Bloomington, a great college town with great bakeries, his mother, a fan of birthdays herself would order a cake at a local bakery, to insure that her bachelor son would have a cake. After we were married I would make one or we would go out to dinner. A few times I threw a party if the day fell on the weekend.
So today…is not just another day although I do not think of it as sadly as I did the first few birthdays after his death.
I asked my son what he thought we should do—and since he will be working that night, I suggested we think about what to do to honor the day. In the past, on the anniversary of his death, I have taken flowers to the sixth floor of the parking garage, the last place on earth where he stood. His ashes have been scattered in several places he loved—the Atlantic Ocean, Lake McWain in Waterford, Maine, and the Baltic Sea, and some of his ashes are interred under a rose colored marker in a quiet hillside cemetery in Norway Maine. So visiting the sixth floor of the parking garage is perhaps not as morbid as it sounds. Then again morbidity is in the mind of the beholder.
Was I surprised when my husband committed suicide? Yes, and no. I knew he suffered from the depressive end of bi-polar disease, although there were a few times when I saw him go through the manic side, for example impulse buying of something he would rarely use (a rowing exercise machine he used twice). But usually the down side showed. He was actually diagnosed in 1986, but in looking back from then he and I could see a pattern had been growing for thirty years.
My husband experienced his first fill blown depression in 1967 when he was studying in Tubingen Germany on his junior year abroad. He had had a great semester ending with a two week stay at Christmas with his cousin who was in Dublin that year. They had made a hilarious Christmas dinner, gone to pubs, and sought out sites connected with James Joyce, one of his favorite writers. Then he came back to Tubingen alone. He went through a deep depression which he convinced himself was homesickness, and decided to cut the year short and return to the United States. His parents accepted the idea that he was terribly homesick—he had rarely been out of Maine until his senior year of high school and then his matriculation at Antioch College in Ohio. He was also 16 years old when he first attended college, intellectually ahead of his class, but not emotionally. He literally crashed when he returned to Tubingen.
When he returned to Antioch in time for the following quarter he plunged into his classes and then a co-op job [Antioch had a schedule so that students worked (called co-operative jobs) one quarter or ten weeks, then returned to campus and class the next.] That year his co-op job was in Connecticut at Manchester State Hospital where he was aide in a ward for functioning but mentally disabled young men. Although his career path would not point in the direction of the mental health field, he thrived at the job. Looking back, I can speculate that helping boys more disabled than he would ever be was somehow uplifting. He focused on their needs rather than his depression and by the time he returned to the Antioch campus, it had lifted... He remembered the routines at the training school vividly and talked about them with me. They called the routine cleaning up the boys were required to do “milieu therapy” and for years we referred to our Saturday morning house cleanings as “milieu therapy.”
Back on campus he threw himself into classes—Antioch students usually spent five years on a Bachelor’s degree with the co-op schedule, but Tim was able to finish in four years—going on cooperative jobs all over the country—in Hillsboro California as a counselor at a public school year around enhancement camp, as a counselor at a foster institution in Boston, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton. Later, he would fondly reminisce about all those jobs especially the McCarter Theater tech internship—for theater was a great passion. He also involved himself in theater productions on campus, and the inevitable graduate school applications. His Antioch teachers recognized him as brilliant, intellectually curious student, and although Antioch at that time gave no letter or number grades, his records from completed courses demonstrated that brilliance. He applied to top graduate schools in English and Comparative Literature: Stanford, the University of Chicago, Yale, and when accepted, chose Stanford. He received a National Defense Scholarships and loans, and worked summers; he taught as a graduate teaching assistant. In 1968 he headed west and began his PhD work. And again he would speed through his graduate program, winning a National Defense Fellowship to go to Poland to do research on the avant garde theater created by Jerzy Grotowski. In Poland he refined his Polish language skills—he had become fascinated with Polish culture and theater under the tutelage of an international an Polish émigré scholar and dramaturg at Stanford.
As always a bit of a wunderkind (he started first grade at 5), Tim finished graduate school in four years, applied for jobs and invited to interviews, and when offered positions at three prestigious universities, chose to begin teaching at IU/Bloomington. He was practical and clever enough to know that earning tenure at Princeton would be impossible, since top tier Ivy League universities had established “revolving bottoms” in Humanities departments. The start of a promising academic career began in the fall of 1972 when he left a summer of jogging daily on the beach and typing his dissertation. That hard exercise and constant sun seemed to nourish his mental health for starting in Bloomington on a high note, perhaps too high, and tanned and healthy. A young woman, Denise, with whom he had a happy relationship, had left Stanford to move to New York City and she alone was disconcerted at his taking jobs in the Midwest. His first semester he taught his specialty, Avant Garde Eastern European drama, and seemed to be starting off well. The first year sped by as he acclimated to life as faculty member. I met Tim that fall, at the Graduate Student welcome party, and he himself looked like a grad student. He was 24, tanned, and the California sun had bleached his longish blonde hair. He looked like a surfer.
In October he threw himself a 25th birthday dinner, making Beef Strroganoff on a three burner stove in a tiny campus apartment. I was there along with four or five faculty couples whom he had come to know. The Beef Stroganoff was excellent. His mother had ordered a sumptuous, decorated chocolate birthday cake. The party was joyful.
The year passed; during his second and third year in Bloomington he and several graduate students in Folklore sublet a house from a faculty member teaching abroad that year. That fall torrential rains cause flooding in the basement of that house and the graduate students were not proactive in helping deal with the problem. Tim’s frustration with the graduate students’ passivity and irresponsibility increasingly frustrated him. That pattern of extreme frustration with situations or people he could not control would plague him most of his adult life.
But we also had one of our first dates in the fall, 1974—a trip to Indianapolis to a Herbie Hancock concert. It was a thrilling concert and I enjoyed the evening and Tim’s amazing knowledge of music and jazz. My brother had been killed in a motorcycle accident in August and I had moved to a job at the University of Cincinnati, but Tim had contacted me—perhaps feeling badly about my brother’s death. He was very kind, and I saw a compassionate side of him. He had taken me out to dinner in late July to congratulate me on getting a job in that very tight job market. Then, in October had called me to invite me to yet another birthday party, and then came the concert date—which I saw as a “just friends” date—remembering the Stanford girlfriend who had moved to New York.
All that academic year, the Indiana University Office of International Programs had been negotiating with the US State Department to establish an American Studies Center at Warsaw University—and in that Cold War era there were funds to establish cultural and academic exchanges with Communists countries. IU asked Tim to go to Poland in the first three weeks of January, 1975 to actually begin the setting up of the Center. But just before he left he had attended the Modern Language Association Conference, the biggest international gathering of English, modern Language, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature scholars in the world--held at that time the weekend after Christmas. He had stayed with Denise, the girlfriend, but while he was there she told him that there was no future to the relationship with him in the Midwest and her committed to staying in New York City. He was crushed, but had little time to brood as he left for Poland almost immediately.
The work in Poland as well as one could expect in a Communist country where getting things done required bribes and patience. It was still the Cold War, after all. Tim felt he had not accomplished enough.
In mid-January he flew back to Bloomington to resume teaching and he found himself paralyzed with depression. He crashed. He went to the Chair of the Department, a compassionate and wise academic who would go on to a career ending as Academic Vice President and Provost of the University—and he told his him he could not teach, and that he wanted to leave the profession. Wisely, the Chair arranged for a medical leave with continuance of medical benefits and put Tim in contact with the first psychiatrist he would ever see, a doctor who directed the University mental health center. He prescribed mood elevators (Elavil) and strenuous exercise. Tim began long, arduous bike ride around the hills of Monroe County. He worked hard on his therapy. At that time, there was little medical discussion of Bi-polar disease and the idea never came up. Tim had gone a rocky time—the girl he was sure he would marry had dumped him, the Poland trip was not a huge success (although the American Studies Center he helped establish exists today in independent Poland); he also was probably exhausted from having no inter-semester break, and experiencing severe jet lag.
Later that spring of 1974, Tim also contemplated a first suicide attempt. He rode his bike out to a Fire Watch tower in Brown County State Park and climbed to the top, thinking for an hour about jumping. He changed his mind and biked the 16 miles back to town. I believe he shared this with his therapist, but I do know that for certain. He told me about it years later.
When I heard from a friend teaching at IU that he was covering Tim’s large freshman literature lecture course, and was soliciting volunteers to lecture, I volunteered to give a lecture on Jean Anouilh’s Antigone.
I also called Tim after the lecture and offered to take him out to dinner: I did not want him to think I was shunning him. I found out later that he felt many people were avoiding him because they did not know how to handle or address his illness. He also told me at that time that he felt embarrassed, that he had let the department and his students down. I responded that an illness is an illness—and that it was not a question of letting anyone down. Like most people, particularly at that time, his family had not ever talked about mental illness as a real illness—it was something to be swept under the rug. This was probably February or March and he was beginning to feel better. We had a wonderful time, talking about our families (each dysfunctional in its own way) literature, music and a range of topics. I found out he was a fan of opera and I told him about the summer opera series in Cincinnati—and we offhandedly made plans to see an opera.
COMING IN NOVEMBER:
(from www.afsp.org)
Did you know that the Saturday before Thanksgiving was designated as International Survivors of Suicide Day by a congressionall bill sponsored in 1999 by senator Harry Reid (himself a survivor of his father's suicide)?
Spread the Word Each November, on International Survivors of Suicide Day, those who have lost someone to suicide come together in healing events all over the world to share information and mutual support.This is the only international program of its kind, and our goal is to reach every person affected by suicide loss. Can you help us to spread the word? The following are some ways you can help to get the word out:
- If you have a blog, website, Facebook page, or Twitter account, post an announcement or web banner about International Survivors of Suicide Day.
- Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper using these instructions and sample letter.
- Use our organizer resources to plan your own event.
- Print an announcement about International Survivors of Suicide Day in your organization’s newsletter.
International Survivors of Suicide Day:
A Day of Healing for Bereavement after Suicide
Saturday, November 23, 2013
DVD broadcast available with English, Spanish, or French subtitles
Each year in November on the Saturday before American Thanksgiving, survivors of suicide loss around the world join together at hundreds of local healing events to view a DVD program about suicide loss. During the program:
- Survivors of suicide loss share their stories and guidance for the benefit of the newly bereaved.
- Experts share current information about suicide and grief.
- Local events may plan other healing activities before and after showing the DVD program.
Find out everything you need to know to organize your own gathering at www.afsp.org/survivorconference.
www.afsp.org/survivorday.
4. 18 October 2013
Tim and I did attend an opera in Cincinnati, The Flying Dutchman, and a few days later he asked me to marry him. Considered the tragic idea of marriage in that opera, it's a bit ironic. By then his depression had faded; he was excited to return home to Maine during the warm months and excited to start teaching at the start of fall, semester. Neither he nor I were aware that his depression had been part of a pattern. He had not connected it with the depression that sent him from Germany during his junior year, and only several years later would we see the pattern emerging when he was finally diagnosed with Bi-Polar disease in 1986.
We were married in July of 1976 in Newport, Rhode Island, my home town. We would remain married for 27 years until he died. For the most part we were happy. and in the early years, were blithely unaware of the demons that would eventually surface.
Yesterday, I had lunch with an 84 year old friend, Helen,whose son committed suicide six years ago. We compared our stories and reactions –reactions that were similar. When I think of my husband standing on the highest level of that six story parking garage, looking over into the alley below, I wonder what he is thinking. I wonder what he is feeling. I once talked at length with a friend, Rona, now long dead from illness not suicide; Rona had become debilitated by bi-polar disease and was not working at the time. It was at a time in my life when I, too, was ill although doctors finally discovered that I had developed Adrenal Gland failure (Addison’s disease)—an auto-immune disease. Rona was sure I was experiencing a deep depression, and I did seem very depressed. I could not eat, I slept very little, and I had lost weight and felt exhausted all the time. These symptoms could have been part of a depression—and certainly I was experiencing a physical breakdown as my adrenal glands slowly were dying. Rona told me of a suicide attempt she had made a year before, and I remember her saying that she was at the time so depressed, so immersed into a black hole that nothing else seemed to matter. She did not have children, nor was she married at the time. After Tim had died, I thought about that—had he too been immersed in a black hole? Had his mind been so pushed by the emotional tornado that afflicted him, he had not thought of me or his son? He had written notes on yellow lined post-its—notes that gave no significant answer to the thousand questions we are compelled to ask after something like this. He simply wrote to me: “Mary —my love, I just could not hold on any more.” To David he wrote “ I love you. Please take care of Mom, grow up to be a good man, and someday I hope you will forgive me.” Helen’s son had not left any notes, any written explanation or goodbye. Notes or letters written at such a time could hardly do what we want them to. Helen, too, said she often pictures her son before he actually died, trying to know what was in his mind and heart.
It may not have mattered, but we want it to matter. No note or explanation would be enough to fill the void, the hole left by the person who seems compelled to take his/her own life. We want notes; we want explanations; however what we really want is to talk them out of it. We want to turn back the clock, to make it not so.
In April, 1981 my husband called me in Columbus, Ohio where I was working, to tell me that his younger brother Tris had shot himself. Until then I did not fully realized the ramifications of Tim’s depression.
I did not know Tris very well—he was at the time twenty five, eight years younger than Tim, the youngest of the four children. Tim’s parents were devastated, understandably. He had been seeing a psychologist, had been experiencing depression, but he had seemed to be recovering. He was dating a young woman he liked a lot; he had a solid job at a tool and dye making factory near his home, in Norway, Maine. His brother, Tom, the second oldest had found him. No note. No explanation.
There was little discussion that I know of, beyond what Tim told me. I was an outside. I had been married to Tim five years. I had met Tris a few times; he had come to visit once in 1979. Tim loved him of course, but they had not been close with the age difference between them. I felt very sad for my husband’s family. They bore the tragedy quietly, with dignity. They were, after all, a Yankee family who did not discuss their private pain and feelings. I knew the pain of losing a younger brother as I had lost my brother, John, to a motorcycle accident in 1974. While the grief caused by a random accident is different than the death caused by suicide, it seemed an odd coincidence that we both lost our younger brothers—despite the different causes of death.
For Tim, Tris’ death seems to have impelled him to want a child. We had been discussing having children (we were both in our mid-thirties) so we knew we had to make the decision quickly given my biological clock. But we were scheduled to teach in Warsaw, Poland for Fulbright and Indiana University for the school year 1981-2. I was not eager to deliver a baby in a hospital in a country where there were major shortages of everything including disinfectant cleaners and common medicines. We had to put plans for a family on hold—and we would not address those plans again for several years.
We did not bank on falling in love with Poland and Polish culture; we did not expect that we would participate in and witness a major historical upheaval. Our lives were changed for the better by our stay there. We ended up staying in Poland until July 1983.
I look back now, and realize that we often did not plan our lives very well. We were still relatively young and felt life would remain the same forever. As two people holding Ph.D.’s in English, our plans were often, at least in my case, decided by the ever changing job market. I was so lucky. In my first job at the University of Cincinnati, I had created and administered a Developmental English program for freshmen whose English skills needed improvement. It was the age of almost open admissions and high school English programs had not kept pace with the demands of universities—at least that is how universities saw it, but they were willing to help students close the gap. Skill and practice at teaching written composition was a job skill much in demand. And that skill earned me several great jobs, at good schools. However I was never going to be hired at Indiana University Bloomington where my husband taught. That meant I would always be working away from husband. And that is exactly what happened until August 1990 when I started a job at a small, comprehensive university in Indianapolis and could live with Tim in our home, with the toddler whom we adopted in February, 1989.
In the mid-eighties I was teaching at a college in Rhode Island. I called Tim to tell him about a job I heard of for someone with his qualifications within commuting distance of Providence. His response was lack luster to say the least, and I realized he must be experiencing another depression.
The next day I called him back and we had a long discussion. I told him I would have to think about leaving him if he did not do something—a pattern was beginning to emerge, although I do not truly know how aware of it we were. I just knew something had to change, particularly if we were to contemplate parenthood. After Tris’ suicide I became worried that Tim might do the same thing. I had never realized how such a death could overshadow so much. When my husband went through these depressive incidents he was unable to think of himself in a positive way. He saw himself as inadequate in every thing, especially professionally. This was far from the truth. His book had been critically acclaimed when it was published in the late seventies, his teaching evaluations were positive, he was professionally accomplished. We had heard of a medical doctor/psychiatrist (there were very few of these in town at the time) who was specializing in helping people who thought they might have Bi-Polar disease. The doctor was testing lithium levels. Evidently either my threat or the depth of his depression propelled Tim to make an appointment. He was diagnosed as being Bi-Polar and, in looking at the family history, the doctor felt that there might be a genetic pattern. The doctor prescribed lithium. Within a few weeks, Tim was emerging from the depression which had practically paralyzed him. For seventeen years, lithium helped him maintain his equilibrium.
Years later, as I look back over the eighties, I realize how much Tris’s death affected us. How unresolved Tim’s grief must have been. I thought for awhile that Tim could not possibly want to inflect the same pain again on his mother. I know now that it must have had the opposite effect on Tim—possibly allowing him the choice. What I do know is that suicide never goes away, never leaves us. As David Sedaris writes in reference to his sister's suicide, "Doesn't the blood of eery suicide splash back on our [the family's]faces?
5. 24 October 2013
A.Alvarez wrote The Savage God in 1970 in an effort to fathom his friend Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Plath a brilliant young poet killed herself when she was 30 in 1963. In The Savage God, Alavarez, a poet, essayist and literary critic, wrote a literary history of suicide, but also probed the suicides of two famous writers, Plath and Ceasar Pavese. Alavarez concluded that Plath’s suicide was really an attempt, a call for help and that’s eh had not meant to succeed. Biographers and other writers have disputed that claim. But Alvarez was also probing his own attempt at suicide a few years before he had written the book.
The historical survey of suicide and attitudes toward suicide is particularly instructive. Still, in 2013, the twenty-first century, suicide is still treated as a crime, it is so stigmatized the survivor families of suicides feel the shame and the stigma, to the point of lying about the cause of death or hiding it.In David's Sedaris recent essay in The New Yorker, he tells us that his sister Gretchen's obituary of Tiffany, the sister who filled herself recounted that Tiffany "had passed away peacefully at her home." Obituaraies of suicides rarely state that the deceased has killed himself or herself.
Alvarez summarized the evolution of suicide as a taboo. It is somewhat surprising to read that suicide was not a Christian taboo until the sixth century when in reaction to a heretical cult, the Donatists, a group which sought out suicide as a means of martyrdom and thus achieving sainthood, the Roman Catholic Church applied the sixth commandment to suicide which became defined as self-murder, and thus a mortal sin. Thus the early Christian, succeeding the Roman Empire took on the stoic, even accepting attitude toward suicide. St. Augustine, the foremost theologian and Doctor of the Church of the sixth century, denounced suicide as a "detestable and damnable wickedness” (quoted in Alvarez). Augustine’s authority led to the Council of Braga (562) to denounce suicide and to decree that the rituals of the Church would be denied suicides. Later in 693 the Council of Toledo, was to proclaim that even by attempting suicide, people should be excommunicated. The Middle Ages were fascinated and obsessed with death and it’s terrible details. Dante would reflect the terror of the church by relegating suicides to a desolate punishment in the seventh circle of Hell. One would assume that the shame of suicide, the fear of others knowing that that shame is part of our families originates from this era. Once when I brought food to a family whose had killed himself, I reminded the mother that I would not be the last to bring comfort food and that was the custom in the region in which they lived (as it is in many areas to bring food to homes of the bereaved). She dismissed the idea and told me “I do not want people to come and laugh at me.” I was stunned by this comment. I did not think anyone who would go to the trouble of bringing food would do so to mock the family. Sure enough within the next few days, many dishes arrived at that woman’s door. But the woman must have been feeling the terrible shame Christianity tells us to feel.
As someone who was raised Catholic, I grew up familiar with the stigma and taboo against suicide. I remember how the story of Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ for 30 pieces of silver was viewed. The nuns told us that Judas’ great sin was the despair of suicide, not his betrayal of Christ. The nuns pointed out that Judas’s suicide was a total repudiation of God’s love for us and our hope in redemption. I can remember when my mother told me of a man in town who committed suicide she lowered her voice and showed real shock. That man was a good person, a guy who was a few years ahead of me in Catholic school; he was often an altar boy at the 8:30 Sunday children's Mass. The authorities had found his abandoned car, his shoes, socks, watch and wallet parked near the Newport Bridge (since then renamed the Pell Bridge). His body was never recovered. His mother was an impeccably dressed, pleasant person whom I knew more from seeing at Church than I actually knew her. My parents knew her but not well; I cannot say I knew no more but what I saw in Church. Later, the rumor was that the man (around 28 at the time, I think) had identified himself as homosexual and could not face the stigma (this was forty years ago) and his mother’s horror. His fear and despair must have been great. He had brought up in a Church that vilified homosexuality and suicide, but for him the only way out was to kill himself. I felt so sad for him.
Someone just emailed me and asked me how I thought we could destigmatize suicide: I know what I chose to do when my husband died. The memorial service (not funeral) I planned celebrated his life. One speaker spoke of depression and how brave he thought Tim was to go to work every day, to continue teaching and living for so many years. When one newspaper representative told me the paper was printing the cause of death, I agreed wholeheartedly. and in every obituary I mentioned my husband’s struggle with depression. I never lie about how he died. I want people to know that he had a good life, was a successful scholar and teacher, and that he suffered from a terrible illness that finally defeated him in the end. That disease, and his death, are part of who he was and what should be honored. Sometimes it’s a conversation stopper but when people appear embarrass for asking I tell them that they did not know when they asked and that I am not ashamed of it. I try very hard to put these people at ease. We have finally reached the point (I hope) where we do not feel ashamed to say someone died of cancer (although I knew a friend from an eastern European culture who would not say the word “cancer” when her mother was dying of it—she even went to the trouble to put her mother’s cancer medications in other bottles so her daughter would not find out. She told me that there was still terrible fear and superstition around discussing cancer in her culture---and this was 2001!!
In the mail today came a bonanza of books that I had ordered from Alibris.com—the postage was not much but it totaled more than the bill for the books. Several were unavailable at other sites—possible out of print. All are about suicide and survivors’ stories. I have chosen to first read Mariette Hartley’s Breaking the Silence (1990). I do intend to publish an annotated list of such books. Reading them has been very helpful to me.
6. 31 October 2013
Mariette Hartley’s book, Breaking the Silence, disappointed me. Perhaps because she is a film and TV star, she seems to focus it more on herself and her development as an actress, rather than her life as a suicide survivor. Of course, one cannot split oneself in two either. She is both.
Hartley was twenty two years old, living in Los Angeles with her parents, when her father, Paul Hartley a brilliant and creative former advertising executive and graphic artist, shot himself in the head in the room next to where Hartley and her mother were eating breakfast. Paul Hartley was also an alcoholic and Hartley and her mother were planning to take him to a sanatorium that day. He did not die immediately, but was rushed to a hospital where he subsequently died. Hartley initiates the chapter about her father’s suicide with the question so many of us survivors ask:
“I don’t know if I will ever be able to understand why Dad did what he did. For many years, I took it personally. Then for a long time, I felt responsible. Not only responsible, but that I had caused it…When someone drinks, you know he’s running away from his feelings, but you never know what those feelings are. So you fill in the script…” (Hartley, 1988, 150).
The question “Why” continues—whether there is a note or no note (Mariette Hartley’s father did leave a sort of note); whether the person has been depressed. We know that—it’s a state—but not an answer to “Why?”
The connection between alcohol and suicide is strong. A former student of mine, we will call him Michael, shot himself with his grandfather’s antique pistol. Michael was an artist and art educator. He had stayed home with a cold and called in sick to his student teaching practicum at an arts magnet high school. He had started drinking in the morning, as evidenced by the bottles in his room in his parents’ basement. But what I remember about Michael was his brilliant, brooding art; his soulful writing (he had taken an advanced composition course from me) and his quick wit. He and a buddy used to stop by my office to talk and we were usually laughing in a few minutes. When I heard the news, I was truly stunned.
When I returned home after my husband’s suicide, everything was as he had left it the day before: he had been writing checks and paying bills—his characteristic yellow legal pad list of checks he had written and mailed was there. There was a note on a yellow posit-it, “Today I paid these bills and my life insurance premium.” I guess he thought I might wonder if the insurance was paid up—but it had been the farthest thing from my mind. There was also a wine glass that had a dried bit of red wine in the bottom—had my husband drunk glass of red wine to muster courage? I will never know. It could have been from the night before. Tim was not a big drinker, and in fact in the weeks before his suicide he had hardly drunk anything. We had gone to two cookouts that week and at each he had had a half a beer.
Alcohol is also a slow form of suicide; it is a legal drug that kills many over the long term. When I think of my father, who was an alcoholic, but died of melanoma that metastasized—I am certain he was self-medicating his chronic depression. But he must have known how destructive alcohol is—he watched his alcoholic brother die of cirrhosis of the liver. And their father, who was a heavy drinker, had committed suicide when my dad was 16. Mariette Hartley’s father had always been a heavy drinker but in the months before his suicide he had taken to drinking constantly:
“Nearly one-third of people with major depression have an alcohol problem, according to one major study conducted by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In many cases, depression may be the first to occur. Research shows that children who are depressed are more prone to develop alcohol problems once they reach adolescence. Teens who've had an episode of major depression are twice as likely as those who aren't depressed to start drinking alcohol” (Depression Health Center, WEBMD.com). A.Alvarez documents the alcohol he consumed the week before he tried to kill himself with barbiturates (Christmas week).
In the United States we have created a culture of alcohol. We say, after a stressful day of work, “I really need a drink.” We convince ourselves that alcohol relieves us and relaxes us.
But alcohol can cause us to lose sleep. Alcohol can send us into the depths of depression. Alcohol can suppress any inhibitions or fears so that self murder is easy.
7. 05 November 2013
July 17, 2003: The day my husband took his own life. One of the hottest days of the year. Over 93 F.
From my journal, kept sporadically in the months after Tim died: I keep seeing him fall, in that space between the garage and the row of houses. No one saw him fall. A workman returning from lunch to painting a sorority house stumbled on him. He must have been a mess. I could not see him. I was too afraid. I knew he was ill, very ill, but I had asked him, before I left for Utah, if he was suicidal. He lied that he was not. I think he was planning it for when I was away.
His clothes were bloody and they must have cut them off at the hospital where they took him. It was summer. I imagine he had on shorts and a t-shirt. He was very practical and I imagine the clothes were old. I did not identify the body. Later, looking in the closet and drawers I could not envision what was missing. The coroner, a family friend, had done that and told me he would not advise me seeing him. His arm was fractured, with a bone protruding. He face was covered with lacerations and bleeding. He had landed in the alley between a row of large sorority houses and the parking garage. A workman who had been remodeling one of the sororities found him and called 911.
His body was transported from the hospital to the crematorium. I never saw him. I did not want to see him so battered. My son wanted to see him but I did not want him to have nightmares of seeing his father like that him. Was I wrong? I do not know. I suppose if we had a kind of calling hours or wake where there was an open casket; the mortician could have made him look “normal.” When I went to my dentist a few weeks later, she told me that Tim had had a temporary crown put in a week before he died; then he had lost it and called for an appointment to replace the temporary crown. Then at 11:30 a.m. the day he died he called and left a voicemail canceling his appointment which would have been at 100 p.m. The medical examiner put the time of death at 1:13 p.m. Our beige van was the only car parked on the top, unshaded level of the parking garage.
I do not regret choosing not see my husband’s body. It would have added to my nightmares. For a long time I had a dream of me being with him when he went over the edge of the parking garage which was not a very high barrier at all. Interestingly enough, his mother had the same dream. He had parked in the garage every day for years. In the winter when the garage was full he had often parked on the top level. Had he planned all this? I do not know, but knowing him I suspect he did.
The University had sent him to Poland on program administration for almost the entire month of May. He returned to Bloomington during the last week of May, and went off almost immediately to the wedding of a cousin in Connecticut where he knew he would see his mother, his sister and her husband and many of his relatives. Since I was going to be teaching in Greece for a large part of June, I asked him not to go—but he really had wanted to go. I think now that he had wanted that last time to see them, especially his mother and sister. While he had been in Poland he had seen every good friend we had from our time there in the eighties: he had even written to friends in Europe he would not see. I saw a copy of one letter, a five page hand written letter he had sent to his mentor, professor and friend at Stanford who had since retired in Berlin. The letter was a sort of apology to his professor who had always thought Tim was brilliant. In it Tim wrote that he had chosen not to pursue a scholarly career on literature and theater, but felt that our family was his great work, and thus what he had chosen over a high-powered career. He did not seem to express regret at the choice, he was just explaining it. André sent me a copy of the letter, and I talked with him on the phone. He did not feel he had ever judged Tim for not becoming a famous scholar. Tim had judged himself, and somehow he felt in his heart of hearts that he might have disappointed his mentor.
Tim’s illness may have prevented him from realizing the talented potential he had shown as a graduate student and young faculty member. Yes, he had published a revised version of his dissertation with an important publisher, the University of Chicago Press. He had published scholarly articles in journals like The Yale Drama Review; he had presented papers at many conferences. But it never seemed quite enough. Tim also would not ever ask for a raise or even ask a chairperson to review his low salary. When he died, Tim had taught in the IU English Department for thirty one years, and his salary was lower than mine at a smaller institution where I had much less seniority. Because IU is a state institution, the salary levels were regularly published. A few times I suggested he talk with his chair about his salary, but he never would consider it. He simply could not assert himself on behalf of himself, although he could plead a case for others. But I also fault the chairman of his department at the time of Tim’s death. The chairman was in a branch of the same field as Tim (Modern Drama) and despite Tim’s list of accomplishments and a record of distinguished service to the university,, the chair made a point to make him feel inadequate. And the Chair had a great deal of influence on salary levels.
Bi-polar disease is insidious: the people who suffer from it convince themselves that they are worthless unless they experience a manic episode and then they are lying on top of the universe. Tim rarely had manic episodes. He would swing from a normal mood to a deep, black hole of depression.. My mother-in-law remembers Tim’s first major adult depression—in 1975—when he returned home in January and told her he was leaving the academic professions and that he knew he was not able to be successful. That was very far from the truth, but the illness made him believe it. S9on after that, the chair of the English department called him at his parents' home in Maine and asked him to return to Bloomington: he told him he had arranged for Tim to see a psychiatrist who was Direcetor of the Indiana Unievrse Mental Health Center an that he had also arranged for Tim to keep his medical coverage. That chairman, wise and compassionate refused to allow Tim to quit. He was the wisest and most compassionate chair TIm ever worked for.
How does this disease grow and evolve? It has creates a terrible feeling in its sufferers. I have read so many books. I have talked to people who have it. It is in the DNA, in some people’s genetic code. Yet, I am still stymied by its nature.