Suicide On My Mind

September is National Suicide Prevention Month and suicide has been on my mind all month. Over the years, I have lost at least ten loved ones, friends and family to suicide. As a result, for more than six decades suicide has been haunting me and occupying my own mind. The most impactful loss occurred in 1964 on Labor Day, when I was 10 years old.

My grandmother lived with us and was my caretaker. It was early in the morning when I entered her bedroom to ask if I could go to a friend’s house. My grandmother looked like she was sleeping in one of the two single beds pushed together. She didn’t answer me. With a child’s intuition I felt something was terribly wrong, so I ran to the pink dial phone in my parents’ room up the hall and called them at work. Before I knew it, my parents arrived home, ran up the stairs to my grandmother’s bedroom on the second floor beside mine. Following them were two paramedics.

I am an only child of European immigrants who owned a dry goods store in Brooklyn, New York. They worked very long hours. Years after my grandmother’s passing, I learned that that she who taught me how to type my first short story — had taken her life by ingesting an overdose of sleeping pills. At the time however, my mother had told me that Grandma was depressed because we’d taken our first family holiday and didn’t invite her. She never mentioned anything about having a…