Thoughts on my grandfather’s suicide
Two years ago this week, my grandfather killed himself at the age of 87 with expired barbiturates from 1983.
Friends of mine have heard the mini, morbid barroom standup set I’ve developed about this incident, with its timed sucker-punchlines. Because it’s funny that the first thing the man’s son, my uncle, said was “We thought he was too pussy to do it” in response to “Oh my god I just heard, I’m so sorry.” There is such great irony in the fact that this man was a pharmacist who had decades to squirrel away a cache of drugs but instead ended his life with those stolen from his own father. It’s so much fun to explain what the Hemlock Society was to strangers in the smoking area.
I feel like, if this was a more normal thing, the next thing I should be writing would be about how that routine is a surface-level skim of something much more deep, that it hides deeper secrets or a hidden reserve of deep heartache. There is something additionally morbid about grieving someone who made the choices my grandfather did. Who lived a life fraught with lost connections, lingering negativity, and clinical pessimism. But mostly, someone who talked about killing himself for four decades.
The first time that my mother met her future father-in-law, he asked her to bring him Hemlock Society pamphlets to where he lived abroad. The Hemlock Society was an American right-to-die and assisted suicide advocacy group. Its motto was “Good Life, Good Death.” I can’t say, on a fundamental level, I disagree with the right-to-die movement. I have a feeling that I will be ready to go when my quality of life has reduced my abilities to do things like roll a decent joint or crack my hips (on purpose.) My mother’s mother passed away the week that I moved to Germany. It had been a long time coming, a relief, and I had said what I knew would be my final goodbyes in the weeks leading up to my move (it should be noted that even in her dementia-addled mind, she remembered she did not approve of the nation of Germany.) In a lot of pain both physically and mentally, the toll of forgetting that her husband and friends had passed and had to daily receive reminders, she requested from her children for years to pursue assisted suicide. It never came to pass, but it opened my mind to new thoughts on the subject.
That grandmother had lived a very full life, filled with adventures and joy and a constant pursuit of knowledge. My grandfather, on the other hand, was a bitter, joyless man, one with whom I put off phone calls with until this time, it ended up being too late. My grandmother’s reasoning for assisted suicide was that she was content with the life she lived, but her current existence was unenjoyable and therefore, rendered unnecessary. I actually do not know the roots of my grandfather’s interest in the subject. No one has explained it to be. All I know is that it was a fervent interest for so long that we ended up in a “boy who cried wolf” situation where eventually, no one took him seriously when he informed those around him that he would kill himself.
“We thought he was too pussy to do it.”
My grandfather’s ex-wife, my father’s mother, was the brightest, bubbliest star in our family sky. The most consistent source of support, love, and chocolates that we have ever known. She died too young, in her 70s, from a very aggressive pancreatic cancer. She passed surrounded by her closest relatives, with her favorite Sondheim song sung by our synagogue’s cantor, my mother’s friend. She had been on the best possible terms with her ex-husband, and to me that struck an introspective spiral into a comparative study of their lives and deaths. My grandfather was maybe the “worst” of my grandparents, and I (very guiltily) opine that he is the one who lived the longest. Feels like some kind of cruel twist of fate. He didn’t even want to be alive, apparently. He hadn’t, for a long time.
I wonder what my grandfather was thinking in his last moments. What did he feel? Was it spite, shame, pride, despair? Did he think “I told you so?” He didn’t leave a note. We got no goodbyes. So I have no idea. That is maybe the thing I dwell on the most, the not knowing. But, I feel this way when I start a TV series and haven’t yet learned every tiny bit of trivia about it. Even this doesn’t seem to have a meaningful uniqueness. The whole situation just is exactly what it is. I know even if I’ve cried about it more than I have my 200th rewatch of Fleabag.
Without answers to these questions, I can’t come up with follow-up questions. The research ends and the conclusion is dull and foggy. A man is dead, a man with no obituary and very few people to mourn him. I’m one of the people here to do that but I’ve just written why it is confusingly hard to. And I wonder about a life so lonely, and I fear it, and I ruminate if I sometimes send myself into a social overdrive over that fear. I hope I can let go of this fear, and remember that my family was still full of light and love at one time, that it can again, and the light drizzle of rain that’s followed us since his death will lift.
