LY #106 Jumper

(c)Justin Sullivan Getty Images from Slate

In mid-February 1976 I was thinking about calling Sally and asking her how she was doing.  I was living in Pocatello at the time, had been married for three years, and was in the last semester of my undergraduate career.  I'd heard, I'm not sure from where, probably in a letter from Mom, that my oldest was feeling down again.  But I'd been putting contacting her because I hate talking on the phone.  I had written to her.  I preferred and still prefer writing letters to live non-f2f communication because the phone doesn't offer enough nonverbal cues to the Other's meaning.   I also found interactions with my older sister difficult because her state of mind wasn't predictable.  Sometimes her thought processes weren't completely intelligible to me.  Even when she was completely lucid her conversations could fly around multiple topics, mixing theories of psychology and metaphysics at a far higher level of understanding than I possessed.  And most important she, like other members of my family, could evoke deeply uncomfortable shame response in me even without trying.

So I thought, "Well, I'll call her on Valentines Day.  That would be a good time."  But I didn't. 

Two days later, on February 16, 1976, I got a call from my mother.  She began the conversation as usual.  "Hi, dear.  How are you?  And how's Will?"  But there was something wrong with her voice, some flatness, in spite of her attempt at normality.

"It's Sally, isn't it?"  I asked.

And it was.  She had finally succeeded in her five year attempt to kiss death.  She had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.  My father had been required to identify the body.  She had already been cremated.  There would be no funeral.  No need for me to drive home.

No funeral.  Who made that decision?  Was it Dad, afraid of what the neighbors and his colleagues would say?  Or Mom?  She always hated funerals, saying in a disgusted voice that they were for the living.  I think I actually heard her mourn my sister only once, and that was almost 15 years later just before her own death.  I believe that one of the reasons for the burst blood vessels that killed her was my mother's generational commitment to repressing the terrible.

But I could not be silent.  I did go back to Los Gatos where I held a couple of private ceremonies of my own.  I walked on the beach twenty miles from our home and poured wine into the sand and water.  I also contacted an old friend of hers and we mourned her together.  Then I returned to Idaho where I spent two weeks wearing a black armband.  I also told the story to anyone who would listen and wrote poems and essays.  Like my Dad, I am someone who usually manages the dark by bringing it into the open, saying "Look at this ball of darkness I hold -- consider its weight and size."

But it's small, was always small, considering the heavy ball of darkness carried by my parents,  Mom until her death at 73 in January, 1991, and Dad until 2004 when he passed into the elsewhere at age 90.

Sally Jane Hanson Death Certificate 1976

LY #105 The Endless Mirage of Explanations

These are the explanations for my sister's murder of her child.

1.  The LSD made her do it.

In the weeks preceding the terrible event my father was writing a series of stories about the drug menace in the Bay Area, especially in the schools.  The mainstream press in those days was filled with stories of young people jumping out of windows thinking they could fly.  Early on Dad blamed Sally's behaviors on the mind altering drugs she and those in her milieu were taking.

2.  She was a biologically a paranoid-schizophrenic.  (Nature did it.)

Who made this diagnosis?  I don't know.  Maybe a jailhouse shrink or someone in Agnews State Mental Hospital in Santa Clara (now Sun Microsystems/Agnews Developmental Center).

Someone, probably Mom, told me that Sally had heard voices telling her that she herself was evil, that her child was evil, and that she should kill them both.  Over the next five years until her death she certainly behaved in some of the ways typical of people given that diagnosis.  She would be institutionalized for awhile, put on anti-psychotics, get stable, get released, get tired of the terrible side-effects, go off the drugs, and wind up doing something extreme, like starving herself and then showing up on my parents doorstep screaming at them and talking word salad.  Her self-hurting included more suicide attempts.  Often these attempts seemed to be about sending a message to my parents, like the time when she drove off the cliff near Monterey when my Mom was up in Idaho visiting me. 

Certainly, there was some madness in Dad's family -- the great aunt who occasionally tore her clothes off and went wandering through the streets and the 19th Century religious obsessives.  One might also interrogate the alcohol and cigarettes consumed constantly by both parents during pregnancy as well as an almost killing fever she experienced as a baby.  And knowing where they were living in my sister's baby years (with my cat-loving aunt Huldah in Pocatello), Toxoplasma gondii might also be part of the witches brew.

Then again, I was once told by a psychologist that in the seventies, paranoid-schizophrenia was something of a catch-all and often meaningless label.

3.  The psychiatric establishment did it.

The was an explanation Mom gave me a few times.  She blamed a psychiatrist for telling Sally to "express all her emotions."  In other words, Mom thought psychiatry was to blame for Sally acting on her rage.  Mom didn't believe in expressing anger or sadness openly.

4.  Dad and Mom's behavior toward her in childhood made her crazy.  (Nurture did it.)

In the late seventies and early eighties I blamed my Dad.  At the time I was under the influence of a variety of Sixties psychologists, including Jules Henry (Pathways to Madness) and R. D. Laing (Knots).  Both men believed that environmental stressors within families were at the heart of schizophrenia.   According to Professor Emeritus Victor Daniels, R. D. Laing considered schizophrenia "A sane response to an insane situation. This is Laing's comment about what 'going crazy' entailed."

What behaviors?  Well, Dad was a drunk in my early childhood so there was all that chaos around the time of Sally's adolescence.  He pushed her toward perfection and didn't recognize her unless she was doing big things and succeeding and being special.  And she was special and perfect and high functioning.  Until she wasn't. 

My Mom was great at setting up double-bind situations in which the other person, often one of her children, was punished whichever decision that person made.  She had trouble letting go of her kids, letting them go out on their own.  I remember one Christmas before her breakdown when Sally gave Mom a copy of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and called attention to the section on Children: 

Your children are not your children. 
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

5.  Sally experienced a virulent form of postpartum depression.

This was suggested to me by a member of the close family and it makes some sense.

6.  Cultural variables acting through my parents and later through my sister's social system in a devil's dance with genetic inheritance and early brain damage overdetermined the tragedy.

This is my explanation now.  Everything did it.  And because her story is like a Greek tragedy -- my sister was a brilliant star whose secret vulnerability brought her down - I'll say it was the Moira - spinning, weaving, and cutting her as they cut all of us to fit the form that god requires. 

LY #104 Not News

Sally-High School

Search term:  Sally Jane Hanson

As far as I know the deaths of my oldest sister and her daughter were never reported in a newspaper.  I would actually have to do some research, however, to be sure.  Visit the morgues of the Oakland Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Jose Mercury News.  Or get access to their databases, if they have them.  A quick search of Newspapers.com under her maiden and married names revealed nothing.

This lack of information was made clear to me twice in the years afterwords.  In the summer of 1988, at the 100th Anniversary Celebration of Los Gatos High School, I ran into the man who taught her French back when she was in school in the early 60s.  I casually mentioned her passing.  He looked like I'd slapped him.  There in the midst of the celebration he sat down and began weeping.  Then, in 1991 after my mother's death I wrote in Mom's obituary that she was "preceded in death" by her daughter, Sally Jane Hanson.  A woman showed up late to the reception after my Mom's funeral mass and said that she had just driven an hour to be there not because she knew my mother but because she'd known Sally and was shocked that she was dead.

Why the lack of news about what, these days, would be considered content worthy?  Perhaps the old time professional courtesy that bound reporters and their police contacts were responsible for this lack of public information.  So I always assumed.  There's so much of this story that I "assumed" because I found it so difficult to talk with my parents about it.  And when I was able to talk with them the information they gave was limited both by their positions and by the ideology of their generation.

Here is what I remember about my first knowledge of this story.

The date is Sunday, February 28.   (I know this now because it was just before dress rehearsals of the LGHS senior play, Midsummer Night's Dream.  I have all my high school newspapers so I know the exact date of that show.)  I have just returned from meeting across town with the woman who is doing hair and make-up for the show.  She has set and styled my hair and taught my Mom and me how to get the pancake, blush and eyeliner on.  Since I rarely did anything with my hair or face, I am feeling giggly and goofy when I get home.   In my memory we arrive at almost the same time that my sister's husband, A--- and another man arrive at the house.

I notice that A--- has cut off both his beard and the hair that once touched his shoulders and make some loud laughing comment about his changed appearance.  The face he turns to me is that of a ghost.  It's empty of everything except darkness.  I feel afraid and know that something is wrong.  I am sent to my room for a short time.

A few minutes later Dad and Mom call me into the living room.  Is my younger sister there?  It seems so but frankly, I'm not sure.  What I remember is looking at A--- and the gray light of late afternoon streaming in through the venetian blinds.  There is something big now sitting inside my chest pressing hard my breastbone.  I already want to be somewhere else.

Then someone, probably my mother, told me, told us, that my oldest sister had attempted suicide and succeeded in killing her 18 month old child.

What words were used?  I don't remember.  For years I remembered hearing that my sister had used a broken bottle on herself and her child.  But this wasn't the case.  In the early part of this Century I met again with my ex-brother-in-law and found out that Sally had indeed slit her wrists.  Then she smothered her child to death.  Also, while bleeding, she made a phone call to my mother during which she had the usual "how's-your-day-going-just-fine-thanks" conversation.

This first suicide attempt was not successful.  Her husband found her and she survived, saving him from being charged with the deaths of his wife and child, though not from a long night of police interrogation.  His release marked one small escape from the collateral damage resulting from her terrible actions.