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Suicides I Have Known
The first one was early, scary, and quite a bit more than my six-year-old brain could process. The shooter was the father of five; he shot his wife, then himself. She survived, he didn’t. My Dad married her when she got out of the hospital, legitimizing their affair that had begun before all of that went down. The affair might have precipitated the shooting, or it may well have happened anyway. She knew her husband was unraveling and maybe that’s what drove her into the arms of my Dad. Any port in a storm. The narrative was that the husband was addicted to Bromo-Seltzer and it was making him crazy. Near the end he carried around a bottle of it in his bathrobe, for quick access. They don’t make Bromo-Seltzer anymore.
The next one I remember was from when we were living in the little mountain town where my Mom grew up, after my parents’ inevitable divorce. The guy and his wife were Polish immigrants and he worked in the mine, like most men in the town. No one knew that much about Ivan but I remember that he had a big American flag pinned to the wall in his bedroom, as wide as the bed. I was over at their house with his son who was a couple of years older than me, after it all happened. I remember that it felt weird and creepy to be in the bedroom of a guy that had shot himself. A town of 300 is more like a family than a town and everyone felt what he had done. His widow lived to old age and became one of…
