A Tough Topic

The Topic: Suicide

Take a look at the beautiful woman holding this baby. The picture on the right is that same child two years later, the younger of two well loved grandchildren. A third would grace the woman's life before she died, far too young, and by her own hand.

The woman is my grandmother. The child is me. This picture was taken during a time of sheer innocence and a time that seems like lifetimes ago. I believe the picture with Grandma was taken in 1957. She died in 1970. Why do I bring this up now? Because it was this past week, some 36 years ago, when life ceased to be worth living for this wonderful lady. What I wouldn't give to have been able to see the handwriting on the wall, but my clairvoyant abilities were far to undeveloped at that point in my life. What a pity.

It has taken me years to stop being angry at my Grandma. I always felt she had robbed herself of such rich experiences that would occur in the next 5 years. Only in the past five years or so have I come to understand the depth of pain she felt after my Grandfather's death some 14 months prior. As an adult, I can clearly see the depression that encompassed her life and can recall the prior attempts, the cries for help, even in the short span of my life with her. I can stop being mad at her. Now I am merely sad.

Why did I choose to deal with this subject tonight? Most assuredly it stems from having known two people who died during the course of the past two weeks. One, from a long bout with cancer, the other from multi-system failure likely due to cancer from earlier this summer. Both fought desperately to live. Today, I learned of a third death, a woman I had worked with for years at my hospital. Another cancer that was battled for years. These people fought. I feel that my grandmother just gave up. Right or wrong, it's how I've felt.

Like my grandmother, I have suffered with clinical depression for nearly a decade now, but unlike her, I am medicated during stages of this hereditary syndrome and refuse to allow myself to get anywhere near the state she exhibited. Both of my children have also recognized the symptoms early on and have sought medical intervention.

I still feel the pain of my grandmother's death because I feel she cheated herself and us, her children and grandchildren. I resent that my mother had to be the one to find her, knowing in her heart that her mother was dead when she walked into my grandparents' home. I wish she could have had one quarter of the strength my mother, her daughter, possesses. And, I won't even discuss the thoughts that come when I contemplate the theology with which I was raised in regards to those who commit suicide. I can't make myself believe those images.

So, tonight, I allow myself to sit here, write, cry, and try to again reclaim the beautiful images of a beautiful woman as I purge the demons that entered my life on September 30, 1970.
Dawn

Rest in peace Grandma.
Laura B. Currey (June 6,1909-Sept. 30,1970)