In the wake of a loved one’s suicide, irrational shame haunts those left behind.
How is it I could persuade the man I loved to apply sunscreen, get regular checkups and wear a bike helmet, all in an effort to prolong our life together, but I couldn’t keep him from killing himself? Wasn’t it my job as his wife to help him stay safe and happy - securely tethered to life?
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In the months and years after my husband’s death, I would slip into a foggy depression of my own, fueled by my loss and sense of failure. I prayed and battled against them for more than 25 years, but on the night they convinced Mark he was better off dead, I collapsed in defeat.
Spade said his accomplished wife fought personal demons. I could have said the same thing, because as much as you may love someone, it’s not easy to sustain a happy marriage when one partner struggles with debilitating depression or severe mood swings. “We were best friends trying to work through our problems in the best way we knew how,” he said. But I resonate most with Spade’s husband, Andy, who defended himself publicly against speculation that their less than perfect marriage contributed to her death. Kate Spade’s “heartbroken” father died two weeks after her death. That’s why when news breaks of the suicide of a celebrity, like Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain or Mick Jagger’s longtime girlfriend, L’Wren Scott, others look for the reasons they took their lives, but I scan for clues as to how their loved ones are surviving the anguish and the shame. Instead, they attach like a sticky film to the survivors. The depression and shame that take a loved one’s life don’t go to the grave with them as pancreatic cancer or a brain tumor does. This is what it’s like to survive the suicide of a spouse. If only I could wade in over my head and hold my breath in a safe and silent place, where I could wrestle with the unrelenting question, “Why did he do it?” I excused myself and hurried through the open door toward the ocean.
#WHY DID KATE SPADE SUICIDE MOVIE#
To tell this stranger the truth - that my beloved partner of a quarter century had killed himself at our family’s lake house - would be to step into the starring role of a horror movie too terrible to watch. Instead, she turned to me with an expression I’ve come to know too well - fear mixed with pity, the worst kind of sympathy.īreathlessly, she asked, “How long from the diagnosis to his death?” I’d known a woman whose husband died of pancreatic cancer, and he’d gone quickly. “Pancreatic cancer,” I said without hesitation, confident that this would satisfy my determined acquaintance. Tonight, I would don the costume of a woman on top of her game, one who had grieved her husband’s death from cancer successfully and was happy to be out socializing.
#WHY DID KATE SPADE SUICIDE FULL#
I set down my fork and opened an imaginary door to a closet full of disguises I now owned. That wobbly hope slipped away as soon as the dinner conversation began. The salty ocean breeze and the fine cloth brushing against my knee reminded me that even though I had lost my life partner, I was still breathing and that I needed to learn to embrace life as a gift again. Occasions like these gave me a chance to escape the grief I had been drowning in since my husband’s death. Wide doors were flung open to the ocean before us. I sat mostly with strangers at a linen-covered table with candlelight. Not long after I was widowed I found myself at an elegant dinner party on the Florida coast. Once he was gone, my life was unimaginably altered, both by his deadly decision and the stigma it left in its wake. I missed those signs until it was too late. All this week mental health professionals are sounding the alarm about this crisis, drawing attention to the warning signs that someone you love may be at risk. More than 45,000 Americans died last year from suicide, in a staggering but seemingly silent epidemic. When I lost my husband in 2008, I learned that the shocking cause of his death wasn’t as rare as I had thought.
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