Suicides I Have Known

A man dies and his soul ascends to heaven. Etching by Karel van Mallery after Jan van der Straet. CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36647902

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…