T.S. Eliot starts his poem "The Waste Land" with the line "April is the cruellest month."  For my family, though, November is crueler.  My father and my brother's girlfriend and business partner of fifteen years both died of suicide during the month of November, their deaths twelve years apart.  Dad died on November 3 in 1985 at the age of 60, hanging himself at his real estate office late at night, depressed after two small strokes and God knows what else.  We've never been the sort of family to share openly, and when we do share, the factual content some of us provide is suspect.  One family member insists Dad knowingly engaged in business practices that could have jeopardized his status as a retired Army officer and even subjected him to criminal prosecution.  I don't know for sure, of course, but that seems unlikely, though I admit he was a troubled man, difficult to know and difficult to befriend.  I like to remember him as he looked in an old photograph, circa 1957 or so, when he was an often very affable drinker, a brilliant, funny, and fun father when he hadn't drunk his way over the line into irritability and abusiveness.

My brother's girlfriend and business partner, K----, blew her brains out in their apartment bathroom in 1997, twelve years and fourteen days after my dad left the planet.  Her suicide nearly killed my brother too, already strung out from combat-related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that bubbled just beneath the surface.  He was a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam, flying into hot zones to provide fire cover and extract the LURPS, the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols, the really crazy guys.  His hypervigilance and fury had by that point already exploded one marriage and two other long-term relationships.  My brother tried to run the business by himself for a while but soon left it and most of his possessions to his employees, moving to Florida with a $500,000 life insurance settlement and a plan to rescue his half-brother from financial ruin.  Hope persists, I suppose, even if or especially if you've been unable to help your father or girlfriend.

Our half-brother took him to the cleaners.  Finally, suicidal himself, my brother began calling me early each morning on my cell phone.  I was eventually able to persuade him to "visit" me and my husband in the Northwest for a while, where he lived with us for two years and finally got the recognition and assistance he deserved from the Veterans Administration.  It had blown him off in the 1970s when he'd asked for help with his back and knees, causing intermittent agony after "hard landings" his crew had made when their aircraft was shot down.

This past year, I had my own brush with seductive Death.  Mental health professionals had for years misdiagnosed and mis- or undertreated a condition that -- when it was at last correctly diagnosed -- proved to be Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.  Treatment made me suddenly alert to a disproportionately heavy workload, growing by the minute, and to what (to me at least) seemed colleagues' and managers' harsh and demeaning communications.  Beset by Posttraumatic Stress Disorder -- the legacy of childhood abuse from which untreated ADD had, until then, largely distracted me -- I made several poor decisions at work, injuring myself in the wake of a co-worker's insult and inadvertently perhaps causing management to feel threatened by the possibility of administrative or legal responses.  They countered by conducting an ostensibly neutral investigation that mysteriously absolved everyone but me, then forced me to see a forensic psychiatrist (after which I attempted suicide three times in three consecutive days, nearly succeeding on the third try) instead of cooperating with my own psychiatrist in his requests for accommodation for my conditions. It seemed, though it may not have been, a deliberate campaign to force me out.  I'm better now, at least somewhat, extracted from the workplace by agreement with my employer and from my personal hell of dissociation and suicidality by my psychiatrist.  Still, I have no idea whether I'll ever overcome my reactions to PTSD triggers sufficiently to return to the high-pressure work I've done in the past.

I'm sorry, so sorry, for other families who have lost a loved one to suicide.  You never get over it, though it seems mostly to go to a quieter place.  It throbs on anniversaries, but not continually as it does when the loss is fresh.  My psychiatrist says there's likely a "suicide gene" I'll be fighting for the rest of my own life.  I hope I come out the winner.