Surviving Suicide - Part 1 of 2

I’ve mentioned in previous posts (see My Father and A Long Line of Iron) that my parents were refugees from Hungary’s Communist Revolution in 1956. Hungary had been under Communist rule since World War II, and an uprising by the people in a short-lived attempt to overthrow the regime was crushed by the Soviet army as they stormed the country and resumed control of the government. My parents, along with my mother’s extended family, escaped over the border into Austria and lived for months in a refugee camp before being allowed to emigrate to the United States. Below is a snapshot of what the exodus looked like as thousands of Hungarians fled the Soviet tanks and soldiers.




Both of my parents grew up in extreme circumstances themselves. As children, they lived in poverty conditions and survived World War II, my mother being 7 years old when it started and 12 when the Allies declared victory in Europe in 1945. Their house had been bombed, so my mother’s family and several others lived in the cellar while the war raged on. It was only by befriending one of the Russian soldiers that they were given rations of basics such as flour, grain, milk, bread – things we expect to find everyday at our supermarkets. Sometimes I wince when I hear my kids complain about not getting the latest whatever-it-is. The stories (most of them independently corroborated accounts) my family told me and carried with them to their graves renew daily my gratitude for living in such a prosperous nation. Having traveled the world over, I’ve also seen my own share of heartbreaking poverty that would make our own poor appear “rich” by the world’s standards.

I didn’t grow up with my father. My parents were divorced when I was about 2 years old, and my mother and I came to St. Louis to live with her parents. My father stayed in New Jersey and eventually married Ann (who by the way is a wonderful friend and the GREATEST example I could ever have for how to be a stepmom to Steve’s kids).

My mother’s sorrow and bitterness over the divorce bled over into her judgment on how to raise me on her own. She committed the parental cardinal sins of terribly disparaging my father in his absence and not allowing me to see him at all. Later on I discovered some of the things she said about him were true, but it didn’t mitigate the resentment of not being allowed to realize these things on my own, untainted by another’s terribly biased opinion.
I was about 8 years old when I figured out something was dreadfully wrong with my mother. She heard voices in her head and thought people were “after” her. Sometime later I would learn it was a textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia, but at the time I was just a child and utterly incapable of helping in any meaningful way. When I was 12 I got a firsthand introduction to the hopelessness and desperation buried deep within her - she made an attempt on her life by taking a bottle of pain pills. She didn’t tell me and I found her one Saturday morning when I tried unsuccessfully to wake her from a deep sleep; she was completely unresponsive. I remember the 911 system had just been installed because somehow I had the presence of mind to dial the numbers. Paramedics showed up in a few minutes and tried to revive her. The trip ended at the hospital with her getting her stomach pumped and sleeping off what had already been metabolized. I sat in her hospital room, watching her, and prayed like never before that God would intervene and keep her from taking her life. To be honest, I didn’t know what I really wanted. In some ways anything was better than this, but the fear of losing her and my subsequent fate was more than I could bear.

Another attempt followed when I was 14. In the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school, she finally succeeded by hanging herself. My grandmother found her. She had used twine and a pullup bar I had in the doorway to my bedroom. The coroner said it took only a couple minutes for her to die. I later wondered if she regretted stepping off the ladder.

A flood of strange “relief” and heartbreaking loss swept over me – now what? I had prayed to God and He said no. At the time I truly hated and cursed Him.

My father came to the funeral and wanted me to go back to New Jersey to live with him. No way, I said, I barely know you; where were you when I needed you most? Though he legally could have forced me to move, he relented and allowed me to continue living with my grandmother. It would be a blessing in disguise as I would later realize, but not before taking just about every destructive detour possible.

The years shuffled by and my life was ruled by rage, resentment, and the proverbial “my way or the highway” attitude. Ironically my mother’s suicide had the opposite effect one would expect – I absolutely REFUSED to follow in her footsteps. It was simply out of the question. As bad as things were I couldn’t imagine taking my own life and meeting my Maker in my current state of mind. I was on fire to stay alive, even if only by clawing my way to reality each dreary morning.

One night when I was 20 and halfway through college, I watched an episode of Wheel of Fortune and the contestant won a lot of money. An avalanche of tears burst forth from me (kinda like the little alien in Spaceballs…yeah this is a way heavy story and this is called comic relief), and I realized I was living in a seesaw world of extreme emotion – one minute I would be tearfully ecstatic over the most trivial experience, and the next I would be living in a gray cloud of apathy, experiencing the world from inside a cotton ball.


Part 2 coming tomorrow...