By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I will never forget a haunting summer in a trailer park in the early 1980s, when suicide lived just down the road.
In the early 1980s, my mother grew weary of renting apartments and bought a one bedroom fixer-upper micro mobile home in a small trailer park on 4th Street and Grant Avenue in the northern part of Ogden. She was happy to own her own little house, for the first time in her life. I shared her joy about the place, but remain forever haunted by one hot evening there.
My older brother Pete and I helped repair Mom’s mobile home—my brother much more effectively and efficiently than me (see: Mechanic v. Lawyer). I lived in the rejuvenated trailer in the park during a couple of summer breaks from college at Notre Dame. My bedroom was a lumpy sofa bed in the cozy wood paneled living room.
It was an interesting neighborhood. One resident was a lot like Mom—a divorced working woman tired of paying rent and trying to build some equity in something. Her nearby single-wide mobile home was neat as a pin and featured several carefully-tended flower boxes filled with pansies and geraniums.
The wizened retired folks just across the street had a makeshift carport-garage, created with colored vintage plastic corrugated roofing material, and filled with the fruits of two long lifespans of concerted collection. They either were elderly hoarders or preparing for the mother of all yard sales. They even collected the weather. They could (and did) tell me the historical meteorological conditions on any given day from the previous four decades.
And then there was Cleo. She too was an older and apparently retired women, but lived alone in a nondescript trailer three or four concrete pads away from our spot. I never knew her full name or story. My mother described her as a lonely, neglected soul who needed a friend. Cleo wanted Mom to fill that role.
I met Cleo only once. She stopped by the house to speak briefly with Mom one day when I was there too. She was short and thin, with clean but straggly gray hair. She reminded me of a skittish deer in an open meadow, furtively watching all the space surrounding her, ready to flee at the first sign of trouble.
I struggled to find a summer job that year, and took on a part volunteer, part underpaid press/publicity aide role for a Congressional candidate. One night after work, Mom and I had planned a dinner and movie outing together. Cleo threw an unexpected wrench into our plans when she called and asked to visit.
Mother patiently spent some time on the phone with her. In contrast, I was impatient to start our planned fun. I kept pointing to the clock and signaling Mom to break off the call. Finally, she did and we went out. We learned the next day that Cleo took her own life later that same night, hanging herself in her shower stall.
I do not harbor any messianic illusion that we could have changed this dismal course of events had I thought less of my own fun, and more of someone else’s needs, on that fateful night. Still, I felt bad. Mom was somber too, but she told me that Cleo was sinking in a deep well of sadness long before either one of us had met her.
I do not think Cleo was a Catholic, but I also considered her life-ending decision in the context of my own Catholic faith. For a long time, both my church and society seemed to shun the Cleos of the world. To take one’s life was a mortal sin, for which no Catholic funeral or burial was available. Suicide even was a crime, which made little sense to me given the obvious hurdles to prosecution.
Several years later, one of my Catholic friends ended his own life too. I attended his Mass of Resurrection with some dread, recalling my own previous dogmatic ruminations about Cleo. I was surprised, however, by the compassionate tone and words of comfort offered by the presiding priest. He told everyone in the church that our mutual friend had been living in a dark cold room, from which he found no escape, and that he did what he needed to do to escape that terrible place, the same thing any of us might have done.
This kind priest’s homily reminds me of another one I read recently. “Our friend died at his own battlefield,” explains a eulogy for suicide victims attributed to the Unitarian minister Rev. Weston Stevens: “Only God knows what this child of His suffered in the silent skirmishes that took place in his soul.”
In an April 2020 article on suicide (available here), Fr. Ronald Rohlheiser drew on great literature for a similar explanation: “There’s a powerful scene in the musical adaption of Victor Hugo’s, Les Miserables. A young woman, Fantine, lies dying. She tells of once being youthful and full of hopeful dreams; but now, worn-down by a lifetime of poverty, crushed by a broken heart, and overcome by physical illness, she is defeated and has to submit to the tearful fact that ‘there are storms we cannot weather.’”
Today, the Catholic catechism recognizes, “Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide. We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives.” (Read more here.)
Cleo was my first acquaintance who ended her or his own life. Perhaps I was too oblivious. As the Jesuit magazine America reported in a March 2018 article: “suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, killing roughly 45,000 people each year, 123 people every day.”
Long after Mom sold her mobile home and bought a newer model, and a full ten years after her neighbor had joined that list of statistics, I still thought about Cleo often. Ultimately, in an early manifestation of what I now call my “blog therapy,” I wrote about her too, but this time in a poem (see below).
I read the poem again recently, now over a quarter century since I wrote it in 1993. I was surprised that not only does the poem say what I felt then, it also expresses—with just one small word added and italicized below—what I better understand now.
As said so well in the America magazine article, suicide is a “surrender to a disease that made living unbearable.” The same is true when we give way to any other illness. There is not—nor should there be—anything stigmatic in that ultimate acknowledgment of our humanity. And so, dear Cleo, rest in peace.
CLEO
Cleo.
Old
and
alone
and
sick
and
despairing
and
alone
and
without
hope
and
tired
and
tired,
hangs
herself
in
her
shower
until
she
is
dead.
Alone
alive,
not
alone
dead.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
