LY #110 More local tragedy

Next year my replacement might have a student who talks about losing his friend in last Friday's suicide at Bend High.  Certainly there will be more students in all of the speech classes giving presentations about suicide prevention.  Like these kids in a Mayo Clinic video on Teen Suicide.

Like many of the lost, I too made suicide attempts in high school but fortunately was spared from success by God and my own incompetence.  Kristin Tone has written a beautiful blog post on the ineffability of this recent tragedy.

My friend Lilli Ann posted her daughter Kit Foreman's thoughts on Facebook and Kit has given me permission to quote her:

"I've been thinking a lot about last week's tragedy.

I'm hurting. Along with many, many other people. Because that "doesn't happen here." This is Bend. That kind of thing doesn't happen here.

But obviously it does. It does happen here. And I think that shakes our community's foundation. And I think that's good.

I think this is a chance to have a positive, open dialogue about suicide. And about the things that lead people to it. About the warning signs, and how sometimes it's impossible to know who is at risk.

Asking for help is the hardest, bravest thing you can do.

I intern with the local Medical Examiner. The sheer amount of suicides that happen in Bend is astonishing. The media doesn't usually report on suicides, because they're generally a quiet, private affair. The only evidence that they occurred is a human-sized hole in the hearts of the people who knew them.

1-800-273-8255 is the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

You are loved. You are loved. You are loved."

 
Kit's final words above were put into visual rhetoric at COCC  on Tuesday as some staff participated in Blue/Gold Day in support of Bend High. 

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 #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.