I seem to have plowed a path of destruction, suicide-wise, in my earlier years.
In 1958, I studied "intermediate algebra" with a cheerful, well-regarded teacher named Ruth B. White. One Monday morning, she wrote her new name on the blackboard; she was no longer Mrs. White; she was now Mrs. White-Green. Her supportive students, I remember, applauded enthusiastically. But just as the semester ended and we pupils moved on to trigonometry, newlywed Mrs. White-Green, sadly and incomprehensibly, took her own life. What a shock and puzzle for a gawky innocent Flatbush "yoot." Why, I asked myself, should re-marriage lead so suddenly to suicide (if indeed the two events were at all related)? To me, this tragic occurrence was an early indication that human psychology was a heck of a lot more mysterious than cocooned me had imagined. And then, a few years later, in the spring semester of my second year in college, I enrolled for a course in medieval history with the very distinguished Professor Theodore Maroon. Just a few months after the class concluded, Professor Maroon destroyed himself. Moreover, the very next year, I surveyed early American literature in a course taught by Professor Stephen Emerson Black, who, the following summer, attached a hose to the car exhaust, shut the garage doors, and put an end to his existence.
I need to reassure myself that it was only a few, not all, of my many teachers who pulled the trigger after trying to educate me. Nevertheless, something of a pattern emerged. The trajectory continued in 1960, when, two months after he officiated at our wedding, cigar-chomping Rabbi Herschel Gray walked into Lake Yahnundasis in order to drown himself. Why? I had nary a clue; still don't, in fact.
Several other people with whom I've crossed paths have also chosen to leave life behind. I remember dour Alfredo Naranja, a college acquaintance from Costa Rica or perhaps Panama. He graduated from Cornell, returned home, and immediately shot himself. I also remember handsome fair-haired Stanley Brown. He was a classmate at EHHS; the two of us studied four years of Latin in the same half-empty schoolrooms. He was not a close friend, though I clearly recall that we occasionally trudged home from school together. Stanley went on to Columbia, where, I was later informed, he graduated first in his class, which is no mean achievement. I wasn't surprised -- he was smart and extremely serious about schoolwork. Stanley then proceeded to Harvard Medical School. Cambridge was my home at that time as well and although our paths had not crossed in four or five years, Stanley telephoned me "out of the blue," as they say, and engaged me in conversations that were longer than I wished. I realize now that I was not as hospitable to him as I might have been. He was lonesome, I think. And then came the news that he had killed himself. I now wish that I had been more cordial -- but how was I to know that he was in such mortal pain? The story has a coda: Stanley's grandparents owned a delicatessen on Ditmas Avenue between East 7th and East 8th. Some years after the suicide, I stopped in at the store for a salami sandwich (or something) and encountered the diminutive elderly storekeepers -- a sad, crushed couple. I knew, or thought I knew, that they were mourning the death of their promising grandchild. Was it my imagination, or was my intuition correct?
And then in graduate school there was Arthur Blue. Arthur was a serious poet and budding scholar. I was a close enough friend that I was invited to his Episcopal wedding in, I think, Wellesley, Massachusetts, where, for the first time in my life, ceremonious kneeling was required of me. Arthur and I kept up an intermittent correspondence after I moved to New York and he to Seattle. I remember congratulating him on the births of his two daughters. But then one December, I received an end-of-the-year card from Barbara Scarlet-Blue, which contained a most memorable sentence: "Of course you have heard of Arthur's suicide." Well, no, I hadn't. I was later informed that Arthur had turned on the gas at his summer house on Vachon Island, where he had been on a solitary vacation. Barbara offered no theory to account for Arthur's act, but now, fifty years later, I suspect, without evidence, that he had sexual identity problems with which he could not cope. If so, he would be another casualty of the commonplace bigotry of that era. Arthur's death is a suicide to which I am not reconciled, and never will be.
And I must also remember Mary Crimson, wife of famous Shakespearean scholar Reginald Crimson, who, depressed, slit her wrists in the bath. It was an absolutely devastating act for Reg and his many friends and admirers.
And then there are the young people, the next generation, who made irreversible decisions when they were far too young to do so. There's the horrible story of Carol Pink, a daughter of friends, who jumped off a balcony in Lincoln Towers in Manhattan and landed, twenty stories below, on the roof of a yellow taxi. Apparently, she tried to grab her brother and pull him down with her, but thankfully she did not succeed. And Alice Magenta, daughter of Hill neighbors, who killed herself in her late teens, a disaster made more excruciating because her elder half-brother had done the same deed few years before. Their parents never recovered from the twin losses; but why should they? Another young person was twenty-two year old Francesca Crimson, the daughter of a pair of famous artists and herself a promising photographer; another plunge from the roof of a tall building. And also, the teen son of my longtime colleague Richard Purple, who did himself in with drugs, though his religious family chose to believe, against all the evidence, that it was an accidental overdose.
I respect suicides, even when I don't understand them, because I believe that everyone has a right to do what they want with their own selves. But I am saddened beyond ordinary sadness when very young people take their own lives. If an adolescent or twenty-something boy or girl told me that they had suicidal thoughts, I would say "almost everyone has a few bad years; almost everyone is miserable during adolescence. But almost every one of these unhappy beings turns out to live a productive, useful and essentially happy life. Give it a few years; don't make a precipitous decision. Hold on; hang tough; trust me, it's going to get better."
