About Suicide
Sunday, March 11th, 2007
It was 1984, I think, that I was attending an acting school in Montreal. We took a tour to Manhattan and one of the places we stopped at was a comedy club because we thought it would be groovy.
Richard Jeni was on the list. I believe he was third in a line-up that had about four comedians. I watched him throughout the years, and to be bluntly honest, really didn’t think that much about it although I thought about it in intermittent bursts of recognition when I saw him on television.
I don’t want to talk about Jeni the comedian however, I want to talk about the fact that he just might have killed himself today.
Back in the fifties, when my mother was a wee one and before she had a little girl, who was this blogger we all call newscoma, she lost her grandfather to a suicide. He was a well-thought of man, had several children, including my beloved grandfather, and even served on the city board in our local abode in Hooterville.
My mother said he was quite a tall man, which surprises me, because the rest of us are a bunch of shorties, and he apparently had a swagger about him. A way that made people stand up and pay attention to him.
He was that sort of guy.
As he left the family one day and my mother who adored him, who was as young as my dear precious niece Bear he never returned.
That is because he walked out in front of a speeding train.
Suicide is a weird thing, isn’t it? My mother was always very preoccupied with any suicide she heard about either locally or nationally. I think as a child she wondered if she had anything to do with it, which we all know is ridiculous. There was some talk of a suicide note where he wrote he had inoperable cancer, but I’ve never seen that note, and if memory serves me, neither did my mother. I am guessing this gave the entire family comfort although I wonder if it really ever existed.
And sometimes she would talk about his death, and her eyes would fill with tears for a man she loved that had, for all practical purposes, fallen victim to his own demons.
The demons won.
People do things in the heat of the moment. Sometimes there is tragic results, sometimes not.
A woman I work with nephew also committed suicide as well just a few years ago. It took her a lot of time to understand there was no understanding why people do what they do.
Despondency and depression is an odd, vicious thing. It attacks people and tears them into little pieces.
What did my mother and my co-worker do after their losses? They went on, although it was painful and there were no answers to pressing questions.
But it changed them.
Anytime I hear about an apparent suicide, I think about this.
