What Lies in Suicide’s

Wake
By Peggy Wehmeyer • Sept. 12, 2019

When I lost my husband in 2008, I learned

that the shocking cause of his death wasn’t
as rare as I had thought. More than 45,000
Americans died last year from suicide, in a
staggering but seemingly silent epidemic.
All this week mental health professionals
are sounding the alarm about this crisis,
drawing attention to the warning signs
that someone you love may be at risk.

I missed those signs until it was too late.

Once he was gone, my life was
unimaginably altered, both by his deadly
decision and the stigma it left in its wake.

Not long after I was widowed I found

myself at an elegant dinner party on the
Florida coast. I sat mostly with strangers at
a linen-covered table with candlelight.
Wide doors were flung open to the ocean
before us.

Occasions like these gave me a chance to

escape the grief I had been drowning in
since my husband’s death. The salty ocean
breeze and the fine cloth brushing against
my knee reminded me that even though I
had lost my life partner, I was still
breathing and that I needed to learn to
embrace life as a gift again. That wobbly
hope slipped away as soon as the dinner
conversation began.

The woman sitting next to me sized me up

and wondered if I’d been married before. I
answered with a simple yes.

From there the conversation read like a

script. “Oh, you’re divorced?”

“No, I’m widowed.”

I’d always thought divorce signaled a

failure in life’s greatest commitment. But
in the months and years after my
husband’s death, I discovered that there’s
something worse than a marriage that
ends in divorce — a marriage that ends
the way mine did.

My table mate tiptoed further into fragile,

off-limits territory.

“Did he have cancer?” she asked, eyebrows

raised.

“Yes, he did,” I said solemnly. Now I felt

the shame not only of Mark’s death but
also of my own deceit. Curiosity seems to
overwhelm wives when they meet
someone once married but now single. It’s
like rubbernecking alongside a bad wreck.

“Oh, my God!” they wonder. “Could this

happen to me?”

The woman pressed on. “What kind of

cancer did he have?”

I set down my fork and opened an

imaginary door to a closet full of disguises
I now owned. Tonight, I would don the
costume of a woman on top of her game,
one who had grieved her husband’s death
from cancer successfully and was happy to
be out socializing.

“Pancreatic cancer,” I said without

hesitation, confident that this would
satisfy my determined acquaintance. I’d
known a woman whose husband died of
pancreatic cancer, and he’d gone quickly.

Instead, she turned to me with an

expression I’ve come to know too well —
fear mixed with pity, the worst kind of
sympathy.

Breathlessly, she asked, “How long from

the diagnosis to his death?”

It was too late to backtrack. To tell this

stranger the truth — that my beloved
partner of a quarter century had killed
himself at our family’s lake house —
would be to step into the starring role of a
horror movie too terrible to watch. I
couldn’t do it.

I excused myself and hurried through the

open door toward the ocean. If only I
could wade in over my head and hold my
breath in a safe and silent place, where I
could wrestle with the unrelenting
question, “Why did he do it?”

This is what it’s like to survive the suicide

of a spouse. The depression and shame
that take a loved one’s life don’t go to the
grave with them as pancreatic cancer or a
brain tumor does. Instead, they attach like
a sticky film to the survivors.

That’s why when news breaks of the

suicide of a celebrity, like Kate Spade,
Anthony Bourdain or Mick Jagger’s
longtime girlfriend, L’Wren Scott, others
look for the reasons they took their lives,
but I scan for clues as to how their loved
ones are surviving the anguish and the
shame.

Kate Spade’s “heartbroken” father died

two weeks after her death. But I resonate
most with Spade’s husband, Andy, who
defended himself publicly against
speculation that their less than perfect
marriage contributed to her death.

“We were best friends trying to work

through our problems in the best way we
knew how,” he said. “We loved each other
very much.”

I could have said the same thing, because

as much as you may love someone, it’s not
easy to sustain a happy marriage when
one partner struggles with debilitating
depression or severe mood swings. Mr.
Spade said his accomplished wife fought
personal demons.

I knew those demons. I prayed and battled

against them for more than 25 years, but
on the night they convinced Mark he was
better off dead, I collapsed in defeat.

In the months and years after my

husband’s death, I would slip into a foggy
depression of my own, fueled by my loss
and sense of failure.

How is it I could persuade the man I loved

to apply sunscreen, get regular checkups
and wear a bike helmet, all in an effort to
prolong our life together, but I couldn’t
keep him from killing himself? Wasn’t it
my job as his wife to help him stay safe
and happy — securely tethered to life?

In the wake of a loved one’s suicide,

irrational shame haunts those left behind.
On the night Mark took his life, he had a
dinner date scheduled with our younger
daughter, Hannah, who was home from
college. For days she wept, asking, “Wasn’t
time with me enough to keep Dad from
killing himself?” His closest friends
condemned themselves for not following
up when he didn’t return phone calls. His
mother, who just turned 93, still wonders,
“If only I could raise him all over again,”
as if that could have saved him.

The questions friends and strangers asked

in the months and years after Mark’s death
only made it worse. At the funeral of an
elderly friend, an acquaintance seated next
to me in the church pew patted my knee
and whispered, “I can’t quit wondering,
have you figured out why he did it?”

At another gathering, while standing in a

cluster of people engaged in small talk, a
young woman said, as if she was asking
whether I washed my whites in hot or cold
water, “Peggy, did you see any sign it was
coming?”

For months the questions, like fiery

arrows, came — in the grocery store, in
airport security lines, in restaurant
restrooms. I began avoiding people I didn’t
know well. When unwanted queries
caught me off guard, my replies grew
understated and were clearly unsatisfying.
“No, I was stunned,” I’d say. “I don’t fully
understand why he did it.” Or “No, I didn’t
see signs it was coming.”

But as I would drive away alone in my car,

I’d rehearse what I wished I could have
said.

“Sure, I saw it coming,” I’d snap, pounding

my fist on the dashboard. “There were
little nooses hanging all over our house
and I just ignored them!”

Truth is, no one saw it coming. My

husband was bright and sociable, an
adoring father and husband. His humor
made him the life of the party. His own
battles with depression led him to help
countless others find the assistance they
needed to overcome it. But like many
accomplished men, Mark was good at
masking his feelings and powering
through his bouts of despair. His fateful
mistake was failing to reach for help when
he needed it most.

Over time, I’ve found a way to protect

myself when people ask me how and why
my husband died. I pause to leave the
question suspended in awkward silence.
Then I say gently and firmly, “You know,
that’s not something I’m really comfortable
discussing with you.”

The kindest thing anyone ever said to me

may also have been the most painful.

At an impromptu gathering of Mark’s

college friends in Chicago, one of his
former roommates, whom I hadn’t seen in
years, pulled me aside quietly, put a hand
on my shoulder and said, “There’s
something I’ve never told anyone but I
think it might be a comfort to you.” He
described the days he’d come home after
class to find Mark, captain of the college
ice hockey team, weeping in inexplicable
darkness, wishing he were dead.

The story broke my heart, but I go to it

when I find myself looking back over our
marriage for evidence that I failed him as a
wife. Never mind the stories of his black
moods in adolescence, the history of a
mood disorder that predated me; I
believed love would triumph, that I could
coax him into the light. What I failed to
fully comprehend until he was gone was
that I had no more power to heal my
husband’s mental illness than I do to cure
pancreatic cancer.

Many widows have told me it takes six to

seven years to recover from the death of a
spouse. I’d throw in a couple more for
suicide.

Unlike death by cancer, which has a clearly

defined perpetrator and victim, suicide
feels criminal. The act is often prompted
by a wide confluence of causes and
circumstances, hardly understood by
mental health professionals.

During a week that elevates suicide

prevention to a national imperative, we
might do well to consider its invisible
casualties, the living wounded.

After more than a decade, the painful

questions from others and my self-
condemnation are mostly gone. Grieving
comes now in manageable waves on
occasions like our daughters’ weddings,
the births of our grandchildren, other firsts
my family always dreamed we’d share
with him.

Some nights, when I lie in bed still

wondering why Mark left us like this, I
find my greatest comfort in the
paradoxical treasure he left behind. In a
last letter to me, waiting on our kitchen
counter, his final written words were, “I
love you, Peggy, with all my broken heart.”

Peggy Wehmeyer is a former

correspondent for ABC’s “World News
Tonight” and a writer living in Texas.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call

the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at
1-800-273-8255 (TALK). You can find a list
of additional resources at
SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

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