By Marianna Hopkins (Guest Contributor)–
In 1954, when I was five years old, I woke to a hysterically crying mother who had just learned from a phone call that her sister was dead. She was informed that her dear sister whom I will call “Maude” had died of a cerebral hemorrhage during the night. Mom was inconsolable.
Mom’s sister had not been ill. Her fifty-one years felt way too young to die so unexpectedly. We had recently seen her over Christmas when she had presented me with a beautiful velvet and taffeta dress. She was good at looking after me and a cousin of the same age. She was a generous and outgoing person who seemingly cherished her life. Of course, as a five-year old, my knowledge of her was minimal. But as a fifty year old woman I should have been smarter about asking those ahead of me in life the right questions. I didn’t. And now they are gone.
Maude had her own son who was grown by then, a successful college student on his way to a lucrative and professional career. Unfortunately, she had lost two other sons, one at two and one shortly after birth. The causes of these deaths may be preventable today, but then they were fairly common tragedies, and both deaths occurred decades before her death.
Maude was a married, presumably happy, woman. In a medium size Utah city they were professionally connected as her husband was a pharmacist. They belonged to the Country Club, were golfers and socializers. They enjoyed an upper middle class life with few money worries. They lived in a nice home with the help of a housekeeper to keep it up. My mother’s life in a town a few hours removed was not unlike hers. My mother was a professional woman, and her husband, my father, a business owner. We, too, had housekeeping help. My mother and Maude were close in age and close friends as well, not always the province of sisterhood.
As days went by, it became known to us and others that Maude had died by suicide. Medications for any of her pains or discomforts were accessible to her with a husband in pharmacy, owner of the “drug store”, as we called it then. Her husband told the story of her request for medication for a headache. He went on to explain that she had deliberately taken more of this remedy than required and died as a result. When he returned home late one night, she was dead.
Her legacy, that of suicide, remains solid until now, almost 70 years later, with few of us left to remember her. My mother was so mystified by her suicide and by suicide itself that she sought out experts to explain it to her. At one point, she asked the winning question of a contest sponsored by what was known as the Great Books. She was awarded a full set of the Great Books based on her question on suicide. In my hazy memory, it had something to do with the idea that a person who kills herself is suffering from a mental illness.
Maude’s legacy became well established in the minds of my mother, me, and most others, apparently. Long after my mother’s death, and some fifty years after Maude’s death, my own sister and I visited our mother’s only living sister, Mary, the baby of the family. We just wanted to connect and see how she was doing, now into her eighties. She treated us to a lovely luncheon at the Country Club in the city where she lived, the same country club and city where Maude had lived, thrived, and perished all those years before.
During our conversation about family and those we had lost, I brought up the unfortunate memory of our dear aunt and her suicide. Aunt Mary looked at me and raised an eyebrow. What a powerful gesture! I looked at her and questioned what that meant. Feeling the need to explain my comment, I told her that we always understood her death to be a suicide.
A raised eyebrow rarely needs calming or explanation and this one was no different. She proceeded to speak of things altogether unrelated. I would give anything to play that scene over again and to ask her the question that now plagues me. If it was not a suicide, what was it?
As time went on, and after our luncheon, I started to think about what that raised eyebrow meant and why Aunt Mary would not elaborate or even comment. I went back to what I knew about Maude’s death. What stood out now and not then was the fact that Maude’s husband, only months after her death, married their housekeeper. From there came memories of my father’s estimation of her husband as a womanizer. And compounding that idea, I learned somewhat later from my mother that Maude, when going to visit her parents two hours from her town, would never spend the night. This, she whispered, was because she couldn’t leave her husband alone at night due to his philandering. And then came the memory of my mother’s disbelief but acceptance about a frame of mind that would lead to suicide.
Of course, suicide was less understood in the fifties than it is today, as demonstrated by a more nuanced understanding on the part of mental health experts and more evolved religious teachings and practices. But, for those who committed suicide in those times, the stigma of mental illness and mortal sin remained strong.
This story has affected the course of my own life in this way. Learning at five years old that my aunt Maude had committed suicide and living with that belief has led me to believe that suicide is a perfectly sane and moral option for some under certain circumstances.
I don’t believe Aunt Maude was mentally ill. In fact, I question the premise that her death was a suicide. Unfortunately, I will never know. I might have learned the truth had I been wiser and braver when presented with opportunities to ask the right questions of those who knew more than I. But for now, Maude’s legacy is one of suicide, mental illness, and sinfulness.
*Marianna Hopkins is a retired associate professor of English at Salt Lake Community College. She is married to regular blogger, Gary Topping.
