Has a family member, relative or friend of yours (in real life) CTB?
What was the method?
Did they leave a note?
What were the stated or suspected reasons?
What kind of job did they have?
Did they have a family? Or significant other?
What age were they at the time?
When did it happen?
How did you and others who knew the person react?
My uncle hanged himself almost 10 years ago at age 42. Didn't leave a note as far as I know. He worked a low wage job at a loading dock and lived in a spare room at his sister's (my aunt) house. He had been married once for a short time but had been divorced for probably 8-10 years and they'd had no kids. I'll always wonder about the exact reasons. I heard a rumor it was because he fell in love with a con artist who robbed him, but maybe that was just the final straw that broke the camel's back.
I AM SORRY THIS IS SO LONG---I HAVE ALREADY BEEN TOLD BY MEMBERS HERE THAT MY POSTS INVOLVE "TOO MANY WORDS", BUT MY FAMILY IS FROM EUROPE AND I DONT WRITE FOR AMERICAN ATTENTION SPANS
I am 51 this year. I have personally known seven people who have "self-delivered". One of them I was married to, she was 30 when she CTB, I was supposed to go with her but backed out. She did it the day after my birthday and the day before Thanksgiving in 2000---two days I was never fond of anyway. She was a writer and had really emotionally unravelled over the previous three years and her fucking control-freak aunt, who was the trustee of all of her money, made her check into this posh, renowned psych hospital near Harvard where they held her for months, ultimately giving her Electro-Convulsive Therapy. She agreed to it, so she couldnt accuse them of forcing her, but she really wasnt thinking clearly during the discussions..Llater, in retrospect, she felt like they pushed her into it. In any event, they didn't work, and they affected her memory terribly, which never came back, and she ended up sliding into the deepest depression she had ever been in. She came back to NYC and I took care of her the best I could (her fucking aunt owned our apartment!), but I was myself in a freefall, which led to us making a schedule, with a CTB date sometime in autumn. I procrastinated having the follow up conversations until late October, when I told her I wasn't ready and wanted to wait a little while longer (I was 30) She said she understood and I thought the discussion was off the table for a while but then she disappeared that morning in late November but left all of her private papers and banking information and anything else I might need neatly on the table for me, and I knew something was up.
I didnt know what to do so I called her best friend in Boston and let her handle the family, who also made the necessary calls to police, etc...But she had outflanked them, and turned up at the Algonquin Hotel (a New York City hotel with famous literary associations that she loved), in a room, having OD'd on all of her many anti-depressants and just about every other pill we had in the house. I still hate to think about her death, that it may have been painful and frightening, with her body going into shock, maybe seizures---I dont know...She had an eating disorder and was only 98 lbs, so hopefully she died fast---she also had 60 xanax, which might have knocked her out before she experienced the worst of it.... She left several notes in the room, none of which expressed any resentments or recriminations toward anyone (in spite of her bitterness toward her family)and had put on her most beautiful dress. I dont think a day goes by, and some days, not an hour passes, that I dont wish I went with her...
Later was a close friend of her's, a well-known, commercially successful folk-pop singer who actually managed to stab himself in his own heart with a steak knife when he was 34. He was very troubled, but the immediate trigger remains a mystery (his girlfriend was in the next room and they were having an intense argument, but nothing freakishly intense or scary) Another two were my close friends, a brilliant couple who I knew from the East Village. Teresa was a phenomenally successful game designer, but Blake (Jeremy, but we all called him by his last name always) was truly considered an important up-and-coming creative force in the art world, and today is regarded a digital art genius whose works are at MOMA. She took an overdose and he disappeared, but it is believed he walked into the ocean on Long Island about a week later....She was about 40 at the time, and I am pretty certain he was my age, so he would have been 36 (it happened in 2007) Until this day no one is sure why they did it.
WAY BEFORE ALL of that there was my friend Scotty, who, at the tender age of 15 and a half, found himself 10 grand in debt to a coke dealer...Frightened, desperate and not knowing what the hell to do, he used his father's service pistol (retired USMC) and put a bullet in his brain. All of us were questioned by the police, not because there was ever any suspicion of foul play, but due to a larger investigation that was coincidentally at that very moment trying to tighten a noose around this dealer (and several others) If my poor friend had held on a little bit longer the source of his terrible fear, fear which had proved mortal, would have been behind bars...
THERE ARE SEVERAL MORE---more than 7, truth be told, probably way more---but those are all I can exhume right now...There is another bizarre case: A psycho-stalker who I connected with through a writing group on Facebook ten years ago who was aging this batshit campaign against me (he had gone off his meds, and right around that time I had rebuffed advances of his), sending the most otherworldly, insane emails to friends in this group, accusing me (and another person in London) of being Satanists and witches and ritual child murderers (because I had an album of pix dedicated to Wednesday Adams)----all the while communicating with me in a completely civil, congenial spirit via email and PM, although I hesitated corresponding with him because he was getting weirder and weirder) The other members of the group actually KEPT HIS LUNACY from me because they were afraid I was too emotionally labile at that moment to deal with it, and tried to solve this issue by themselves!!
Long story short, I received a phone call from the LAPD wanting to ask me some questions after he jumped from his 20th story condo, because his computer was PACKED with a thousand folders and documents and screen-shots pertaining to ME---and his fucking family were CONVINCED that their LUNATIC SON had to have been "driven" to suicide....The cops never really did more than just go through the motions with these people, as it was clear this man was frighteningly unhinged, and almost certainly the real danger, so the call was just a routine chat that they werer almost embarrassed about making, but I was more than cooperative----I let them have the entire archive of my exchanges with him so his fucking family could see that their son who they were suddenly so righteously concerned with, was spinning the darkest, sickest web out of his own twisted mind which would ultimately strangle him while they were busy with their live....
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links.
latimesblogs.latimes.com
When Theresa Duncan, 40, took her own life on July 10, followed a week later by her boyfriend, Jeremy Blake, 35, their friends were stunned and the press was fascinated: what had destroyed this glamorous couple, stars of New York’s multi-media art world, still madly in love after 12 years?
www.vanityfair.com
