Most of us do not walk around thinking that, one day, everyone we know will be dead. It’s unsettling, too awful to even contemplate.
We all have our routines, our rituals. Little ways to capture and hang onto moments of something that feels like perfection in a world that, for some of us, offers so little of it that the idea of continuing to live becomes unbearable.
My father was one of those people. I was 14 when he died. My sister, Debby, was 13. My mother was never the same again, and my sister and I became much different adults than we might have otherwise.
This is not uncommon. Crack the shell of a person who has had someone close to them die by suicide and they will tell you that there is a clearly defined before and after.
“Why?” is a common question when someone dies. But it takes on a whole new layer of meaning when suicide is involved. Even if the person leaves a note, there are far more questions than answers.
Dad’s suicide came with a generous helping of complications. For starters, he was a rabbi, and he died on the eve of Purim.
Also, he had been dead for 11 years when I figured out how he died. Debby, who’d taken a somewhat different route to the answer, arrived at the same conclusion two years later.
Thirty-nine years out, Mom is still on the fence. She definitely seems to be leaning more our way, but it’s hard to be sure, because it’s only recently that she’s been willing to talk about it at all.
Here is a short version from the last person to see him alive — me.
He drove us to school that morning, dropping my sister first. Debby, who shared a bedroom wall with our parents, had told me earlier she’d heard something unprecedented during the night — our parents fighting.
Mom and Dad adored each other. I have never seen a couple more in love and more loving toward each other than my parents.
Once we were alone, I asked Dad about the fight. He said it was his fault. He wasn’t sleeping and Mom had been yelling at him to come to bed. I asked if they’d always waited to fight until we were asleep and he said no. When we got to school, I kissed him and told him I loved him. He drove away.
The congregation reported him missing when he didn’t show up to read the Megillah.
His car was found the following day on a country road surrounded by woods, just shy of a bridge that crossed a little lake. A search ensued, but turned up nothing.
Fifty-four days later, a floating body spotted by an off-duty state trooper was identified through dental records as Dad’s.
His best friend, a Hebrew Union College classmate, conducted the funeral. We didn’t sit shivah. I asked why.
“We’ve been sitting shivah for 54 days,” Mom said.
It was true that we had only been buying groceries on our own again for about a week before Dad’s body turned up. Up to that point, the house was pretty much always filled with people bringing food and spending time with us. And it all started again, full-force, the minute his body was found.
I knew somehow through all of that that my father wasn’t going to be back. But it had not occurred to me that there might be a body, and that would mean a funeral. There’s probably no name for whatever it was I had been doing. It was definitely not sitting shivah.
I was also confused, trying to figure out what had happened to my family. My parents had adored each other. The community loved my dad.
I was Daddy’s girl, Debby was Mommy’s girl. It was the perfect family rectangle.
Now I was setting the table for three. What had happened to our father? Our only source of information was Mom, and she wasn’t talking.
Recently, I interviewed my sister (a writer who has written an unpublished book about what happened).
“I believed Mom when she said it was an accident,” she said. “I thought it was weird and it didn’t make sense, but every time I tried to get her to talk about it she’d give me some platitude.
“She’d say, ‘You had 13 good years with him.’ ‘It doesn’t matter how he died, it was important how he lived.’ Any time we had questions, she swatted them away. So after awhile, we just stopped asking because we knew she wasn’t going to answer them.”
My recollections are similar.
If we asked too many questions, she got angry. And her temper was fearsome. Neither of us wanted to set her off — although I seemed to have more of a knack for it than my sister.
The year before my father died, my 12-year-old sister announced that she wanted to be a reporter. I was one of those kids who change their minds every week about what they want to be when they grow up. The only thing I knew I wanted was children, and the only way I knew to get them was to have a husband.
Debby worked on the school newspaper in high school, majored in journalism in college and was a staff reporter at a daily newspaper within two months of graduation.
I got married right out of college — still clueless about what I wanted to do professionally — and had a baby. It was deciding that Liza deserved better than my stock answers, “It was an accident” or “I don’t know,” that set me to trying — again — to find out what had happened to my father.
For Debby the reason was different, but the result was the same.
“I went to therapy because I was 24 years old and had never had a boyfriend and I didn’t know how to talk to boys my own age,” she said. “I figured it had something to do with Dad dying and my not having any males around to talk to.”
For both of us, good therapists were instrumental in helping us work through the issues surrounding Dad’s death. Both therapists insisted that we needed to get Mom to stop stonewalling.
With my therapist’s help, I developed a strategy. I would ask Mom about Dad when she knew something else would quickly preclude further discussion.
Mom came to visit a few times a year to see her grandchildren. En route to the airport for her trip home, we always stopped at my husband’s office so she could say goodbye.
And so, five minutes before arriving at his office, I would begin the questions. Mom knew the conversation would end when we reached the office. I didn’t bring up the subject on the way from the office to the airport.
For Debby, whose relationship with Mom had always been easier, confrontation paid off.
“I went to visit her one weekend with the express purpose of finding out what had happened the night before Dad died,” Debby said.
After receiving the usual non-answers, “I got really mad and said, ‘You have to tell me because it’s my story and I deserve to know it, too.’
“And she did. She said, ‘He told me we would all be better off without him and I told him that he needed to get some help.’ So I thought to myself, ‘Then I guess maybe he did kill himself.’”
It was both awful and liberating to finally have an answer. I had married a man whose mother had also died under mysterious circumstances and who had a surviving parent who didn’t talk about it.
Our marriage did not survive the fallout of my discovery, or the realization that what I most wanted to do professionally was to write.
Debby, who had already figured that piece of her life out, finally figured out how to talk to boys her own age and eventually married one.
We have always been honest with our children about what happened to Grandpa Elliot.
“I’ve never not known and it’s the best thing you did for me as a parent,” said Liza, 30, “because at an incredibly difficult time in my life where my genetic pre-disposition toward depression may have gotten the better of me, the knowledge that it was as much of a real disease as diabetes probably saved me from myself.”
My father was never diagnosed with depression or bi-polar disorder. But the declaration he made to Mom the night before he died was rooted in his own family history, both personal and medical.
He was born to an Orthodox family in 1928, just before the onset of Great Depression. His father was a cantor, his paternal uncles all rabbis or cantors.
His maternal aunt lived with them and supported the family between hospitalizations for bi-polar disorder and electroconvulsive therapy that never seemed to make her better for long-enough periods of time.
When he was 11, they lost their house and moved in with cousins. His maternal uncles both lived with depression and one died young. No one talked about him.
The family was pious and learned, but Dad grew up feeling like a second-class citizen at the synagogue because they were constantly reminded they were poor.
In the months prior to his death, Dad became convinced that his synagogue was going to fold, that he would lose his job and we would lose our house. He was unable to sleep and increasingly short-tempered.
I knew none of this explicitly. But I must have sensed something, because a month before he disappeared, he went out during a snowstorm on what I thought was a short errand.
My mother and sister were at an event. I was home alone. Those were the two longest hours of my life up to that point.
When he got back, I clung to him, sobbing into his coat collar. I told him how frightened I had been, how much I loved him and that I wouldn’t be able to bear it if anything ever happened to him. He said he was sorry and that he thought I’d realized he was going to the hospital to visit congregants.
A month later, he was gone. Decades later, I told my mother about it. She cried.
Recently, for the first time in my life, Mom said yes when I asked if I could talk to her about the events surrounding Dad’s disappearance and death. She’s 85 now, physically frail but mentally intact. I thought it would be easiest to just let her talk. She said I needed to ask her specific questions.
I asked if anyone in the congregation had died by suicide, and whether Dad had conducted the funeral and counseled the family. I asked — even though I knew the answer — whether she had known the warning signs of suicide.
She hadn’t. She does now, and recognizes how much he was at risk for taking his own life in the time before he died. Still, Mom, who knew him better than anyone did, is not convinced that the way he went was the way he would have chosen.
“My thought was, and I remember this vividly, that he would never do it in a way that we would have had eight weeks of wondering. He would have found a way that would not last eight weeks,” she said.
Her older brother and Dad had been especially close. After the car was found, Mom said, her brother went up to the lake, reporting back on what he had seen.
“He said it was very slippery up there and [your father] could easily have slipped on something and so that was…. I can’t put it into words,” Mom said. “He would never do anything that would cause us more anxiety. He was very protective of you and your sister and me.”
Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and coordinator of the ACCESS Program for Displaced Homemakers at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
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