Waiting for a trolley at the 30th Street station in Philadelphia, I saw two clumps of weeds pushing up through the rock ballast and over the creosoted crossties, seeking sunshine and water to stay alive.
That put me in mind of my father, now dead for nearly 68 years. If these brainless shreds of grass, battered 24/7 by trains, grease and dirty air, can fight to stay alive, why couldn’t my father similarly fight off his demons and live beyond his 49 years?
For whatever reasons, he could not. In 1950, he killed himself with a single shot from a .22 caliber pistol. He left my mother, just turned 50, daughters aged 17, 15, 8 and 6, and me, 10. I doubt he thought through what would happen to all six he left behind.
If you are along the route today of the Ride for Suicide — it runs from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. from Auburn to Livermore to Winthrop to the BBQ Pit in Lewiston — salute the riders. Donate to the mental health programs that might, just might, make fewer of these rides necessary in the future. And remember, many of the riders are the relatives of people who killed themselves. They know the pain from which they want to spare others.
Last year, 1.1 million Americans attempted suicide. That’s three-tenths of one percent. That may be one of the lowest success rates in any endeavor in American life. Of the 1.1 million, about 45,000 (three-quarters of them male) succeeded. That’s four percent. So, four percent of three-tenths of one percent succeed. That’s still too many.
I have long thought that killing oneself must take a bizarre combination of courage and cowardice. Courage to actually pull the trigger, drive in front of a loaded pulp truck or into a bridge abutment, take a bottleful of pills to bring on permanent sleep or throw oneself from a height that guarantees death. And cowardice because the self-killer cannot take the tough steps to deal with the demons.
Many tried to explain why Ernest Hemingway killed himself. I wonder if the writer who had made so much of “manliness” doubted his own “manliness” because he had never fought in a war, never faced the decision of whether to take a human life.
Hemingway left his job as a reporter at The Kansas City Star for the fray of World War I. He was an ambulance driver. Even though he faced death as a medic and later as a reporter in the Spanish Civil War, he never had to decide whether to kill a human being.
Until July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.
As with Hemingway’s motivation, we know way too little about what prompts people to end their lives. Is it because life’s fortunes went south? Are some people just born with a weak will to live? Is it even just programmed into some of us?
On Wednesday, I saw the movie “Identical Strangers” about three men adopted at 6 months of age by three different couples. As they met one another 20 years later, they learned they were triplets, born as a result of a one-night stand in 1961 in New York.
They received huge publicity back in the early ’80s, with Phil Donahue, Tom Snyder, David Letterman and others interviewing them, noting that before they knew about one another, all had wrestled in high school, smoked the same brand of cigarette, preferred the same type of woman (blonde, apparently, judging by the interviews with their wives).
So many similarities that the pendulum that always swings between nature and nurture — that is, are we shaped more by our genes (nature) or by our rearing (nurture) — was tilting to the nature side. The three seemed fated to many characteristics and behaviors.
With a bang, literally, the pendulum swung back toward nurture. Eddy killed himself. Eddy was a teacher’s son, solidly middle-class. The sinister side of the story is that the babies may have been placed intentionally with parents with backgrounds of depression. So each was reared in an atmosphere of sadness and perhaps futility. Eddy’s upbringing was strict, and he and his father never talked about much of anything. Back to nurture.
If the bent to suicide were in our genes, how to explain that Bobby and David, the birth brothers, did not kill themselves? Apparently not even think of it, despite rocky times. The mysteries around suicide may be the hardest to dig out, perhaps the most lethal.
But one guy with a motorcycle whose father committed suicide, along with hundreds of other riders, may turn a long ride today into a short step tomorrow toward cutting the suicide rate, a rate that has grown by a third in this century.
The Ride for Suicide is organized by Nick Danforth, 34, of Lewiston, whose father committed suicide nearly three years ago. The money it raises will go to help people who might be thinking about suicide or have been hurt by someone else’s suicide.
He told the Sun Journal’s Kathryn Skelton last week that he has been surprised when people ask for a photo or tell him the ride made a difference for them. “I’m just a normal guy,” Danforth said. “When you hear that type of stuff, wow, I don’t know what to think about it.” Maybe he should think he has started something out of which only good can come. Preventing one suicide is worth a huge effort. Take it from one who’s been there.
A woman who works with Danforth is happy she didn’t carry out her planned suicide. Danforth attended her wedding last summer. Perhaps she, unlike my father, thoroughly considered the folks who would have been left behind and she thought better of it.
One thing is certain. None of our problems are permanent, so, as a friend told me, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Bob Neal long ago stopped being shy about being a suicide survivor. Next week, he’ll tell the personal story of living after a parent kills himself.
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