suicide – shoutforjoy.us

Scott

Scott was a good friend of mine in junior high. He was on the ski jump team. At Theodore Wirth Park, there was a huge, wooden ski jump. Next to it, was a smaller jump built into the hill. Scott would be there, training with his jumping skis. I would be skiing on the downhill slopes on the park board slopes on the Saturdays I couldn’t get away to Wisconsin, or after school. One Saturday, Scott found me and let me use his jumping skis on the smaller jump. What a thrill! He tried to coax me to go off the big, wooden jump. I knew I didn’t dare. The likelihood would be I would jump off the wrong side of it. Another Saturday morning, Scott finished with his jumping practice. He had forgotten to bring his downhill skis and didn’t have a ride home until later. He found me and persuaded me to share my skis. He let me use both my poles. He just used a single downhill ski. He taught me how to ski downhill on one ski! That was a useful skill. The rope tows were a little tricky. I would end up slowly wilting to one side and pull all of the other passengers on the line down with me into the snow.

Scott was a beautiful boy, and charming. He had a fort he had built behind his house. In the summer after 8th grade, guys and girls would hang out at his house. Couples would use his fort to make love. I was not aware of this until my girlfriend told me it was “our turn”. I declined. I was caught completely off guard. That ended my relationship with that redhead. That was OK. I am so glad I waited until marriage.

During junior high and into high school, Scott was one of those who called me on a few occasions contemplating suicide. My sister, Sue Ann, and I, it seems, were known as the suicide counselors for our junior high. How that came to be is anybody’s guess. All I know is that Scott and I spent time talking, listening, crying, laughing, renewing a reason to live.

We went to different high schools. The night in 1972 in our junior year when Scott killed himself, he did not call me. It still hurts. Scott was the fourth of my friends to commit suicide.

(You may purchase this painting on my art sale site: www.shoutforjoy.net )

More than Pearl Harbor Day

As I start to write this, it is the 76th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. This was the provocation that galvanized the US public to get behind World War II. My parents remembered where they were when they got the news, just as everyone in my generation can recount where they were when they learned that JFK was shot, and the next generation knows when the Challenger blew up, and so on, until the post-modern world is ensnared together by a single polarizing event on 9-11.

December 7th is more complicated in our family than Pearl Harbor Day, however. Ironically, it became the day I learned to bake Christmas cookies. You see we had to, because my mom’s mom died, and she was too sad to make the krumkake, rosettes, spritz, jam thumb prints and bourbon balls. I was 12. My sister, Sue Ann, was 14. We were not going to have a cookie-less Christmas. Grandma Ingham had died in the wee hours of the morning. My older brother had driven (since he was sober) to the nursing home with my dad. She had been in physical therapy for a broken shoulder. The therapist didn’t heed her cries of pain, and forced it, and broke her spine. It was gruesome.

Sue Ann and I just took over the kitchen, read the recipes, baked cookies for four days. Tom, Alison and Dad were taking care of the details that needed taking care of; talking to relatives and friends, etc. Mom just shut down. She looked more like her mom than ever I had seen her. Her mother suffered from chronic depression and alcoholism. We didn’t have a single picture of her without a look of sadness in her eyes. Now that same look was in my mom’s eyes. It stayed there almost uninterrupted for at least two years.

All of the cookies turned out well, except the spritz I made. The dough was so hard I nearly broke the spritz press forcing the dough out of it onto the cookie trays. I had added green food coloring to make them festive. When they came out of the oven they had not spread and were a bit scorched. Most of them were now green and brown. We put them in a box and added them to the assortment when we put plates of cookies out. Everyone complimented us on our baking. Nobody broke any teeth on the spritz, thankfully.

We went through the visitations and funeral at the funeral home. The younger cousins learned from the two oldest cousins, my brother Tom and cousin Deb, that our grandpa had had another wife between our grandmother, Jane, and our step-grandmother, Wathena (whom we all called “Aunt Wathena”). They were only married for about two years. She wanted to move to California. Cranford just couldn’t do that, so they divorced. I didn’t cry over Grandma Ingham’s death until Christmas Day, when the maple rocking chair where she always sat when she came to our house was empty. One of the afghans she had made was draped over its back. (I cry and sob whenever I read this sentence to this day.)

On December 7, 1978, our second daughter, Rosalie, was born, at home, during a blizzard. The midwife was the ever vivacious, traditionally built Sandy Perkins. She arrived at our front door in East Greenville, PA, and immediately asked if I had water boiling. I replied, “What for? That’s just what they assign men to do to get them out of the way.” In her best black mama voice she said, “You mean to tell me you just made me drive over 45 minutes in a snowstorm, and you don’t even have my coffee ready!” Rosalie was born in our bedroom without complications. Sandy weighed her by hooking a blanket to a fish scale forming a sling and placing Rosalie in it and holding it up.

In late November, 2000, my sister, Sue Ann died. She was 47. It took my older sister, Ali, and me a month and a half of research to uncover the fact that she had committed suicide. Our dad wanted to keep that hidden. I flew out to Minnesota for the funeral. On the morning of the day of Sue Ann’s funeral, I went into Minneapolis to visit Grama Ethel Haanpaa at the Lutheran Home, the high rise retirement community where she had lived for several years. Ethel was not our grandma by blood, but by adoption. She was actually Becky Shostrom’s grandma. I had been engaged to Becky when I was a senior in high school until finals week of my freshman year of college. That’s when she told me she had fallen in love with the bus driver on the spring break choir tour. Grama Ethel and her husband, Emil, kept inviting me to all of the special occasions at their chocolate brown house on 25-1/2 Avenue North. We had become good friends, along with Ethel’s first husband, Al Shostrom, and his girlfriend, Mamie. We were a strange lot. When Bethann and I got engaged, I introduced her to Ethel and Emil. Ethel welcomed Bethann to the family with open arms. Emil passed away shortly after we moved to PA in 1977. Ethel became another grandma to our four girls. We exchanged Christmas gifts and birthday cards, letters and phone calls and always visited her when we got back to Minnesota.

When I got to the Lutheran Home, I did not find Ethel in her apartment. I inquired at the desk and discovered that she was in the hospice care unit. I visited her and can remember our conversation like it was yesterday. She told me that she didn’t want to take the pain meds, because they made her befuddled. She was dying and didn’t see any point wasting what little time she had left being befuddled. She said she needed to settle her accounts and needed a clear head to do that. She then recounted to me what she considered to be her failings and sins. Now she had been a Baptist all her life. Baptists don’t do confession. But I heard hers. We cried together. I assured her that God loved her and she was forgiven for all her failings and regrets. At the time, I was an Orthodox Christian layperson. When I got home, I told my priest, Father Boniface, about how I had heard her confession and assured her of God’s forgiveness. He said, “You did good.” As I left to go to my sister’s funeral, I knew that this was the last time I would see dear, sweet Ethel. She would never bless my “pointed little head” again. In fact, that was the last conversation she had. She slipped into coma and passed away a few days later, on December 7, 2000, at age 92.

So I lost two grandmas on the same day, 23 years apart, and gained a daughter in between.

Monochromatic Hero and Suicide

On Sunday, I painted my first monochromatic painting. It is an 11″ x 14″ acrylic on stretched canvas of André Trocmé in burnt umber. He is one of my heroes. That turned out so well, I followed it on Monday with an 11″ x 14″ painting of Bobby Glaeser in phthalocyanine blue. Bob was a classmate and neighbor of mine growing up. In early December 1974, a year and a half after we had graduated high school, he killed his parents, his younger sister Ann, and himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun.

André Trocmé was a Huguenot pastor in southern France. Before and during the Nazi occupation of France, he led his city and the neighboring city and surrounding countryside to give refuge to Jews fleeing Hitler’s genocidal death camps. It started with the boarding school his church ran. He did not believe in discrimination, so the school accepted Jewish students, who wore the school uniforms and lived lives indistinguishable from the Christian students. It grew into families sheltering families. He trained them on how to blend in and how to respond to the authorities. They set up an underground railroad to help families escape from France to safety in non-Nazi occupied countries. No one in their network betrayed a refugee into Nazi captivity. His nephew’s class was raided, where he was teaching a few dozen Jewish children. The Nazis seized the children to take them to a camp. Trocmé’s nephew insisted on going with them, as their teacher. He died in the concentration camp. It is estimated that they saved over 3500 lives.

I read Pastor Trocmé’s story over 30 years ago. It was also made into a movie. As always, the book was better. He had corresponded with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and with Gandhi. He was a pacifist and had a strong ethical belief in honesty, charity and non-discrimination. He never made excuses for having to lie to the authorities. He felt that it was still sin, but to tell the truth would make him complicit in the deaths of fellow human beings, which would be a greater sin. He had been taught a hard lesson by his strict father, when he was a lad. He learned that it was not only right to do good; “it was essential to do the good on time!” It was his position that Hitler’s rule, the rise of the Nazis, and World War II was totally preventable, if only people of good conscience in Germany had done the good on time. Once he and his cohorts were in power, it was too late to stop him without doing evil and causing death and destruction. This is an important lesson and one that America needs to heed today.

We have both major parties putting forward the most despised presidential candidates in our history. Both are bigots. One is a capricious fool; the other is a shrewd politician committed to endless war. One would incarcerate Muslims and Latinos here; the other would (and already has) kill Muslims, Latinos and others overseas. They have 30% acceptance rating between them from the electorate. Yet people are deciding their votes on fear of one or the other, instead of doing the right thing and rejecting both.

It is time to do the good on time.

Bobby was a good friend in grade school and junior high. His family lived two blocks away from mine in Golden Valley, Minnesota. We would bicycle together, sled and skate together in the winter, and sometimes camp out in our backyards together in the summer. He was a beautiful boy! He was handsome, with thick, dark hair, athletic and smart. All the girls loved him. Most of the boys wanted to be him. He did not appreciate all the attention. He was shy and became more withdrawn in his junior and senior year in high school; to the point of not allowing any pictures of himself to appear in the yearbook. This painting is based on his two pictures in the 1971 Robin. The pose is from the soccer team’s group shot, but his eyes were closed, so I looked at his yearly picture for details of his face.

The last time I saw Bobby was in the spring of 1974. I was visiting a few of my friends at the University of Minnesota’s main campus. At that time Pioneer Hall was for both men and women; every other room for each gender. I greeted Bobby as he darted stark naked from the showers to his room. I was shocked at this, not because of modesty, but his apparent lack of it. He had changed, and changed radically. Early December, 1974, we heard the news that Bobby had shot and killed his father, his mother and his sister, Ann, then himself, with a 12 gauge shotgun in the middle of the night in their Golden Valley home. A neighbor discovered their bodies four days after when North Memorial Hospital called her to check on his father, because he had not showed up for his on call assignment. He was a doctor.

Bobby’s case was written up in a feature article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He had suffered some sort of mental breakdown prior to this and had been in treatment. He left the treatment and had been alienated from his family. They reached out to him. He was home for dinner that night to discuss re-entering treatment as an inpatient. After they had all gone to bed, Bobby got his hunting gun and shot his parents and his younger sister while they lay in their beds. Then he shot himself.

The four of them had a joint memorial service at Valley of Peace Lutheran Church. Their were four, beautiful Christmas wreaths on stands in the front of the packed church. Pastor Stine gave this horrible message. He said, “Heaven is God’s gift to us at Christmastime. Bobby gave his family their Christmas gift early.”

I got up, then and there, and walked out of that church! What an ass! This was the same ignorant pastor who had kicked me out of confirmation class one month shy of completion for asking too many questions about heaven and hell, and how one gets to heaven, after my best friend, Steve Rainoff had died by falling through a skylight, chasing a soccer ball, in a locked school in New Jersey.

In the spring of 1975, the Mpls. paper had a feature article on Angel Dust. The authorities had just seen a rise in its use. The symptoms of its use and long-term effects sounded just like Bobby. I have always wondered if he could have been exposed to that, and that is what changed his personality so never know.

I painted his portrait in monochromatic phthalocyanine blue, from a happier time in his life. Bobby was a beautiful boy. He had all the advantages. That could have been me.

Godfather, 4438 Shoreline Drive

I am the youngest of four siblings, yet my memories have always gone back further than my sisters and brother. This is a painting of the house where I lived for my first six years (June 1955- June 1961). It still stands. The outside finishes and windows have been updated, but it is still the same tiny Dutch Colonial. It is almost totally obscured by trees on Google Earth. When we lived there, those Google Earth shots would have been impossible! The place was literally crawling with children! (also skipping, jumping, climbing, hiding & seeking, chalk drawing, running,etc.) 1955 was the crest of the Baby Boom after all. Crystal Lake was across the street. That is where the Ericsons, Hostermans and DeLays lived.

Our house was at 4438 Shoreline Drive, Robbinsdale, 22, Minnesota. First class postage stamps were 4 cents each. US flags had 48 stars. Everybody liked Ike. Our phone number started with KEllogg 7. I knew all this when I was three. My earliest and most powerful memory was being held in the arms of my godfather, Gordon, when I was just two years old, in the dining room of that house. He was looking out the door to the screened-in porch. I remember the feel of his laugh, and that it was one of the few times I felt truly happy and safe in that house.

Not long after that party, Gordy committed suicide. It wasn’t clear, at first, that he intended to. There was no note. Gordy had the form of acrophobia that would cause him to have a strong urge to jump from open heights. I have it, too. It is actually an idea, seemingly hardwired in the brain, that the scariness of being on the precipice would be relieved, if one would only throw oneself on the wind and fly. Gordy flew. His wings burned up like Icarus’ in the Sun. I simply never saw Uncle Gordy again; never smelled that smell; never saw that smile; never felt that embrace; never felt that laugh again.

That’s me in the painting, in the red jumper, asleep in Gordy’s arms. My therapist asked me, yesterday, when I showed her this painting, “So safety must be a big concern for you. What do you do to make sure you are safe?”

I asked her if that was a trick question.

We had much tears. The fact of the matter is, I have had little consciousness of safety since we moved away from that house. First Gordy disappeared, then we moved away from the Ericsons.

In 1995, when an ex-offender, strung out on heroin came to my place of work and pulled a gun on me, I was too numb to be afraid. My safety was not on my radar. My concern for my safety was beat out of me at an early age. I just calmly sized up the man, determined what his real motives were, and helped him achieve them in a way that was best for everyone concerned. It involved me driving with a loaded gun poked in my ribs for 17 miles. He got into rehab, not prison, and, as a side benefit, I got to live. I knew he was serious and I knew he could pull the trigger. He had done so before, after all, in an armed robbery. But it would not serve his best interest of surviving the car ride, avoiding prison, and getting free of heroin to do so. I had met him in my role as a volunteer, prison chaplain. I did not share this story until more than ten years after it happened. No one at my job had been aware that I had been held at gunpoint from my desk in Hatfield. My wife did not know about it. She was shocked when she learned of it in when she was proofreading a fundraising newsletter I wrote ten years after the fact. She asked me why I never told her. I said, because I knew it would upset her and she would worry about me. She said I would be right; so how come is it OK to bring it up now? I told her, because the man who did it has been dead for a few years now. She felt better then.

We have gotten ahead of our story. This is a memoir. There are no rules for these things to be absolutely chronological, as long as there are good stories, right? I’ll try to tell good stories, and some of them, I dare say, most of them, will be true.

I grew up in Minnesota, in an upper middle class household in the suburbs. I cannot tell my story without the undercurrent of death and especially suicide. 18 of my close friends, including my sister have killed themselves. An additional 24 friends and associates have also taken their own lives, for a total, so far, of 42. Even so, my life has not been only darkness. I have been inspired by many personal heroes, some of whom I have known. Unfortunately, several of them have had violent deaths, a couple by their own hands, as well. My hope is that my writing and painting may not just interest you and pass the time, but may edify and even challenge you, in some way.

(If you want to purchase this painting, or others by me, visit www.shoutforjoy.net)

Let me take you down ’cause I’m going to

I went for my intake interview at a different psychiatrist and psychotherapist office on Thursday. It ruined me for the rest of the day and Friday. We’ll see how today goes. The last time I had such an interview was two years ago. That morning I was feeling pretty good and I just didn’t want to ruin it, so I didn’t get into everything. The interviewer was in a hurry and didn’t probe either. As a result, my diagnosis wasn’t correct. She diagnosed me with severe depressive disorder but missed the CPTSD. This time, I determined to be completely open, no matter what it did to my day, and my interviewer was in no hurry and really probed. It got me thinking about all those I have lost to suicide and murder, and the times my life has been threatened and all the bullying I have endured; the friends I have lost. I will attempt to go through the list.

My best friend and playmate when I was three to five died in a plane crash in Peru on Christmas Eve, during my junior year in high school. My best friend in 5th and 6th grade committed suicide in 8th grade. My best friend in 8th grade committed suicide in 10th grade. My best friend in 9th through 12th grade, who was also my sister committed suicide when I was 47. Of the 100 kids in my elementary school 6th grade class, 4 were dead by suicide by Christmas of our 2nd year in college. One beautiful friend had murdered his sister and parents in the bargain. Another two were dead of fast acting cancers. By the time I was 30, 15 in my class were dead of suicide or overdose, and several more friends from junior and senior high school and from my sister’s class.

Then she asked if I ever had suicidal thoughts or thought about committing suicide myself. I know it’s a form question, but I had to laugh at it. Are you kidding me? With this background and having been held at gunpoint by a high ex-con, and threatened to be killed by a Mennonite pastor, and experiencing the probable murder committed by a bishop of his wife, the multiple attacks, slanders, jealousies from clergy because I was serving the poor; the attacks from the press, police, mayors, with more lies and slanders because I was serving the poor, being terrorized by a conman because we refused to be conned. Experienced 6 strokes and 40 TIAs from migraines after allergic reaction to antibiotic for infection I picked up on the street gave me kidney failure.

YES! I think about suicide. YES! I have suicidal thoughts. Do I have a plan? No. I have been hurt so many times by so many who have committed suicide, I do not plan to do it. Although I do not blame any who have done it. I understand and empathize fully. Each night when I go to sleep, I would not be disappointed if I did not wake up. Most mornings lately, I am disappointed that I did.

She asked me what my goals for therapy were. This was hard. It has been so long since I felt anything close to normal, I had a really hard time coming up with any. I think I told her, “I would like to not cry all of the time. I would like not to sleep so much.” She said to make them reasonable, attainable goals. I paused and said, “I would like for people not to be afraid of me.”

She then asked me a question that no one in my life has ever asked me. She said, “Were you always slow at school?” We had already gone over my educational level, which is confusing. I crammed three years of college into two, went to two graduate schools without a bachelor’s, and dropped out of both of them without receiving a master’s. I taught a master’s program, however, and received an honorary doctorate. I have been ordained four times in five denominations (none of which I asked for, one I wasn’t present at). Most people assume I have a master’s. Many assume I have a doctorate. I guess my demeanor, with my slow speech, and my occasional stall while trying to find the right word due to the stroke damage, and my brokenness due to PTSD made me appear to be mentally challenged.

I laughed at the thought. Maybe I have finally gained the tools I sought in ninth grade when I found that all my knowledge and fast thinking were so useless, because I could not use them to help tutor the kid that was in the detention area with me for not getting his algebra homework, while I was there for outsmarting my enriched English teacher.